446. Teaching Neurodivergent College Students

Show Notes

• Pusateri, Jennifer L. (2026). A Practical Guide to Teaching Neurodivergent College Students. Harvard Education Press.
• Brown, T. E. (2013). A new understanding of ADHD in children and adults: Executive function impairments. Routledge.
• CAST UDL Guidelines
• Mary-Ann Winklemes – TILT Higher Ed
• Tom Tobin, Lillian Nave, and Jennifer Pusateri (2025). UDL 3.0. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 395. May 28.
• Mary-Ann Winklemes (2023). Transparency in Learning and Teaching. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 290. May 24.
• Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan (2020). Structured for Inclusion. Tea for Teaching podcast. Episode 153. September 16.

Transcript

John: Neurodivergent students experience challenges in traditional lecture settings. In this episode, we discuss strategies to reduce these challenges while supporting and leveraging the strengths that neurodivergent students bring to our classrooms.
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John: Thanks for joining us for Tea for Teaching, an informal discussion of innovative and effective practices in teaching and learning.

Rebecca: This podcast series is hosted by John Kane, an economist…

John: …and Rebecca Mushtare, a graphic designer…

Rebecca: …and features guests doing important research and advocacy work to make higher education more inclusive and supportive of all learners.

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Rebecca: Our guest today is Jennifer Pusateri. Jennifer is Jennifer is the Senior Universal Design Consultant at The University of Kentucky and has served as the co-chair of the international UDL in Higher Education Network. She is a member of the CAST National Faculty and is the author of Transform Your Teaching with Universal Design for Learning: Six Steps to Jumpstart Your Practice. Her newest book, A Practical Guide to Teaching Neurodivergent College Students has recently been released by Harvard Education Press. Welcome back, Jennifer.

Jennifer: Delighted to be here with you all.

John: Thanks for joining us again, and today’s teas are:… Jennifer, are you drinking tea?

Jennifer: I am and I don’t normally drink tea. So, I’m in central Kentucky, and I will tell you, this is the most beautiful time of year in central Kentucky. It is so green and lush with the blue grass and the horse farms and all of these rolling hills. However, [LAUGHTER] that means it’s also very allergy-ish at the moment, and so I woke up a little froggy today, so I’m drinking Throat Coat tea.

Rebecca: Hopefully that’ll get the job done.

Jennifer: We’ll see.

John: And Rebecca?

Rebecca: I have an English breakfast tea today.

John: And I have a ginger peach green tea today.

Rebecca: Nice. So we invited you here today to discuss A Practical Guide to Teaching Neurodivergent College Students. Can you tell us about the origin of this book?

Jennifer: Yeah. So I’ve been telling folks that I wrote the book I wish my professors had read, [LAUGHTER] because I was not what you would call a great student when it comes to my undergrad. In fact, I opened the book with a screenshot of my actual transcript from my sophomore year of college, and it’s not great… 1.761 GPA I got that semester, which is fantastic. I just didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know how to learn. I didn’t know what worked best for me, and I did not know at that time that I was ADHD. I was actually diagnosed a little bit later in that year, after being like, “this is not working, like something’s not right here.” My younger daughter is graduating high school and ideally entering college this fall. And I was kind of thinking about, “man, what would I like for her professors to know about teaching neurodivergent students.” She, like Mom, is also ADHD. And I was just kind of hoping that eventually instructors will kind of have a better understanding of what neurodivergence looks like in our students, and that it’s not entirely a deficit.

John: I suppose, before we get too far into the discussion, we should talk a little bit about how you define neurodivergence, just to make sure everyone is on the same starting point.

Jennifer: Yeah, for sure, that’s actually a really good place, I think, to start. Sometimes people balk a little bit about this being a little boring, but I think it’s super interesting. So a neurodivergent brain is a brain that functions differently or outside of what the dominant society says is normal. There is, of course, no such thing as a normal brain. That’s not really how it works. But depending on the society that you’re a part of, there are some expectations for what people assume to be a normal brain. So neurodivergence would be whatever falls outside of that. So if you want to make it a little more clear, from its beginnings, honestly, the word itself was used to describe autistic folks, but also now there’s kind of a larger umbrella, recognizing that there are so many different ways to learn, and that there are so many things that affect the way our brain works when learning. Now we’re including things like ADHD, dyslexia. Some people are including things like depression, anxiety, OCD, and trauma, because we absolutely know that those have an impact on the way our brain works. So, that’s kind of the broad understanding of neurodivergence.

Rebecca: What proportion of college students might fit under this umbrella of neurodivergent.

