Neurodiversity in Primary Schools

Introduces the concept of neurodiversity and what neurodiversity can mean in the classroom. It explores the implications of the neurodiversity paradigm for educational settings.

Explores the importance of building effective relationships with students and their families and whānau, and details the many benefits of working closely with other teachers, leaders, and teacher aides or learning support staff within the school, as well as with external experts and specialists.

Focuses on how to build an effective school-wide approach to supporting neurodivergent students, and explores key ideas and principles for designing support based on evidence-informed and life experience-based approaches to neurodiversity. Case studies of three schools enable you to see what these principles can look like in different contexts.

Explores this approach to designing teaching and learning that is recommended and endorsed by neurodiversity advocates and researchers.

Examines how considering environments from a sensory point of view and developing consistent routines can provide important support for neurodivergent students at school.

Explores the importance of executive functioning and how you can enable students to succeed by explicitly teaching and supporting these skills. It also provides guidance on the importance of explicit teaching of both academic content and social skills.

Examines how you can plan for and effectively respond to challenging scenarios in the classroom. It explains emotion dysregulation and what can cause it, explores how you can proactively support students to build their emotion knowledge and emotional regulation skills, and offers guidance on noticing and ameliorating the factors that can trigger episodes of dysregulation in students.

Reminds you of the valuable and vital role you play in supporting neurodivergent students, and supports you to ensure that you maintain your own wellbeing.

Knowledge building sections throughout the course are designed to develop your understanding about the most common forms of neurodivergence and how they can impact students, and to help you develop a suite of practical strategies and approaches that can support students in school environments. The topics covered include autism, sensory processing differences, ADHD, executive functioning, speech and language differences (including developmental language disorder), developmental coordination disorder (DCD), dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, and the mental health challenges that many neurodivergent students experience.