A strengths-based guide for teaching ADHD college students that promotes inclusive, supportive, and high-structure learning environments for all.
The college learning environment is a place of both challenge and opportunity for students with ADHD. In An Educator's Guide to ADHD, Karen Costa offers a transformative perspective on education that reimagines how college classrooms can support these learners. Challenging conventional narratives that treat ADHD as a deficiency, Costa instead invites educators to embrace the full humanity, creativity, and complexity of ADHD learners—whose minds are, as she puts it, wide open to the world like a house with its windows thrown open.
Costa introduces a framework built on strengths, compassion, and structural accountability. As a workshop facilitator with ADHD, she confronts the ableist underpinnings of traditional pedagogy and proposes a high-support, high-structure, and high-challenge approach that benefits all students. Her work encourages faculty to move beyond shame-based practices and toward a model of education that respects neurodiversity, supports executive functioning, and fosters resilience.
Costa's vivid metaphor of an open-windowed house illustrates the reality of living and learning with ADHD, which involves occupying a psychic space of both beauty and vulnerability. Rather than insisting students "shut their windows" to conform, she urges educators to help them build environments where the fresh air of insight and connection can circulate freely while keeping out the mosquitoes. By teaching strategies like externalizing, reducing cognitive load, and embracing metalearning, Costa's design and teaching approach will help educators create inclusive learning environments with the clarity, tools, and inspiration needed to shift the educational landscape one empowered learner at a time.