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An Educator's Guide to ADHD: Designing and Teaching for Student Success
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.
Costa introduces a framework built on strengths, compassion, and structural accountability. As an ADHD workshop facilitator and a person 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.
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.
Costa introduces a framework built on strengths, compassion, and structural accountability. As an ADHD workshop facilitator and a person 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.
272 pages, Paperback
Published January 20, 2026
4 people are currently reading
9 people want to read
About the author
Karen Costa
4 books42 followersKaren Costa is a career higher educator with a passion for discovering her own purpose and path, and a desire to help others do the same. She has been teaching college and life success skills to first-year college students for over a decade, helping them to create the lives of their dreams.
Karen’s first book, 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos (Stylus, February 2020), focuses on helping faculty and teachers to make creative use of videos in their classrooms.
Karen is a staff writer for Women in Higher Education. Her writing has also appeared in Inside Higher Education, The Philadelphia Inquirer, On Being, and Faculty Focus. She is involved in various faculty development initiatives including as a facilitator for Faculty Guild.
Karen graduated with honors from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. She holds a Master of Education in Higher Education from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a Certificate of Advanced Graduate Studies in Educational Leadership from Northeastern University. A proud lifelong learner, Karen holds a Professional Certification in Trauma and Resilience from Florida State University, and will complete her Certificate in Neuroscience, Learning, and Online Instruction from Drexel University in early 2020. Karen is a certified yoga teacher and Level 1 Yoga for Arthritis teacher. She lives in Massachusetts with her family.
Karen’s first book, 99 Tips for Creating Simple and Sustainable Educational Videos (Stylus, February 2020), focuses on helping faculty and teachers to make creative use of videos in their classrooms.
Karen is a staff writer for Women in Higher Education. Her writing has also appeared in Inside Higher Education, The Philadelphia Inquirer, On Being, and Faculty Focus. She is involved in various faculty development initiatives including as a facilitator for Faculty Guild.
Karen graduated with honors from Syracuse University with a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. She holds a Master of Education in Higher Education from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and a Certificate of Advanced Graduate Studies in Educational Leadership from Northeastern University. A proud lifelong learner, Karen holds a Professional Certification in Trauma and Resilience from Florida State University, and will complete her Certificate in Neuroscience, Learning, and Online Instruction from Drexel University in early 2020. Karen is a certified yoga teacher and Level 1 Yoga for Arthritis teacher. She lives in Massachusetts with her family.
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February 8, 2026
phenomenal book as a professor. grateful for this kind of evidence based resource to address hope to improve teaching strategies AND culture in higher ed.
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