Why Inclusion Takes More Than Accommodations – An Interview with Sarah Batchelor
Sarah Batchelor is a music educator, speaker, and founder of The Neurospicy Music Teacher. Drawing on 25 years in education, her experience as an educator with autism and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and her perspective as a parent, Sarah explores what meaningful inclusion can look like in classrooms, workplaces, and the systems we move through every day. In this interview, she talks about belonging, universal design, autonomy, the importance of normalizing failure, and why inclusion starts with changing the way we think about human differences.
Sarah Batchelor, Music Educator & Neurodiversity Speaker
What first led you to create The Neurospicy Music Teacher and bring neurodiversity into your work more publicly?
I have always had a passion for appropriate inclusion, not simply placing people into systems that were never designed for them and calling that support. This belief became deeply personal as I navigated the education system with my daughter, who has autism, while struggling myself. After years of being misdiagnosed, unheard, and incorrectly medicated, I was finally diagnosed with autism and ADHD.
Once I began appropriate treatment, I was angry. I remember thinking, “It can’t have been this easy for everyone else.” I wasn’t just disorganized, messy, difficult, or “too much.” I mean, sometimes I absolutely am, but that wasn’t the whole story. I had spent my life trying to be a horse when I was actually a zebra.
That realization gave me permission to give myself some grace and stop masking so much. I started living out loud, saying the quiet parts out loud, being unapologetically imperfect, and allowing myself to be seen as I actually am.
Most importantly, I discovered that being openly imperfect gave other people permission to do the same. That became The Neurospicy Music Teacher. I wanted to become the teacher, mentor, and friend I had needed but never had, while supporting both educators and students who are neurodivergent.
After more than two decades in music education, what have you learned about the conditions students need in order to feel that they genuinely belong?
The short answer is this: kids need to feel safe. They need to feel valued. They need to feel like they are needed and trusted. In a nutshell, they need Maslow before Bloom.
I think what you are actually asking is how we create those conditions. When I’m assessing what I need to do in the moment to create a sense of safety and belonging, I rely on two guiding principles: behaviour is communication, and the role of power and control in the situation should never be discounted.
Until we understand the why behind a behaviour, we do not have enough information to meaningfully support or change it. Kids need autonomy, especially kids who are neurodivergent. They generally do not thrive in systems controlled from the top, and frankly, neither do I.
I think of it as building a house together. Adults provide the floor plan, the structural walls, and the boundaries that keep everyone safe. Within that structure, students need room to make choices and have some ownership. Even offering two choices, both of which I am genuinely comfortable with, can completely change an interaction because it gives the student some power without removing the structure.
Kids also do not need us to solve every problem. They need us to validate their feelings and provide guideposts. “Your feelings are valid, but that response wasn’t okay.”
Most importantly, they do not need perfect adults. They need adults willing to fail in front of them, take accountability, repair mistakes, and model resilience. That is where trust and real belonging begin.
How has understanding your own ADHD and autism changed the way you interpret student behaviour in the classroom?
Understanding my autism and ADHD changed the lens through which I see almost everything, not just student behaviour. I grew up knowing I was different, but I didn’t know why. I knew my brain was smart, which honestly wasn’t always a gift, because if I was smart, why couldn’t I do things that seemed so simple for everybody else? I internalized the messages I was getting. I was lazy. I was disorganized. I was difficult. I was too much. I wasn’t trying hard enough. I thought I was struggling because there was something fundamentally wrong with me.
That followed me into adulthood. There were misdiagnoses, hospitalizations, addiction, and years of trying to fix what I thought was wrong. Understanding my ADHD and autism didn’t magically fix my life. What it gave me was context. It gave me guideposts for understanding my brain instead of constantly fighting with it.
A diagnosis didn’t change my brain. It changed the story I was telling myself about my brain. That has absolutely changed the way I see students. I am much more careful about attaching character judgments to behaviour. A diagnosis is not an excuse. It is a reason, and reasons give us information. They help us understand what is happening and what supports or strategies might help us move forward.
I give students more grace and understanding now, but I still hold high expectations. Support and standards are not opposites.
Why do people confuse inclusion with simply adding accommodations?
There’s an image I come back to when I think about inclusion. There’s a building with stairs and a ramp, and both are covered in snow. The person clearing the snow starts with the stairs because that gets most people into the building. The person using the ramp has to wait. But if they cleared the ramp first, everyone could get in.