Jennifer: This depends, I guess, on what you recognize as counting as neurodivergent. What I mean to say is that there’s no one definition of neurodivergence. It’s not a medical term. Some people include certain groups, and some don’t. I tend to use a broader umbrella when describing neurodivergent folks, and the reason that is important when thinking about kind of what percentage are we looking at? So I’ll start with ADHD being one of the most prevalent, about 14% of undergrads, and this is using data from spring of 2025, have ADHD. About 6% of them are dyslexic. Autism is around 3%. Those numbers all seem a little low to me, but that’s what we have from the data. I personally include, as we just talked about, things like depression, anxiety, OCD, and trauma, and so this is where our numbers start to get a little bit bigger. So when we’re looking at our undergrads in the US, 27% identify as being treated for depression, 36% of students report anxiety, and OCD is about 6%, trauma is about 8%. Of course, we don’t just add all of those numbers up. That’s not really how that works. We do know that many, many students who are neurodivergent also have depression and anxiety as well. So like if we just counted, let’s just assume that if we included everything else, everyone else is represented already, we’re going to pretend, underneath depression and anxiety, then that highest number is 36%. So we’re looking at roughly a third of our students have brains that are working in a way that’s outside of what the dominant society considers to be normal, and that’s a lot, a third of our students. That’s a huge amount of students., when we really sit down and think about it.

Rebecca: So one of the things that you indicated in your own story is that you didn’t know that you were ADHD when you were a student. So, we know that there’s wildly under-reported cases because students don’t want to disclose for a wide range of reasons, or they simply don’t know, even though you’re kind of identifying one-third, it could be much bigger. [LAUGHTER]

Jennifer: It really could. And something else that we know for sure is that everyone that needs a diagnosis does not have a diagnosis. There’s a lot of reasons that someone couldn’t get a diagnosis. It costs a lot of money, it requires people to take time off work to take their kids to appointments and do things like that. So there are some pretty significant barriers already just in receiving a diagnosis. So we know that that absolutely exists. And then we also know students are arriving at college, and many are choosing not to disclose that they have a disability of any kind. And so we know for sure there are a lot who are falling through the cracks because they’re either not requesting or not receiving the accommodations that they probably need.

John: And along those lines, I would expect the under-reporting would be more common among low-income students and students for whom getting that documentation would be a bit more challenging.

Jennifer: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, and I don’t have that research or data on hand, but I know that it exists, and that’s pretty much what it says. And then we also think about things like cultural norms. There are some cultures that are not going to see and understand things like ADHD or autism in the same way that others would. They may not even understand that this is something they need to be thinking about with their children, and then therefore they arrive at college and they don’t have the diagnosis that they need.

Rebecca: Can you talk a little bit about the strengths that neurodivergent students bring into our classes.

Jennifer: Yeah, man, there are so many strengths, and this is one of my favorite things to talk about. In the book, I have a diagram where I’ve kind of made a three-way Venn diagram overlapping the strengths of our ADHD students, our autistic students, and our dyslexic students, because the strengths overlaps so much, which I think is really interesting. But some of the things you would typically think about… students who are ADHD are going to be maybe a little more spontaneous, perhaps more energetic. They often are very self aware. And then they’re also going to overlap with autism, especially when it comes to hyper focus. Hyper focus just being that you can focus your attention in on something that you are interested in or care about in a very significant way, to the detriment of other things, like having to use the restroom, or drink water [LAUGHTER] or whatever. That hyper focus really is a big piece of ADHD and autism. We also see ADHDers and autistic folks being very justice and fairness oriented, which I think is super interesting as well. And then when we think about dyslexia, individuals with dyslexia often have more of a visual thinking pattern, like they’re thinking in pictures. Often that can mean that they have a completely different way of understanding and sharing the information that they’re learning about. So they may be able to put together a really good or really helpful diagram that someone else wouldn’t think of, someone else without dyslexia may not even consider or not even be able to place together, but they just seem to have this very big strength when it comes to dyslexia and having things like visuals. So that also overlaps a little bit. We have a lot of out of box thinking when it comes to folks with dyslexia, also ADHD, and then that visual-spatial awareness or reasoning we also see in folks who have autism. In this diagram I have in the book, I have the center in the middle, which is all three of these bigger categories of neurotypes, ADHD, autism, and dyslexia. And I’m listing in there five different overlapping strengths, and I think these are super interesting when it comes to higher ed because if you think about these, and I’m going to share them here in just a second, think about them in terms of hiring a grad student to help with something like qualitative research. So here are the strengths: they’re very interest driven, they’re good at problem solving, they’re excellent at pattern seeking and pattern recognition, creativity, and curiosity. So when I think about someone who could be a qualitative researcher, a graduate student, perhaps, those are the qualities I want. I want someone who’s picking up on patterns that I maybe don’t see, someone who’s very strongly driven by their interest in the things that they care about, and who’s also really good at curiosity, that’s kind of driving them along to understand better the things that they’re researching. I really do see a lot of these strengths as being very helpful in higher education, especially when we think about things like research.

