Integrating Neurodivergent Strengths at School

Understanding, honoring, and integrating the interest and strengths of 2e learners is paramount to their well-being, and yet so rarely considered in the educational context. How can parents work with their child's school to encourage strength-based approaches, whether that be in a teacher conference, the IEP process, or other conversations? Join us for this special Neurodiversity Celebration Week lunchtime meetup with Dr. Jade Rivera, Director of the Strength-Based Assessment Lab at the Bridges Graduate School. She'll discuss strength-based identification strategies, education practices, and IEP goals. Feel free to submit your child's learning goals when you RSVP and Dr. Rivera may select some to demonstrate how to reframe goals from a strength-based lens.

See the transcript here:

But we won’t wait too long today because it’s just an hour-long session, and we’re honoring everyone’s lunchtime. We’ll probably go ahead and get started as soon as your AI is ready.

If you’re here and would like to introduce yourself in the chat, please feel free to let us know where you’re dialing in from today and what attracted you to join us. We’re so glad you’re here.

All right, welcome everyone. I know some people are still trickling in. Happy Neurodiversity Celebration Week! In case you haven’t been to their website, they have an amazing array of events you can attend and resources you can share with your school. It’s a really amazing initiative that was started by a neurodiverse student several years ago, so check it out if you can.

We thank Jade for joining us today to kick off the week with a perfect talk for the topic: integrating neurodivergent strengths at school.

For those of you that aren’t familiar with REEL, we are a nonprofit, and we strive to ensure that Silicon Valley twice-exceptional students thrive in school. We do this by hosting events like this for parents, creating resources, having support groups, and working with educators through professional development.

If you’re here, you most likely know what twice-exceptionality is, but just to quickly touch on it, REEL talks about twice-exceptionality as having distinguishing strengths, high abilities, or potentials in one or more areas, while also having complex challenges such as dyslexia, autism, ADHD, anxiety, and others at the same time.

The twice-exceptional student combines the yellow strengths and the complex blue challenges to create a green profile. Their strengths and challenges combine and interact, so you have to support them both simultaneously, which can be a confusing profile.

You can visit reel2e.org to find all of our previous event recordings, blog posts, white papers, and other resources organized in a beautiful new page so you can find them all by topic.

We have a couple of events left this school year to round out the year. We have an event with Dr. Matt Zakreski next week about sensory challenges, and then we have an event with Dr. Danica Maddox about reducing power struggles.

We also have our bimonthly parent support group, and you can RSVP for all of these at reel2e.org. We also have a private Google group with hundreds of local parents of twice-exceptional students asking and answering questions, so you can join there.

You can also follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. All of our previous event recordings are available on YouTube.

We are very excited to release our new white paper with an educator model. As I mentioned before, we do workshops for educators, primarily learning difference simulations and intro to twice-exceptionality, but we do many others. If you’d like to bring us to your school, this white paper is now available on reel2e.org for your review.

We are just now starting to share these ideas about what makes school great for twice-exceptional learners, as well as all learners, including flexibility, strength development, connection, and reframing behaviors.

We also recently published an IEP guide for twice-exceptional students, the California Bay Area Edition, though 95% of it is relevant to IEPs anywhere. That’s also available for download on our website.

I’m so happy to introduce our speaker, Dr. Jade Rivera. Thank you for joining us. She is the lab director for the Strength-Based Assessment Lab at Bridges Graduate School.

She leads the lab to empower students, families, educators, and professionals in creating positive and collaborative learning experiences for children facing challenges in their educational environments.

With over 15 years of experience, she has designed and led micro-schools beloved by quirky and sensitive children, uniquely positioning her to provide insights into positive niche construction, strength-based pedagogy, and talent development for neurodivergent children.

Jade’s Montessori credential and training in nonviolent communication inspires her educational philosophies and practices, including project-based learning, dual differentiation strategies, and gradeless classrooms.

In 2016, the California Association for the Gifted honored Jade for distinguished service on behalf of gifted and twice-exceptional children. More recently, she was recognized as a person to watch in the twice-exceptional movement by 2e News.

You can learn more about her philosophy and practices in her newsletter, which we can post in the chat, and her new publication, Could You Live Underwater?, a design thinking and STEM curriculum now available from Routledge Publishing.

She earned her Ed.D. at Bridges Graduate School of Cognitive Diversity in 2022, and it is her honor to continue working there as a professor, supporting others as they envision a strength-based world for neurodivergent humans.

Thank you so much, Jade.

Thank you so much. Yeah, it’s great to be here. I do have a slideshow to share, so I’d like to do that now.