That’s how I think we often approach inclusion in education, workplaces, and society more broadly. We keep shoveling the stairs first. We design systems around what works for the majority and then add accommodations for the people who cannot access them.
Accommodations matter. Sometimes an individual adjustment is exactly what someone needs. But accommodation is not the same thing as inclusion.
Inclusion asks us to look at the design itself. Is there another way to build this, teach this, communicate this, or organize this so the barrier is removed before somebody has to ask for an exception?
The goal isn’t to get rid of the stairs. It’s to stop assuming that shoveling the stairs first is the only sensible way to get people through the door.
What does meaningful inclusion look like when teachers are already managing limited time, resources, and capacity?
I actually want to challenge the premise of that question a little because it assumes inclusion is an extra. An addition. Something we do if there is enough time, enough funding, or enough capacity left over. That assumption is part of the problem.
Teachers absolutely have too much on their plates. In the 25 years I have been in classrooms, my workload has more than doubled. But when we frame inclusion as one more thing teachers are being asked to do with limited resources, we risk marginalizing the very students who need support most.
That framing reinforces a message many people who are neurodivergent grow up hearing, whether anyone says it out loud or not: “You are too much work. Your needs are inconvenient. Supporting you takes resources away from everyone else.”
I know that message because I lived it. It is one of the reasons I do this work. Teachers already respond to individual needs every day. We just tend not to call it inclusion when the student is neurotypical. No one asks, “What does appropriate inclusion look like for this neurotypical child?” We simply teach the child in front of us.
The bigger question is why teachers are being asked to solve systemic barriers without systemic support. Inclusion cannot be sustained by teacher goodwill alone. The people who control staffing, funding, class size, time, policy, and specialist support have a responsibility here too.
You’ve spoken openly about your own neurodivergence. How has understanding your own brain changed the way you teach, lead, and advocate for others?
For most of my life, I genuinely thought there was something wrong with me. I knew my brain was smart, which wasn’t always a gift, because if it was smart, why couldn’t it do things that seemed so simple for everybody else? I internalized that. I thought I was lazy. I thought I wasn’t trying hard enough. I thought I was just bad at being human.
That followed me into adulthood. There were misdiagnoses, hospitalizations, addiction, and years of trying to fix what I thought was wrong. Understanding my ADHD and autism didn’t magically fix my life. What it gave me was context. It gave me guideposts for understanding my brain instead of constantly fighting with it.
A diagnosis didn’t change my brain. It changed the story I was telling myself about my brain. Once I stopped looking only for what was wrong with it, I started noticing what was extraordinary about it too. My synesthesia, the connections my brain makes, the patterns it notices, the way it thinks outside the box. Those are all part of the same brain.
I had great teachers and supportive adults, but nobody had the information to explain this to me. Now I want to be the person I needed when I was younger.
I don’t want students to simply look like they belong. I want that belonging to be authentic. I don’t want kids to spend decades trying to fix themselves or have to recover from their education before they discover who they are.
What can a music classroom teach us about supporting students who process sound, movement, communication, and mistakes differently?
We used to talk as if there was a “normal” and then a small group outside it, but classrooms don’t look like that. I’m not sure they ever did. The range of learners in front of us is enormous. That’s not an outlier problem; that’s the reality.
Even in something like a Grade 9 English class, what we might call a normal range can span students reading several grade levels apart. Once you really look at that variability, the idea of designing for one imaginary average learner starts to fall apart.
The beauty of spaces like music and physical education is that variation is already visible. We naturally have students doing different things, using different strengths, and needing different kinds of support. In music, we don’t get to pretend otherwise because learning is public. No one asks a kid to perform a math problem in front of the class. In music, you hear yourself in real time. Mistakes are audible.
So we have to build safety on purpose. Students need to be able to take a risk, miss, recover, and try again without believing that the mistake says something about who they are.
That’s why universal design makes so much sense to me. We don’t have to start by deciding who is normal and who needs an exception. These are the humans we have in the room. Design for the humans in the room, not an imaginary average.
How do you use your “failure first” approach to help students build confidence without lowering expectations?
I joke that the secret to happiness is lowered expectations. I do mean it as a joke, but there’s something real underneath it.
