Key Points
Back to top- The Neurodiversity Alliance’s Eye to Eye Mentoring Program fosters belonging and emotional growth by pairing neurodiverse students with mentors to explore identity and emotional awareness through art and community-building projects.
- The program emphasizes the importance of strong mentor-mentee relationships and flexible, curious responses to student behaviors, supporting emotional growth and understanding.
- By disrupting negative mindsets and showing the power of resilience, both mentors and mentees experience a shift in self-perception and gain a sense of hope for the future.
CASEL’s series of Innovations reports share innovative conceptions, methods, and practices that embody the principles of SEL, along with aligned strategies that maximize learning and well-being for students in each setting of CASEL’s systemic SEL framework. In this blog, we share one of the case studies highlighted in the latest report from the series, By Choice, Not Chance: Engaging Social and Emotional Learning to Create a Supportive Climate and Discipline Strategies. The Neurodiversity Alliance peer mentoring program demonstrates that when we nurture relationships and make students’ experiences central, all students can thrive. Images courtesy of The Neurodiversity Alliance’s Eye to Eye Mentoring Program.
The art room pulsed with energy. For many of the middle schoolers entering the space, it had often been communicated that their neurodiversity was a hurdle to overcome, something that separated them from their classmates. But today, they would be meeting their mentors as part of Eye to Eye’s near-peer mentoring program, and, together, they would explore and develop new understandings of themselves and each other.
The Neurodiversity Alliance began as “Eye to Eye” in 1998 when a group of college students with learning differences met with young people at a nearby university as part of a service project to inspire hope. It has since become a national organization with a mission to “improve the educational experience and outcomes of neurodiverse young people, while engaging them and their allies in the movement for a more equitable and inclusive society.” The near-peer mentoring program creates spaces of curiosity and belonging through art, community, and advocacy by pairing 10- to 14-year-old mentees with high school and college mentors. They come together about once a week to make art and talk about what it means to be neurodiverse using the CASEL competencies (self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making) to frame their focus.
After creating community agreements, the students dive into a series of projects, each designed around one of the following topics: community, belonging, group identity, neurodiversity, neurodivergent identity, and accommodations. This series builds the safety and support for students to dive into projects on emotional awareness. The mentors begin by explaining that people with neurodiversity may experience emotions differently than their neurotypical peers.
They explore the phenomenon of emotional flooding, share personal examples of this experience, and use an emotion wheel to name and discuss emotions before engaging in an art project where they explore joy, anger, and anxiousness, three emotions chosen with mentors and chapter leaders as being particularly tricky. Students share their paintings during a gallery walk during which mentors and mentees discuss challenging emotional experiences and ways to work with them. This requires strong relationships and honest conversations with peers and near peers, made possible by the focus on belonging.
While it can be challenging to lead programming as someone outside of the school community, behavior challenges during near-peer mentoring rarely escalate. Given their personal experiences and their training, mentors are willing to see behaviors that could be coded as disruptive as information about their mentee’s emotional state, allowing them to respond with curiosity and flexibility. For example, a mentor might get down next to a struggling student to check in rather than instinctively demanding they get up from the floor. This response preserves the relationship between mentee and mentor while also providing mentors with a powerful teaching opportunity.
Connecting behaviors to needs allows mentors to say, “Listen, I’ve been there, and this is what I’ve started to do instead.” This approach reflects the mindset of the group: There is space for us, with all our strengths and challenges. As one mentee noted about their experience in the art room, “I learned about my differences and how I can see the world differently than others.”
A powerful component of the program is the way both mentors and mentees disrupt enduring negative mindsets learned throughout their schooling. As one student noted, “I got the feeling like I was not alone anymore.”
For mentees, it can be powerful to see an older student thriving in school. Mentors are transparent about productive struggles and times where “you succeed even when you fail.” As they are helping young people feel seen, heard, and valued by the community around them and in the context of school and work, mentors often share that they experience a shift in how they view their younger selves and feel more hopeful about their futures.
As one mentor put it, it was a reminder that “a ‘leader’ doesn’t need to have a specific image or way of thinking; instead, what makes someone a leader is their devotion and passion.”
Related Posts
- Still I RISE: Innovative Work at Da Vinci RISE High School
- Supportive Climate and Discipline Strategies: Spotlight on Generation Schools Network
- The Humane School: How SEL Changed our Family’s Life
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