John: And one of the areas you discuss in the book is executive functioning, and I think most people have at least a general sense of that term, but could you define it a little bit more precisely, and also maybe talk a little bit about what can interfere with students’ executive functioning in our classrooms.

Jennifer: So executive function, it’s basically just this grouping of skills and processes that monitor and regulate all kinds of important things, so things like focus and attention, things like our emotions, regulating emotion, organization, time management, prioritization, those kinds of things, goal setting. And there’s a lot more. There are a lot more pieces. And the problem with executive functioning and defining it is, just like neurodivergence, there’s no one definition. There are lots of definitions. And so I choose to use a specific one in this book, because the model I use, which is Thomas Brown’s model, really focuses in on the emotions piece and also the processing piece. And those are things that I don’t always see in executive functioning models, and I think those are some pieces that maybe have been missed a little bit in higher ed, so I really like that model for that reason.

Rebecca: What can we do in the classroom to help support executive function. 10:53

Jennifer: I think a big one that a lot of people think of up front is focused attention and motivation. In my book, I have broken down these sort of challenges into six categories to make it a little bit easier. It can be overwhelming. There’s so many pieces, so many things that executive functioning touches that I wanted to group it a little bit. So the first group is focus, attention, and motivation. That might mean that students who are neurodivergent are going to have a difficult time sitting and passively listening for long periods of time… more than 10 minutes, maybe. So that may be an issue. It also might be things like motivation. I’ll speak for myself. I am not motivated by things I don’t care about. If I have to do things I don’t care about, perhaps I have to take a class that’s outside of my major, or is a general ed class, or whatever, it’s going to be like pulling teeth to get me to do the things in that class, because it’s something I don’t care about. So those are the kinds of things we might see when it comes to focus, attention, and motivation of students having difficulties. Another big piece is organization and structure. A lot of times, neurodivergent folks have difficulty seeing these structures that kind of underlie everything. One of the things I think about is reading a journal article. Someone who’s neurodivergent may read several journal articles but still not see that there’s sort of an underlying structure or order or grouping or whatever of this is how research reads. So in my field, education, research tends to be laid out the same, like it’s always going to start with an introduction, and you’re going to move to this next piece, and then you’re going to move to this next piece. And if that’s not clearly stated or laid out, sometimes it’s difficult for neurodivergent folks to guess that or to see that. And then other things like time management, prioritization. These are things we see all the time with all of our students, but even more so with our neurodivergent students, struggling with things like turning in assignments on time or planning enough time ahead so that they can study or write or whatever to turn something in by a certain deadline. So, those are things we see in a lot of our students, which also brings me to another thought, that we know for sure that undergraduates are of an age where their prefrontal cortex, part of their brain, is not fully developed yet. That doesn’t happen until about age 25 or even 30 for some folks. We can pretty much guess that all of our undergrads are going to struggle at some point with executive functioning. That’s one of the things I really am trying to kind of get across in this book too, is that when you’re setting up your course and your instruction to support neurodivergent students, you’re actually doing that to support all of your students. And those things end up being really useful for many students, in addition to those who are neurodivergent. And then we can also think about other pieces, like sensory and emotional regulation. Those are kind of overlooked often in a higher ed academic setting, but are really important to students being able to work effectively and efficiently without getting overwhelmed or overstimulated.

Rebecca: So you’ve outlined some of the struggles that students might have related to executive function. What can instructors do to help support these students to overcome these struggles?

