This post starts a short series on neurodivergence in higher ed teaching and community colleges. Half of the posts are about the students in front of us. The other half is about those of us at the front of the room whose own brains do not run on the syllabus schedule nor follow the lesson plan as much as we might want them to.
Neurodiversity is the broader umbrella term. It describes the plain fact that human brains vary in how they attend to, remember, process sensory input, read, and communicate, and it treats that variation as natural rather than as a list of defects. The term was deliberately modeled on biodiversity: the population is neurodiverse. A single person is not, any more than one tree is a forest.
‘Neurodivergent’ is the word for an individual whose cognition diverges from what a given society treats as ‘normal.’ It is an informal family rather than formal diagnosis, commonly including autism, ADHD, dyslexia, dyscalculia, dyspraxia, and Tourette’s; I include OCD, Traumatic brain injury, and other mental health conditions as well. The counterpart is ‘neurotypical.’ Neither term comes from a clinic. They come from advocacy communities, and their edges are interpretive.
Neurodivergence does not imply one learning profile. Two autistic students in the same section may need opposite things. One wants the discussion question in writing an hour early; the other wants to be left alone until the lab starts. So the useful question is not “what do all neurodivergent students need?” but rather “what helps this particular student succeed?” asked directly of and answered by that student at some point.
Let me be explicit about what I mean. I am not saying that every student is neurodivergent these days. Being an adult learner, learning in a second language, feeling stressed, or arriving exhausted from an eight-hour shift does not itself make someone neurodivergent. Those circumstances can create barriers to learning, and some of the same teaching choices can help. Overlapping support needs do not make them the same condition.
We do have evidence that more students are being identified with neurodivergent conditions. A large study of college students from 2009 to 2015 found increasing reports of ADHD diagnosis or treatment. That is evidence of growth in identified needs, although it does not tell us how much comes from changes in recognition, disclosure, or underlying prevalence. I suspect the proportion of neurodivergent students may be especially high in community colleges, but I regard that as a working hypothesis rather than an established comparison. Either way, these students are a regular part of our classrooms, and planning for their presence should be ordinary teaching practice.
The practical issue for me is scale. Community college teaching comes with high demand and a heavy teaching load. I have hundreds of active students at any one time. I cannot build a separate version of every lesson around every student’s diagnosis, and I cannot make useful support depend on knowing who has one. I can build clear instructions, predictable organization, accessible materials, manageable sequences, and appropriate choices into the course from the beginning, then respond to individual needs as they arise.
In that sense, I teach as if the whole classroom were neurodivergent: I anticipate barriers involving attention, working memory, sensory processing, reading, and communication throughout the design. That is a planning stance, not a diagnosis of the room. Universal Design for Learning (UDL) gives me a way to make those supports and choices available to everyone. A clear first step can help a student with ADHD get started and help a tired student find their place. Captions can help students with different hearing, language, or attention needs. Every student can benefit from that design, without every student needing the same support or benefiting from the same option. I still ask what helps, adjust where I can, and honor individual accommodations.
The answer is not heroics. It is simple design choices that recognize learner variability while keeping teaching sustainable for the person doing it, because an exhausted instructor helps nobody. Your own experiences with a neurodivergent brain, whatever it is, can boost empathy but do not necessarily predict (or even resemble) your student’s process.
First up are five posts on helping students with neurodivergent minds with concrete pedagogical recommendations regarding explicit tasks, competing demands, participation, sensory needs, and authentic assessment. Then come five more on teaching in the classroom with neurodivergent mind and what (sometimes) helps: cue sheets, live multitasking, energy, workplace access, and partial disclosure.
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