Tag: neurodivergent-friendly-teaching

The last question in this series is the one instructors ask me most quietly: should I tell my students?

There is no right answer, and I distrust anyone who offers one. Disclosure to students is your choice, and the choice depends on things nobody else can weigh for you: your contract status, your department’s culture, your history with the label, and what you hope disclosure would do. Some instructors find that naming their neurodivergence builds trust and models self-advocacy for students who have never seen an adult do it. Others find it invites doubt about their competence, or becomes the lens through which every misstep is read. Both experiences are real. The power dynamic in a classroom does not vanish because we are honest in it.

What I want to offer is a middle path that is often overlooked: you can explain a practice without naming an identity.

“I answer written questions better than on-the-spot ones, so please put them in the question board and I will address them at the pause.” “I use a timer because I lose track of time when I am teaching.” “I keep the lights on the lower setting because the bright ones give me a headache; let me know if that is a problem for you.” Each of these tells students something useful about how the class runs. None of them requires a diagnosis, a label, or a conversation you did not choose to have. Students, in my experience, take these explanations at face value and appreciate them. Practical transparency is its own kind of trust.

It also models something. A student who watches an instructor calmly name what helps them, and arrange for it, is learning that this is a normal thing an adult can do. For students who spent years being told to adapt silently, that lesson may outlast the course content.

One caution, and it is the note the whole series has been building toward. Your own experience informs your empathy. It does not predict a student’s needs. The support that saves your teaching, whether written questions, a dim room, or a strict routine, may be exactly wrong for the student in the third row. An instructor who cannot bear interruptions can, without meaning to, build a class that suffocates the student who thinks by talking. If you disclose, disclose as one data point, not as the template. Then do what this series has said from the first post: ask what helps each person, and change what you can.

That is the whole practice. Design for the variability you cannot see. Keep the teaching sustainable for the person doing it. Assume less; ask more. It is not a program or a certification. It is a habit, and a fairly ordinary one, of treating neurological variation as the normal condition of a classroom rather than an exception to be managed.

We talk constantly about access for students. We almost never talk about access for the people teaching them. Yet the same institution that runs an accessibility office for students is also an employer, and the same laws that protect a disabled student in the classroom protect a disabled employee at the front of it. Most neurodivergent faculty I know have never asked for anything. Many did not know they could.

Start by naming the barriers, not the diagnosis. What in your working conditions makes it harder to teach well? For me the list looks like this. Room noise: a lab next to the mechanical room, or a classroom that shares a thin wall with a lecture hall. Back-to-back teaching, with no transition to recover before the next section walks in. Last-minute changes: a room switch announced the morning of, a policy update sent the night before it takes effect. Fragmented communication, where the same information arrives by email, by Teams, by a hallway remark, and in a meeting, and the versions do not agree.

Notice that none of these require you to say a word about your neurology. They are conditions that make teaching worse for anyone, and several are fixable by a department chair who simply knows you would prefer a fifteen-minute gap between sections and a consistent room. Ask for those first, plainly and early, when schedules are being built. Chairs can only accommodate preferences they know about.

For barriers that need more than a preference, find your college’s employee-support contact. At most colleges this is a human resources office or an ADA coordinator for employees, separate from the student accessibility office. A conversation there is where formal arrangements get discussed: schedule structure, written rather than verbal notice of changes, a quieter room assignment, or communication norms for your department. Formal accommodation usually requires documentation, and the process can feel exposing. Ask about the process before you commit to it. Understanding what is involved is not the same as filing a request.

Contingent faculty face a harder calculation, and I will not pretend otherwise. An adjunct on a semester contract may reasonably fear that asking for anything marks them as difficult. That fear is a barrier in itself, and it belongs on the list of things a college should fix. But even there, preference-level requests carry little risk, and a chair who wants to keep a good instructor usually wants to hear them.

The phrase I keep coming back to is shared responsibility. The instructor’s job is to identify what would help and to ask. The college’s job is to have a process and to take the request seriously. Neither works alone. A faculty member who masks through every barrier will burn out; a college that never hears the request cannot act on it. Access in the classroom has to include the person standing at the front of it.

