“There’s a whole host of responses that maybe aren’t yes, but they aren’t no, and they continue the conversation. They redirect you to other options and people and interactions. But at least you’ve moved the needle.“
As a special education advocate in California, Sandy Shove helps families navigate the complicated network of laws and policies that govern special education programs in schools statewide. These programs are designed to meet the learning needs of students who have any one of a broad range of disabilities, including physical disabilities, learning disorders, mental health conditions, autism and intellectual disabilities.
The processes schools use to evaluate students and determine the best ways to meet their specific needs can be daunting for parents and guardians. So can the meetings where large teams of educators, specialists and school district representatives discuss and make decisions about each student’s Individualized Education Program, commonly known as an IEP.
Shove says the Right Question Institute has helped her help families advocate for themselves. She uses the Question Formulation Technique to teach adults and children to ask better questions and know when to use open-ended questions, which encourage longer, more detailed responses, and when to use close-ended ones, which tend to elicit short responses such as “yes” or “no.”
“It’s using that Question Formulation Technique to guide the discussion and obtain the information we all will use to make decisions and a plan for the child,” adds Shove, a former elementary school teacher who started doing advocacy work after discovering how tough it was to obtain special education services for her own children in the early 2000s.
She left teaching in 2006 to become a non-attorney special education advocate, who provides support and guidance but does not have a law degree or formal training in education law. In 2017, she opened her private practice, EPIC Advocacy and Consulting, in Santa Barbara, California. EPIC stands for Empowering Parents of Interesting Children.
Shove urges parents and guardians to ask for the services and accommodations their children need — even if they suspect school officials will reject their requests. A “no” response can open the door to meaningful conversations, she explains.
“If they do say ‘no,’ then you can say, “Well, why?” she says. “The person saying ‘no’ is required to tell you why and justify that with something valid. It is OK to ask.”
We recently interviewed Shove to learn more about how she uses the Question Formulation Technique — and how families’ interactions with school officials can change after they master it.
We condensed and edited the conversation below for clarity.
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Question: What prompted you to use the Question Formulation Technique?
Answer: I don’t know that there is a field or a demographic that wouldn’t benefit from this approach, mindset and understanding because it applies to anything, in any context, in any communication, in any interaction that you’re having — personal, professional, whatever it is.
I really hope that more people come to understand what [the Right Question Institute does] and how it can help whoever, wherever. It’s the deceptively simple nature of it. There’s nothing overly complex or involved. It just makes total sense. And you don’t realize until you start putting it into effect how very powerful it is because it is so apparently simple on the surface.
Q: In your experience, why do some families have trouble participating in their child’s Individualized Education Plan (IEP) meetings?
A: A lot of professionals will underplay [a child’s needs] because they’re reserving resources: “Well, we think 30 minutes a couple of times a week of speech therapy should be enough.” The parents are like, “That doesn’t sound that bad.”
When you’re in that deer-in-the-headlights [stage], a lot of very well-meaning educators will step into the void and start making decisions for parents because they can see the parents are completely freaked out and at a loss and don’t know what to do.
So the teachers will step in, or the speech pathologist will step in or the case manager will step in [and say], “No, we know this is all new to you. We’re the experts here, and so we’re going to just guide and tell you what you should ask for, what you should accept and what makes sense.” Then they take their perspective about what’s enough, what’s OK or what they can reasonably provide and they make that the parent’s choice — because that’s what they’re feeding to the parent.
So then what happens is a few years in, the kid is now 10, 11 or 12 years old. The parents have become very used to not making decisions. They come to the meeting, they listen to everybody tell them what to do. They sign on the dotted line and they say, “I’ll see you in a year.”
So then you get to that sixth grade, seventh grade, and the teachers start talking about, “Well, these parents never ask for anything. These parents don’t even know what their kid needs. They’re so checked out. They don’t care.”
Sometimes, you even get parents who [respond with] “You know what? I can’t take another hour off work just to sign a piece of paper. Just have a meeting. Send me the paperwork. I’ll sign it.” Because at that point, they have been taught that their role is solely to listen, say “yes” and sign.
Yeah, they have not been taught to have ideas. They have not been taught to ask questions. They have not been taught to raise objections or alternatives, or even ask for explanations of why [such as] “Why are you doing this, and not that? Why isn’t my child making better progress?”
So you end up with parents who become less and less engaged because they have been taught to be passive members of the team and not to have a voice and not to raise their hand. Then at some point along the way, the educators start getting mad at the parents because the educators believe the kid should have more and the parents are not participating.
It’s really the school’s job at that point to start inviting the parents back in and making a space, rather than just having them come to the meeting and expecting them to suddenly speak up for no reason with no history of having been listened to.
Q: How do you view teaching self-advocacy skills to the parents that you work with? What self-advocacy skills do you try to impart to them?
A: I can only help a certain number of families at a time. What I tell parents who are considering my services is that my goal is to work with you long enough for you to learn the majority of my skills, and then you take it from there.