Jennifer: Well, one of the things we can think about is if we know that we’re going to have many students who are going to struggle with, let’s say, focused attention and motivation, that they’re going to have a difficult time paying attention for more than, I don’t know, 10 minutes or so, then knowing that up front, we can really think about the way that we’re structuring our lectures, or our in-class meeting time, so that we’re breaking that up a little bit with smaller periods, or little bursts of activity, whatever that might be. There are lots of things that you can build in. So you might lecture for 10 minutes or so and then pause, and you can have everyone do a quick one minute reflection writing, or they could even just do a simple turn and talk with their neighbor, because when they pause from the passive listening, and you do something active, it almost is like it resets the timer. As an ADHDer, I have this like internal timer of about how long I can sit and listen and not do something. [LAUGHTER] Stopping after about 10 minutes, doing a quick reflection, or turn and talk with someone next to me, resets that timer. Personally, as an ADHDer, I have this, like, internal timer of about how long I can sit and listen and not do something. [LAUGHTER] And so, like, stopping after about 10 minutes, doing a quick reflection or turn and talk with someone next to me resets that timer now. And now you got another 10 minutes or so where I’m able to really stay focused and listen and engage with what you’re talking about, and then that timer runs out again. As an instructor, if we kind of know that, we can build in these pieces throughout our lectures or even just our course meeting times. And that’s going to be useful, obviously, for our neurodivergent students, but if we’re building in things like reflections or turn and talk or whatever, there’s a lot of research that doing those things in the midst of a lecture is going to help with student memory retention and understanding of the things that they’re talking about. So again, we see this theme come back, that when we build in things that are going to support our neurodivergent students, we are actually supporting all of our students.

John: I was thinking that as you were talking about some of the issues with executive functioning, because issues of student engagement are pretty common and go far beyond just a third of our students. It’s really nice that these approaches can be useful for everyone. So in addition to providing structure and taking breaks and engaging in active learning activities, you also recommend throughout the book using a UDL approach to reduce some of the challenges that neurodivergent students face in our classrooms. Can you provide some examples of the benefits of providing multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression?

Jennifer: Definitely. This is, I think, one of the biggest ones. Of course, the UDL guidelines were updated in 2024 and we used to call the bullet points, checkpoints, but now we call them considerations in UDL. Consideration 7.1 which is in the welcoming interests and identities category or guideline says, “optimize choice and autonomy,” and this one for neurodivergent people, is key. An ADHDers brain, an autistic student’s brain, is an interest-driven brain, and so, when we can provide students with the opportunity to choose something within their learning path, maybe that’s the topic for a paper or a project or something, that gives them the opportunity to choose something that kind of aligns with some of their special interests, or things they are interested in otherwise, and by doing that, that’s going to increase their motivation, that’s going to increase their engagement, and they’re actually going to probably produce better work for you than if they did not have that choice. So, building in that choice and autonomy is a game changer for a lot of neurodivergent folks. When we’re thinking about representation, there are several in there, but the one I was thinking about earlier is Consideration 2.5 and so this one is in the language and symbols guideline, and it’s “illustrate through multiple media.” We know that a lot of neurodivergent folks really respond well and tend to learn well and understand better from visuals. So anytime we can include a graphic organizer, or we can include a clear diagram or a visual or a video, something visual that goes along with more of the text-based things that we’re learning, is going to be super useful for neurodivergent students. So that’s my suggestion for representation. And then when it comes to that action and expression chunk, we’re going to think about the bottom right guideline in blue, and that one is now called “strategy development” (it used to be called “executive function”). Consideration 6.3 asks us to think about organizing our information and resources. To me, as an instructor, this reminds me, if I just give them the things, but I don’t have any good organizational structure around it, it can still be really tricky. Occasionally I see some faculty that will put everything in Canvas… we use Canvas at our university… will put all of the documents that a student needs for a course in the files part of their Canvas course with no organizational structure whatsoever, no modules, no grouping, and that could be really tricky. So it’s going to trip students up when they’re trying to find the things that they’re looking for. It’s also going to be wasting a little bit of their cognitive load or cognitive energy in trying to find those things. So we can organize things like our Canvas courses, our syllabi, etc, thinking about really good structure. When we’re teaching, we can clarify the information hierarchy. And what I mean is, when people learn new information, that information is all at the same importance level, until someone tells you otherwise. And so we can try to be more clear and explicit about that structure. So I might use something like a guided notes document where I have clear headings for kind of the big topics that we’ll be talking about in that day’s lecture, and then that would visually cue students to understand, “Oh, these are the big pieces. These are the most important topics.” And I’ve done that. I’ve kind of elevated that informational hierarchy and made that clear and explicit to the students in the use of that guided notes document.

Rebecca: In addition to using a UDL methodology, what are some other ways to support neurodivergent students in the classroom?