Teaching costs energy in a way that is hard to explain to people who have not done it. For an hour and a quarter you are performing, monitoring thirty faces, making a hundred small decisions, and, if you are neurodivergent, very likely masking: suppressing stims, forcing eye contact, filtering sensory noise, holding a script. Then you do it again in the next room. By Thursday afternoon the account is empty, and Friday’s grading comes out of overdraft.

The community college load makes this acute. Five sections is a normal assignment. Adjuncts teach at two or three colleges, driving between them. There is no sabbatical and often no office door to close. Protecting usable energy is not indulgence. It is what determines whether the students in week fourteen get the same instructor the students in week two got.

Three practices have kept me solvent.

Build a quiet transition around teaching. Ten minutes before class, no email, no hallway conversation, just the cue sheet and the room. Ten minutes after, the same. I sit in the empty classroom or the car and let the performance drain off before I pick up the next thing. Back-to-back sections make this hard, which is why I ask for gaps when schedules are made, a topic for the next post. Where I cannot get a gap, I take the walk between buildings slowly and on purpose.

Reuse everything that can be reused. Instructions follow the same template every week, so I am filling in blanks rather than composing. Feedback comes from a comment bank of the things I say most often, personalized with a sentence rather than written from scratch each time. Announcements have a skeleton. None of this makes the teaching generic. It moves the effort from formatting, which nobody benefits from, to the part where I actually respond to a student’s work.

Keep a simpler version of every lesson ready. I call it the floor: the smallest class that still meets the day’s objective. It is usually the essential activity from the cue sheet, one worked example, and a checkpoint, with the discussion and the extension exercise cut. On a day when I slept badly, or the migraine is coming, or the previous section left me hollow, I teach the floor and the students still learn the thing. They do not know it was the floor. What they would notice is an instructor running on fumes, trying to deliver the full version and failing at it.

The pattern here is the same one we use for students. Reduce competing demands, make the sequence external, offer a workable option for a low-capacity moment. We are not exempt from the design principles we apply to the room. If anything, the person who has to show up sixteen weeks in a row needs them most.

Here is the moment that used to wreck my labs. I am mid-demonstration, six steps into a configuration, and a hand goes up: “Mine says access denied.” I walk over. It is a typo. By the time I return to the front I have lost my place, the room has lost the thread, and two more hands are up. The demo has become a troubleshooting session with an audience.

For an instructor whose attention does not switch cheaply, and that describes a lot of us, this is not a small cost. Every context switch has a re-entry fee, and it is paid in the quality of whatever comes next. So I separated the two jobs.

Demonstrating and troubleshooting now happen at different times. During a demonstration, I demonstrate. Individual problems wait for the doing phase, when I am walking the room anyway. I say this on day one and I repeat it on the slide: “If your machine misbehaves during the demo, write it down. I will be at your desk in five minutes.” Students accept it, because it comes with a promise that gets kept.

Questions go into one channel. In class that might be a shared doc, a stack of index cards, or the chat in a virtual section. Outside class it is the LMS inbox, and only the inbox, not a mix of email, texts, and hallway conversations that I then have to reconstruct from memory. One channel means one place to look and nothing that slips through because it arrived at the wrong door.

I review the channel at planned pauses. In class, that is the break between demonstrating and doing, when I scan the cards or the doc and answer the three questions that matter to everyone at once. Outside class, it is a fixed time each weekday. Batching questions lets me give considered answers instead of reflexive ones, and it stops the day from dissolving into forty interruptions of two minutes each.

Then I publish the expectation. My syllabus states when students can expect replies: inbox messages answered within one business day, grades within a week. This sounds like a policy for students, and it is, but it is also a policy for me. Once the window is public, I stop feeling that every unanswered message is a small failure, and students stop refreshing for a reply that was never going to come at midnight.

Community colleges rarely give us teaching assistants, so the structure has to do the work an assistant would. A single channel and a planned pause are that structure. They are also, not incidentally, better for students. The person who was afraid to interrupt gets the same access as the person who never hesitated, and everyone learns that a considered answer tomorrow beats a distracted one now.

