Roadmap to support college readiness soft skills throughout the high school years

If your neurodiverse student’s goal after high school is attending college, it would be most effective to start planning for that goal in the early high school years. Our kids often need more targeted skill building, more intentional support to build skills, and more attention to incremental skill building (baby steps), and in general more time to practice skills. It’s important to have a plan that identifies the “soft” skills that’ll be needed in the college setting and to start to target and build those skills early and over a period of time. Having a long runway allows the student and the support team to start with strong foundations and build the skills slowly. It’s important to also identify what approach(s), what service(s), and what delivery method(s) will be most effective for your unique student. This will create a robust skill set, skills that are more nuanced and flexible, and skills that are more durable and will weather the transition intact.

It will not be a recipe for success to spend the high school years making sure everything is done for the student, both in the school setting and at home, and then expect them to function independently when they arrive at college. These skills need to be built over time. It’s also not a recipe for success to expect all the skills a college bound neurodiverse student will need to be built with one service, one professional, or in one setting. It will be much more effective to pull on all supports, all available activities, all possible experiences to target college readiness soft skills and to lay a foundation to build upon.

So here is a road map if you will on what to do and when and how.

This is, of course, just one perspective and opinion, a smattering of you will need to consider, may not be a good fit for every student/family/situation, and is not intended to be exhaustive.

Use it as inspiration and a starting point.

Academic and Soft Skills - Get your IEP goals in place

o    Ensure all goals are in service of preparation for college and speak to one of the academic or soft skill needs. Don’t allow the school to “waste” a goal on your student’s time with meaningless skills that don’t serve independence or college readiness. Be robust in terms of looking ahead to what your teen will need to be prepared for college, not just is she passing her 11th grade English class.

Special interests

• Pay attention to talents and interests. Ensure opportunities and encouragement to explore, engage in, and do a deep dive into interests. If at all possible, find outlets for your student to engage in an interest in a meaningful way in the real world – make art and have shows at a cafe, teach a skill to others, give presentations, design and create a personal project, get involved in a sport, volunteer, write a blog, etc.…The “what” is in some ways less important than your student’s passion and engaging in that passion in the real world.

Engaging in disability related services

• Remember that work on oneself is a valid extracurricular activity and should be treated as self-improvement for college applications. Engagement with self-improvement activities (tutoring, EF coaching, college prep coaching, self-advocacy skill building, social skill building, etc.) shows a certain disposition and skill set that colleges are looking for. Mention them on the application with this “self-improvement, hard work, and determination” frame.

Be proactive, mindful, and pull on every service, experience, and activity you can to support college readiness soft skills

• Don’t assume the soft skills will take care of themselves, no matter how basic. And don’t assume the professionals will target all relevant soft skills. It could be the smallest competencies, not learned before college, that can snowball and cause significant problems. Target these skills actively with whatever service or activity you can find. Try to get it funded but if not, if you can afford it, pay for it yourself. Some basic skills when taught early can build on themselves exponentially and lead to a more skilled, confident, and effective college ready student.

Coordinating services

• Know all the different service providers and activities, and exactly what they can do, and layer them so that they complement each other but don’t duplicate. Duplication is tiring, a waste of time, and will turn your student off from using supportive services. Complimenting services helps to make the skill(s) stronger. This requires involvement in the goal and treatment planning and also communication between service providers (usually facilitated by you).

Look ahead

• Plan for next steps. Many services require prerequisite skills, corroborating documentation, working within regulatory timelines, etc. Make sure you know what’s coming in the next 6 months, year and two years, so you can plan with your current services to make sure to have what’s needed to start a process early enough to get what’s needed in place on time. You also need to make sure your student is working on the prerequisite skills needed to work on a more complex skill a year or two years from now. This might be deconstructing a complex skill into its component skills to start working on, engineering documentation (like the IEP or treatment plans) to be part of the supporting documentation for another service, being ready with recommendations from one service provider for the next service, or getting certain services in place to demonstrate need to validate asking for the next service.

Manage your documentation

• NOTHING happens without the right documentation! Get supporting documentation from professionals along the way. Psychologists, primary doctors, teachers, other service providers will all provide documentation at some point. Know who your creative allies are and get letters and reports from them earlier than you think you need it, just to build up a robust and historic documentation profile of your student. You will need assessments of disabilities, recommendations for other services, recommendations for accommodations, treatment plans, IEPs, IPPs, etc. And have a system to keep track of it in hard copy and electronically.

**(Tip: if you have the skills, offer to write an outline or “draft” of letters and recommendations or whatever else you need from the professional – not official assessments and reports of course. That way you know that what you need is in the letter, and they appreciate having to do less work.)

Look for natural activities to build skills

• Look for natural in-the-world activities and experiences and lean on those when you can to support your teen to build skills. Counter intuitively, often skilled learned this way will be superior to skills built from professional “services”, and those skills will be more durable than those gained through a contrived program or sessions with a professional. Best scenario, pair natural activities to work in concert with those services. A volunteer job will help build executive functioning, self-management, and self-advocacy skills (and will work doubly so if paired with an executive functioning or employment coach); a youth group will build leadership and social skills; sports will build self-management, setting and working toward goals, and self-confidence (and social skills and communication skills if a team sport). And all of these will help build self-identity and insight.

Leverage the young people around you

• There is nothing like your teen spending time with young college students to help build college awareness and readiness skills organically. If you can pay a college student to be a “college transition peer mentor” this will go a long way. They can go out and practice “hanging out with a friend”. Go tour the student’s college campus. Organize their binder together at the beginning of the school year. Join a virtual club or take a class together. Cook together. Exercise and try new activities. Take public transportation places to practice hopping on the bus. As college gets closer, they can talk about managing the college application season, celebrate admissions, roommates, how to manage classes, and how to check professors on “Rate My Professor”, how to beg into a waitlisted class, etc….

And from here you can use your imagination. And be expansive and creative. ANYTHING can be an opportunity to teach college readiness soft skills. Opportunities that allow your student to self reflect, talk about what’s important to them, plan something, say “no” to something and say why, try something new, share something they love, have fun, persevere at something that is challenging. It’s not that you want to structure their life to be one long tutoring session, but noticing opportunities to explain, model, celebrate, and just acknowledge will go a long way to supporting your amazing kiddo to build the skills they need to be ready for the transition into their adult life.