Jennifer: One thing that I think is super important is transparent design. So if you are familiar with the TILT method by Mary-Ann Winklemes and others, that’s a really good way to approach assignments for neurodivergent students, because one of the things that’s really difficult is unclear expectations. So when perhaps an instructor thought they were being clear in their directions, but perhaps could have clarified a little more or maybe made some things kind of broken down a little bit into steps, or checklists, or whatever. When we can do that, that’s going to be really helpful for neurodivergent students. But also, one of the things I really like about that TILT approach to teaching and to instructional design in higher ed is the fact that it elevates the purpose of the assignment. Neurodivergent folks really like to know the why behind things, myself included. I want to understand why we’re doing this. Why are we doing this assignment? Because when I know the why behind the thing, that really helps with my motivation and my engagement. And although I don’t necessarily have to like it or agree with you, I can understand why. That makes a big difference. So, using things like transparent assignment design and transparency in learning and teaching is another great way to do that. It aligns so nicely with universal design for learning, because it’s just asking you to take out all of your assumptions and start thinking proactively about the barriers that your students are going to encounter. UDL is doing that, and transparent assignment design is doing that as well.

John: And we’ll include links to earlier discussions related to this, including the earlier podcast you were on discussing the new UDL guidelines, a podcast with Mary-Ann Winklemes, where she discusses the TILT approach, and a podcast with Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan, where they talk about the evidence on structure and the importance of structure, because these things are coming from a lot of different areas, and they benefit a lot of students, and specifically, I think Mary-Ann Winklemes and Viji Sathy and Kelly Hogan have emphasized research showing the importance that these things have in reducing many of the equity gaps that we observe in our classes. So these approaches are really useful, and it’s really nice to see the UDL approach combined with the other materials in your book, as well as TILT and the importance of structure. So it’s really a nice guide to effective teaching for everybody, as well as a guide to help reduce some of the challenges faced by neurodivergent students in our classes.

Jennifer: And our neurodivergent students are some of the most brilliant students out of the box, creative thinkers that we have, and so if we can support them on some of these other pieces related to executive functioning, I mean, wow, we’re going to be astounded by what we see in our students. So, I encourage folks to really think about that by supporting neurodivergent students with things like executive functioning and such that you are unleashing that student’s potential in a way that perhaps they had not been able to do before.

John: One of the other things you talk about earlier in your book was that challenges with executive function are often misperceived as indicating a lack of intelligence. Could you talk a little bit about why this misperception occurs, and perhaps how we can break people away from that misperception.

Jennifer: One of the things I actually included in the book, sort of for that reason, I included some quotes from interviews I did with neurodivergent higher ed faculty and staff. I wanted to include their voices, because sometimes I think it can be tricky for instructors. Sometimes they can think that students who maybe have these, what some call invisible disabilities, might be trying to just get something over on them or cheat or make it easier. And so I guess I wanted faculty and instructors to hear from their colleagues, “No, actually, these are things that I did and still struggle with my entire life, and here’s how I have looked at that, or here’s how I help my students now, because of the way that I approach these things well.”

Rebecca: So we always wrap up by asking: “What’s next?”

Jennifer: There are a lot of things I’ve been thinking about recently. One of the things I’m kind of kicking around is we’ve had some really good books that have come out recently that have elevated the stories of neurodivergent faculty and instructors and kind of their experience and what that’s been like for them. I would love to see… and perhaps this will be next on my list of things to do… more support for neurodivergent faculty, because there’s so much executive functioning that goes along with being an instructor in a higher ed situation. I mean, it’s constant. And then thinking about how we’re balancing our teaching with our research and with our service work and all of those things, we could use a little bit of practical support with that, those of us who are neurodivergent instructors in a higher ed setting. So that’s something I’ve been thinking about a little bit lately. I don’t know if that’s a next project or a next book, but I know it’s a thing that we need some support and help with out there in the field.

Rebecca: Definitely, I think that’s something that I hear a lot as we’re talking about digital accessibility efforts and other things in this space, is we spent a lot of time thinking about how to help students, but not always a lot of time thinking about how to help and support colleagues.

Rebecca: Well, thank you so much for joining us. We look forward to sharing your book and getting this episode out into the world.

Jennifer: I appreciate that.

John: And in fact, we liked your book so much that it’s been chosen as one of our fall reading groups here.

Jennifer: Yay!

John: So we’ll have a number of faculty who will be discussing this through the fall semester. So, thank you.

Jennifer: That’s great. Awesome.

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John: If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast service. To continue the conversation, join us on our Tea for Teaching Facebook page.

Rebecca: You can find show notes, transcripts and other materials on teaforteaching.com. Music by Michael Gary Brewer.

John: Editing assistance provided by Fred Llerena.

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