The second half of this series turns the lens around. If you teach while neurodivergent, the same variability we design for in students is running the class. Working memory, time perception, and attention under interruption are exactly the things live teaching demands, and exactly the things many of us cannot rely on in the moment. The answer is not to try harder. It is to stop asking your working memory to do a job that paper does better.

I keep one cue sheet for every class meeting. One page, large print, four things on it.

The purpose: one line stating what today is for. When a tangent or a technical failure knocks me off course, that line is how I find the path back.

The essential activity: the single thing that must happen for the class to count. If the projector dies and half the room is late, this is what we still do. Everything else on the sheet is optional by comparison, which means I can drop it without guilt when the hour goes sideways.

The checkpoint: a moment, usually two-thirds of the way in, where I stop and check whether the room has the idea. A quick question, a show of hands, a one-line answer in the chat. It is written on the sheet because otherwise I forget to do it and discover at the exam that nobody had the idea.

The closing prompt: the sentence I end on. Ending is a transition, and transitions are where I lose the thread. Having the last sentence written means the class ends on purpose rather than trailing off when the clock runs out.

Two more tools live next to the sheet. A visible timer, on the desk or the second screen, because my sense of elapsed time in front of a room is unreliable in both directions. And a parking lot: a corner of the whiteboard or a sticky note where tangents go. When a great question pulls me toward something three weeks ahead, I write it in the lot instead of following it, and I say so out loud. Students see that their question mattered, and I keep the sequence.

The community college version of this problem is scale. Five sections, three preps, two campuses, rooms that change without warning. A cue sheet travels. It works in a room with a whiteboard and a room without one. It works on a day when I slept four hours. And because it is a single page, it takes ten minutes to write, which is the only reason it exists.

The general principle: anything you have to hold in your head during class is a thing that can fall out of your head during class. Put it on paper and let your attention go where it is actually needed, which is the students.

Every assessment measures two things: the skill you meant to test and the format you chose to test it in. When a student struggles, you have to ask which one they struggled with. A timed multiple-choice exam on subnetting measures subnetting. It also measures reading speed, working memory under pressure, and test anxiety. If speed was never a course objective, the format is adding noise to the signal.

This is not an argument for making things easy. It is an argument for making them valid.

Start with clear criteria. Students should know before they begin what a strong response contains, in language a person can actually use to check their own work. “Demonstrates understanding” is not a criterion. “Explains why the packet was dropped and names the line in the config that caused it” is. The criteria protect students who cannot infer what I want from tone, and they protect me from grading on vibes.

Make feedback timely and actionable. Feedback that arrives three weeks later teaches nothing, because the student has moved on and cannot connect it to what they did. Feedback that says “good job” or “needs work” teaches nothing either. One or two sentences naming the specific next step, returned within the week, does more than a page of comments returned after the next assignment is due. I keep a comment bank of the twenty things I say most, which is how I keep the turnaround short.

Offer an equivalent response format where the format is not the skill. If the objective is “configure and verify a VLAN,” a two-minute screen recording with narration shows me that as well as a written report does, and for a student with dysgraphia or severe writing anxiety it may show me far more accurately. If the objective is “explain a design decision,” a written paragraph, a short recording, or a live conversation in office hours can all meet it. I decide what the objective is and then accept any format that demonstrates it.

But retain the required skill when the format is itself the objective. If the course outcome says students will present a technical recommendation to a non-technical audience, the presentation stays. Removing it would mean certifying a skill I never saw. What I can do is scaffold it: post the prompt early, allow a practice run, permit notes, and be clear about what is being scored. That is support, not substitution.

A last note on accommodations. Designing assessments this way reduces how often a student needs a formal accommodation, but it does not replace their right to one. Extended time, a distraction-reduced setting, and other approved arrangements come through the accessibility office and are not mine to negotiate. Good design and formal accommodation work together. One lowers the barrier for the whole room; the other guarantees the individual door stays open.