For me, lowering expectations doesn’t mean lowering standards. I want the standard to be high. But expectations have to be responsive to what’s actually happening in the room. I start with high standards, and as I get real information, I adjust my expectations. That’s not lowering the bar; that’s being realistic. If the standard was high to start with, even an adjusted expectation is probably going to land higher than if I’d set the standard low.
That’s where failure first comes in. A mistake is just data. It tells us where we are. That doesn’t mean we stay there; it means now we know something. I think about behaviour the same way. Behaviour is communication. Not an excuse, but information that helps us move forward.
Because band is such a space directed by the teacher, I have to be conscious of those power and control dynamics. I joke that it’s a benevolent dictatorship. There is a conductor, there’s a score, and ultimately I have the final say on the artistic decisions in the room. I’m not pretending that structure doesn’t exist or that it isn’t part of my responsibility.
But because it exists, I have to be intentional about how students experience it. I’m watching for moments where a demand becomes the problem instead of the learning, and for places where I can build in meaningful autonomy without removing the structure the ensemble needs. I’m not trying to remove every demand. I’m trying to make sure the demands are purposeful, that students understand the why, and that there are places inside the structure where they still have ownership.
That matters to me personally too, because I understand that tension around autonomy from the inside. Pattern recognition is fundamental to music. Music is patterns, and being wired to notice them is one of the strengths I lean on. But I don’t just want to notice patterns for students. I want to teach students to recognize them too: What happened? What usually happens before that? What worked last time? What changed? What can we try next? That’s metacognition. We’re teaching students to understand themselves.
Through all of this, there’s one core philosophy for me: I don’t teach kids to play instruments. I teach them to figure out how to play instruments. That means naming from the beginning that learning takes work and that they share responsibility for their success. I can support them. I can model, troubleshoot, adjust the environment, give them strategies, and make sure they’re never alone in the process. But I cannot do the learning for them.
That’s empowering, because when they succeed, it’s theirs. They noticed something. They adjusted. They practised. They failed. They tried again. They figured it out.
My job is to empower them with strategies so they can continue learning when I’m not in the room. So failure first doesn’t lower expectations, and it definitely doesn’t lower standards. It teaches students that failure gives us information, that adjustment is part of learning, and that ultimately they have ownership over what they do next.
In your videos and sessions, you often speak about your mantra, “Practice makes progress.” What does that mean to you beyond music?
“Practice makes progress” doesn’t mean we’re lowering our standards or expectations. It means we stop equating our best work with perfection.
Perfect is awesome when it happens, but it’s not realistic as the only measure of success. Honestly, perfect means something different to every person anyway.
Progress means we set a goal, work toward it, and recognize when we’ve moved forward. Then the target can move. It isn’t fixed. We’re constantly asking ourselves: Am I improving? What have I learned? How far have I come? What do I want to work on next?
I think that’s much more powerful than looking at life as a series of finite destinations where eventually you arrive at perfection, and you’re done. Real life doesn’t work that way. Life is messy. Growth isn’t always linear. Sometimes we move forward, sometimes we plateau, sometimes we have to go back and work on something again, and sometimes the destination changes completely as we learn more about ourselves and what we actually want.
So for me, “practice makes progress” is about giving ourselves grace while we grow without giving up on growth. We can be proud of where we are and how far we’ve come while still knowing there’s somewhere else we want to go.
What is one change educators can make that would help more students feel they belong without creating an unsustainable workload?
I think the first change is to shift the way we look at support. Instead of looking at students with diagnosed or identified needs as the group that requires something extra, we need to recognize that all students have additional needs. A diagnosis can be incredibly helpful because it gives us language, possible strategies, and a starting point for understanding behaviour. But there are also plenty of students sitting in our classrooms without a diagnosis who benefit from many of the same supports.
Rather than building a lesson for an imaginary average student and adding accommodations afterward, I try to design the lesson and environment with the students who need the most support in mind from the beginning. When you do that well, you often meet the needs of a lot of other students at the same time.
I also do not want to pretend there is one simple change that fixes everything. There isn’t. Many educators are working in overcrowded, underfunded systems with complex needs and very little support. Universal design can make teaching more sustainable, but it is not a substitute for adequate staffing, resources, time, or systemic support.
The shift is not a magic strategy. It is recognizing that support is part of good design, not something we add afterward for a few students.
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