A recent conversation about designing for neurodivergent learners left me thinking about how easily inclusion can remain an aspiration without becoming a consistent practice.
We often approach accessibility through standards, accommodations, and compliance. Those things matter, but neurodivergent learners invite us to consider a broader question: What if the difficulty is not located entirely within the learner? What if some of it is produced by how we design courses, communicate expectations, measure participation, and define success?
A course may technically be accessible while still demanding an exhausting amount of interpretation. Learners might encounter unclear instructions, inconsistent layouts, unnecessary time pressure, sensory overload, rigid participation requirements, or assignments that measure executive functioning as much as subject knowledge.
This challenges us to move beyond asking whether students can access our courses. We also need to ask what our courses require students to overcome before meaningful learning can begin.
At the same time, there is no single neurodivergent learner. A design decision that supports one person may create friction for another. More structure can provide security, but too much can feel restrictive. More choice can create agency, but it can also create decision fatigue. Recorded lectures may offer flexibility while introducing new difficulties with attention and processing.
There may not be one perfectly inclusive design. The goal may be to create thoughtful pathways that give learners greater clarity, flexibility, and control without leaving them to assemble the learning experience on their own.
Productive Challenge or Unnecessary Difficulty?
The conversation also made me think about Vygotsky’s concept of the zone of proximal development. This is the space between what a learner can accomplish independently and what becomes possible with appropriate guidance and support.
In education, we sometimes assume that difficulty is evidence of rigor. But not every difficulty contributes to learning. A student may be capable of engaging deeply with complex ideas while struggling with ambiguous directions, rigid time limits, sensory demands, or the executive functioning required to manage several overlapping tasks. These barriers can push a learner outside a productive learning zone without increasing the intellectual value of the experience.
This raises an important design question: Are we challenging students through the substance of what they are learning, or through the conditions we have constructed around that learning?
For neurodivergent learners, scaffolding might include predictable course structures, models of completed work, opportunities to practice before being evaluated, explicit explanations of expectations, flexible ways to participate, or tools that support planning and processing.
These supports do not remove rigor. They can make the intended rigor more reachable by directing the learner’s effort toward the knowledge or skill the course is meant to develop.
The zone of proximal development also reminds us that appropriate support cannot be entirely standardized. The distance between independence and supported possibility will differ from one learner to another. It may also change across tasks, environments, and moments in a student’s life.
Designing for that variability requires more than adding a fixed collection of accommodations. It requires learning environments that help students recognize what support they need and access it without stigma.
Designing With Learners
Another important consideration is the difference between designing for neurodivergent learners and designing with them.
It is easy for educators and instructional designers to make assumptions about what students need. Even well-intentioned assumptions can reduce people to diagnoses or generalized profiles. Listening, testing, and inviting learners into the design process can reveal barriers that experts may never notice.
However, this creates another responsibility. We should not expect neurodivergent students to repeatedly disclose personal information, represent an entire community, or educate the institution without recognition and support. Meaningful participation must be invited in ways that protect privacy and respect the value of students’ contributions.
Questions I Am Still Considering
The conversation left me with several questions:
- Are we challenging students through the substance of the learning, or through unnecessary barriers created by our course design?
- How can we distinguish productive struggle within a learner’s zone of proximal development from difficulty caused by an inflexible learning environment?
- Which course practices measure actual learning, and which primarily measure executive functioning, processing speed, social comfort, or tolerance for ambiguity?
- How can we design with neurodivergent learners without requiring them to disclose personal information or repeatedly educate the institution?
- Who gets to define what meaningful participation, engagement, and success look like?
That final question feels especially important. In education, we can unintentionally privilege the learner who responds quickly, speaks comfortably in groups, maintains eye contact, processes information in familiar ways, and demonstrates attention in visible forms. When those behaviors become proxies for engagement, we risk misunderstanding students whose learning is real but expressed differently.
Designing for neurodivergent learners is not about lowering expectations. It is about becoming more precise about which expectations genuinely serve learning. It asks us to preserve meaningful challenge while removing friction that contributes little to the intended outcome.
Perhaps rigor should not be measured by how much difficulty a student can endure independently. A better measure may be the depth of learning students can reach when challenge and support are intentionally designed to work together.
This work requires more than adding accommodations after barriers appear. It requires curiosity about the assumptions embedded in our courses and humility about how much we still need to learn.
Perhaps the most useful starting point is not, “How do we help neurodivergent students succeed in the courses we have designed?”
It may be, “What can neurodivergent learners teach us about designing better learning environments for everyone?”