[I teach parents] how to effectively ask—not argue, not accuse—effectively request explanations, effectively reinforce certain kinds of responses to them and extinguish others. Ninety percent of the negotiating [is] really asking questions. It’s not an equal footing, right? [The parents] are up against a government entity. They have the purse strings but also the public obligation.
Your role [as a parent] is to engage with them, obtain information from them, give consent or not, but you can’t make them offer something. You can request, you can explain why you think that would be helpful, and you can ask them to give it to you, but you can’t make them give it to you. [You can] recognize that the person in front of you, even if their behavior right now is being a gatekeeper or a barrier to you, has pressures that they’re subject to that you may not know about or be able to see. They may have barriers in their own way that prevent them from doing everything they wish they could do.
A lot of people really get stuck because they either don’t know who to ask and so they ask the wrong people, or they just don’t ask anybody, [] or they ask in a way that’s not effective. Or they’re easily dissuaded by the first barrier, denial, disagreement, or whatever, and they give up.
If you ask and they say no, you are no worse off than you were to begin with. They have taken nothing away from you. There is, for some reason, a fear in being told no that somehow asking and being told no equates with you should never have asked. Or you’re stupid for asking. Or you were ashamed for making a request when the answer was no. Being told no shouldn’t be scary. There’s no shame in being told no.
There’s [also] a whole host of responses that maybe aren’t yes, but they aren’t no, and they continue the conversation. They redirect you to other options and people and interactions. But at least you’ve moved the needle.
Q: Right. At the Right Question Institute, we think about how, when people are affected by a decision, they should ask questions about the reason, the process, and their role, especially in their encounters with public bureaucracies.
Government agencies operate with rules, regulations, policies, etcetera because they are publicly funded. They have an obligation to tell you why [they made a certain decision]. If you ask for something and they say no, they have to tell you why. They have to explain the appeal process, the situation under which you could then argue about it to some extent.
Q: What is the importance of self-advocacy and being able to ask questions as a skill for young people with disabilities?
A: I literally used all the principles that I teach parents [to teach students], and I started there with self advocacy. Because advocacy is advocacy, whether you’re advocating for yourself, your child, your parent, your neighbor, your student, your client. There are just basic principles of how that works, right?
So I started and just basically included all the same kinds of information, but in smaller chunks. The first big step, I think, for anybody, with or without a disability, is to understand, “”What do I want?” Who am I? What do I need? What do I want? Then how do I get my needs met? How do I get my wants addressed?”
I think, especially kids who grow up in the disability system and who have intellectual or developmental disabilities, they may not be included in all of the general education curriculum.
So, they aren’t taught critical thinking in the same way that a lot of their non-disabled peers are. They’ve never thought that through.
Other people who are not them have met on a regular basis and set goals, put services in place, made decisions for their benefit. But even once they started attending their own [Individualized Education Program] meetings in their teenage years, they may have never actually been asked, “What do you want? What’s meaningful to you? What gives you satisfaction or pleasure? What do you think you’re really good at doing?”
[E]very one of my clients needs to have self-advocacy skills because it’s part of that knowledge of yourself. It’s part of self-awareness to know what you need. [W]e need to make sure that every child grows up and has that ability so that when they need something, they can get their needs met wherever they happen to live, whatever circumstances they find themselves in, whether it’s school or work or a government benefits program or the grocery store or whatever it is.
Q: How can the families of children with disabilities support independent decision making as these children transition to adulthood?
A: People with more significant intellectual and developmental disabilities may have been infantilized out of fear for their safety, usually by teachers, by caseworkers, by institutions. There was a presumption of incompetence.
I sat through a really interesting bar association webinar right at the height of the #FreeBritney movement [to end a conservatorship a court ordered for singer Britney Spears after a series of mental health crises]. What it boiled down to was where the line was between appropriate conservatorship or guardianship and appropriate self-determination. What is it called — supported decision-making? That line is, “Can this person make choices for themselves?” Not, “Can they make choices that we all think are good?” Because guess what? As an adult, I’ve made some really terrible decisions for myself.
I have made bad choices at times. We all have, and no one has sent a government agency to our home to seize all of our decision-making rights. We’ve been allowed to make bad choices and live with the consequences.
So, taking off the table that they have to always make good decisions, is this person capable of making decisions and making choices? Do they understand that choosing one thing means not choosing something else? That saying “yes” to this automatically means “no” to that?
If they’re capable of that, then you start exploring. OK, well, how much can we teach them to choose for themselves? How much can they learn to decide? How much information can they learn to gather?
That again points right back to the question. If we can teach people to ask for information and ask for explanation and ask for clarification and ask for visual examples or whatever it is that will provide them what they need in order to make a choice that is their own meaningful choice, then we can safely say, “OK, they don’t have to be conserved in all areas.” They can be allowed to make these kinds of choices and decisions for themselves.
Maybe not in everything — maybe not financially, maybe not all of their health care decision-making — but some of it. So that just like everyone else, we learn by making choices and having it go well or not, and figuring out what we want to do the same or differently the next time we’re in that situation.