Walk into a typical community college classroom and inventory the sensory environment. Fluorescent lights, sometimes one of them flickering. A projector fan. Thirty machines humming in a lab. A hallway with a vending machine and a door that slams. For most people this is background. For a student with sensory sensitivities, which are common in autism and not rare in ADHD, anxiety, and migraine, it is a constant tax on attention before any teaching happens.

I cannot rewire the building. I can do a handful of things that reduce the load, and most of them cost nothing.

Preview transitions. Switching from lecture to lab, or from solo work to groups, is a small shock for a brain that has just settled into one mode. A two-minute warning smooths it: “In two minutes we’ll stop the demo and you’ll start the exercise on page three.” I say it out loud and I put it on the slide, because saying it once is not the same as it being received.

Allow movement and quieter options where the room permits. A student who needs to stand at the back for ten minutes is not being disrespectful. A student who wears headphones during independent work is usually protecting their concentration, not ignoring me. During group activities I keep a quieter corner for anyone who finds six simultaneous conversations unbearable, and I let people work alone when the objective does not require a group.

Use one clear restart cue. After a break or group time, everyone needs to know when we are back. I use the same phrase and the same slide every time, so the signal is unmistakable and nobody has to guess whether the chatter is ending. Consistency is the point; the cue itself can be anything.

Then the part that surprised me: breaks. I assumed a mid-class break was universally kind. For some students it is. For others, a break shatters a concentration they spent twenty minutes building, and the restart costs them more than the pause gave. There is no default that serves everyone. So I ask. Early in the term, and again when the room changes, I ask what helps, and I adjust. Being asked is itself meaningful for students who came through school with every choice made for them.

None of this requires knowing who in the room is neurodivergent, which is good, because I will never know. Plenty of our students arrive from a full shift, or a long commute, or a house with no quiet place to study, and they benefit from the same predictability. Design the room for the people you cannot see, and the people you can see do better too.

I used to grade participation the way I was graded: who spoke, how often, how quickly. It took me longer than I would like to admit to notice what that actually measured. It measured comfort with speaking, processing speed, and confidence, none of which was on the syllabus.

The student who answers in the first two seconds is often not the student who understands best. Sometimes they are simply the student least troubled by being wrong. Meanwhile, the student who needs ten seconds to organize a thought, the one who is translating from another language, and the one who finds eye contact physically uncomfortable are all being quietly marked down for how their brains and bodies work.

Here is what I changed.

I build in thinking time before discussion. The classic research on wait time found that most instructors leave under a second between a question and calling on someone. Stretching that to a deliberate pause changes who answers and how well. I go further and ask everyone to write for two minutes first. Writing first means the fast talkers have something more considered to say and the slow processors have something to say at all.

Where a written response meets the objective, I accept it as full participation. If the goal is to show that you understand why a routing loop forms, a paragraph in the LMS discussion shows that as well as saying it aloud, and often better. If the goal is oral explanation because the course teaches client communication, then I keep the spoken requirement and scaffold it, with the question posted in advance and a chance to rehearse in pairs.

Group work gets explicit roles and a named deliverable. “Discuss in groups” is an invitation for the loudest person to run the show and for others to disappear. “One of you drives, one navigates, one records the steps, and you submit the recorded steps at the end” gives every student a defined job. Pair programming already works this way for good reason. Roles rotate so nobody is permanently the scribe.

And I have stopped reading faces as evidence. A student looking at the desk may be listening harder than the one nodding at me. Eye contact is culturally variable and, for many autistic people, costs attention that would otherwise go to the content. Quick speech is a trait, not a competency. What I want is the thinking, and I have learned to build several doors into it.

For a community college, this matters more than it might elsewhere. Our rooms hold nineteen-year-olds and fifty-year-olds, people returning after a long time away, and people who have never once been asked their opinion in a classroom. Offering multiple workable ways to take part is not lowering the bar. It is making sure the bar measures the thing I said it was measuring.

Picture a typical software demonstration. I am at the front, clicking through a configuration. Students are watching the projector, listening to me narrate, reading the text on the screen, and trying to reproduce each step on their own machine. That is four channels of input and one channel of output, all running at the same time, and every one of them is competing for the same limited attention.

Cognitive load research calls this the split-attention effect, and it hurts everyone. But it does not hurt everyone equally. A student with ADHD who loses the thread for eight seconds is now three steps behind with no way back in. A student who processes spoken language a beat slower is always translating what I said a moment ago while I am already saying the next thing. A student with a visual processing difference is squinting at a cluttered slide. By minute ten, a third of the room is quietly lost and too embarrassed to say so.

The fix is to reduce the number of demands competing at any one moment.

First, put the instructions out before class, in an accessible format. A student who has already skimmed the step list walks in knowing the shape of the hour. Some of my students read it on the bus. Some run it through a screen reader. Either way they arrive with a scaffold rather than a blank.

Second, alternate watching and doing. I demonstrate three or four steps while students only watch, hands off the keyboard. Then I stop, and they do those same steps while I walk the room. Then we repeat. Nobody has to watch and type simultaneously, and the walk gives me a real read on who is stuck.

Third, keep a short step list visible the whole time, on a second screen, a whiteboard, or a printed half-sheet. When a student drops the thread, the list is the way back in. It should be terse: numbered, one action per line, no paragraphs.

Fourth, caption everything you record and clean up everything you project. Captions are not only for deaf and hard-of-hearing students; they help the student in a loud house, the second-language learner, and anyone whose auditory attention wanders. Slides with one idea and generous white space get read. Slides with nine bullets get ignored.

Community college labs make this harder than a lecture hall would. Machines vary, students arrive at different points, and there is rarely a teaching assistant to catch the person who fell behind. That is precisely why the structure matters. The alternating rhythm and the visible list are doing the work an assistant would do. Fewer competing demands means more students finishing the lab, and it means I spend the period teaching rather than re-teaching the same three steps to one row at a time.

The most common question in my inbox is not about programming code or subnetting. It is some version of “what are we supposed to do?” My personal favorites: “What did I miss? Why is my grade zero? Why am I failing your class?” For years I read that as students not reading. I now read it as an opportunity for connection through using my words.

Academic structures and course assignments that are clear to me, war-torn veteran of decades of higher-ed, are sometimes unclear to a student, especially for those who are taking their first college course online. For many students with ADHD, dyslexia, autism, et al, a vague task is not only irritating. It can be the wall of inertia that ends semesters before they start. Executive function (the mental machinery for getting started, sequencing, and finishing) is exactly what a fuzzy prompt taxes the most, which can trigger negative affective ripples across the whole person.

So now every Activity I require explicitly states five things, in the same “P-F-O-D-E” order, every time:

1 The Purpose (Why): why this exists and what skill it builds. If I can’t say it in one sentence, it’s a sign I have not performed enough executive function myself as the instructor and that I need to have some alone prep time.

2 The First Step (How): the very first thing to do, physically. “Open Packet Tracer and load the .pka file you downloaded from Module 6.” Starting is the hardest step for many people, and naming it removes the blank page.

3 The Outcome (What): or expected deliverable, what submission gets turned in, in what format, with what file name. A screenshot? A .java file? A paragraph in the text box?

4 The Due Date (When): date, time, and whether late work is accepted.

5 The Evaluation (Who): what successful students do who earn the highest grades, a plain-language description or a short exemplar. Not a rubric with twelve rows, though a rubric can sit underneath. Two or three sentences a student can check their own work against.

Note that my instructions live in one predictable place in the LMS, and only there. For me that is the assignment page itself, linked from the week’s module, laid out identically every week. Not the announcement, not the slide deck, not a reply buried in a discussion thread. When a student knows where to look, the looking stops costing them anything.

None of this is an accommodation for some students. It is universal design for all my students: a change to the default that removes a barrier for some students and costs nothing for the rest. The strong student skims it in ten seconds. The student who would have emailed me at 11 p.m. does not need to. Both of them get to spend their effort on the actual work.