It was wonderful to get a rundown of all the things that REEL is up to right now. It’s so amazingly impressive, and what a great resource for families in your area and families all over the country, as you mentioned.

As introduced, I am Dr. Jade Rivera, and I’m here today to talk to you about strength-based IEP goals—what they are and how to write them.

We’re also going to talk a little bit about strength-based education practices and how to develop an environment that is accessible to twice-exceptional children, a place where they can thrive and find joy in learning.

As mentioned, I am a curriculum and learning environment designer with expertise in strength-based education for neurodivergent children. I’m the lab director for the Strength-Based Assessment Lab at Bridges Graduate School and a faculty member there.

I actually see some students in the audience here at this presentation, and that’s really special to me. So, thank you for being there.

I think it’s really important to start each talk grounded in a rationale and an objective as to why what we’re talking about is important.

This is a discrepancy that we’re all quite aware of, but I just want to make it explicit: While strength-based talent development approaches in education are recognized as best practice for twice-exceptional children, a shared understanding of strength identification and strength-based talent development pedagogy is scarce among education and non-education professionals.

That is the discrepancy—the gap—that Bridges Graduate School, in general, is trying to close. I think we’re doing a pretty good job alongside wonderful organizations like REEL.

What do we mean by strength? I think there’s a lot of confusion out there about what we’re talking about when we say strength-based education and what it actually looks like in practice.

We haven’t really come to terms with how internalized our deficit mindset is. It’s something we all grew up with through our own education experiences. I’m speaking very generally here—I know this is the case for me and probably a lot of you as well, except for a few lucky ones.

We all grew up drinking the water and breathing the air of a deficit mindset. So, to switch our mindset over to a strength-based one actually requires quite a bit of inner work and reflection.

It’s not as easy as just identifying a strength and then speaking to that strength. Because of that additional discrepancy, there’s a lot of confusion in the field about what we mean by strength-based.

When we say strength-based, we’re really talking about a curricular or instructional approach that’s differentiated to align with the student’s cognitive styles, learning preferences, and profiles of intelligence.

This is very individualized for the student. But another aspect of what we’re talking about is environments—making learning accessible to a student’s strengths, cognitive styles, and learning profiles.

But before we can do that, we really need to talk about how to recognize a strength. And I swear to you, it’s as simple as this: When you ask adults and observe students, what you end up with is an identified strength.

Before you can speak to strength-based IEP goals, you need to know what the student’s strength is to begin with.

When I receive these sample IEP goals and people ask, “How do you make this strength-based?” I say, “I don’t entirely know how to do that until I see what the strengths are—what the student loves to do, where they excel, their moments of personal best.”

This is really what we uncover through our work with the Strength-Based Lab. We conduct an exhaustive interview-based assessment where we speak to the parent, the child, and non-related adults in the child’s life who have structural power.

We ask: Where do you see the child thriving? What are their times of personal best?

But you can start this today. You can start by asking people around you, “When do you see my child thriving? When does my child seem most comfortable? When do they seem most like themselves?”

Then, observe them in those situations. That’s where you’re going to uncover those aha moments so you can begin to advocate for their strengths by first identifying them.

What I see in these IEP goals is that so much onus is placed on the child to change. I believe—and we believe at Bridges Graduate School, and probably you believe this as well—that the onus really should be on the environment and the people serving the child to shift, change, and evolve their thinking about what learning looks like for these amazing children.

That means environmental shifts. In our work, we talk about the intellectual environment, the emotional environment, the social environment, the creative environment, and the physical or built environment.

There’s overlap between these things—they inform each other—but when you tease them out separately, you’re able to uncover strength-based solutions to make learning accessible and joyful for twice-exceptional children.

I just want to give you some light ideas that you might want to research more on your own or discuss in your group about how to actually go about building an environment where twice-exceptional children thrive.

First, in the intellectual environment, we discuss compacting a curriculum—allowing a student to test out of or demonstrate their understanding or prior knowledge about a subject being covered, and then accelerating them.

This could mean grade-skipping or skipping over courses entirely if they won’t offer new information or experiences in that subject.

We talk about the social environment, which is such a rich place for talent development to occur. We’re talking about shared interest groups—clubs, troops, teams.

When we talk about talent development, we’re not just talking about developing a talent in isolation. That’s not actually how we get better at something. We get better through the relational act of learning, which really happens in these shared interest groups, clubs, and teams.

So much happens through talent development that isn’t just about developing the talent—though that’s very important. Connections are made, and social and emotional learning occurs as well.

Again, this shows how these environments overlap and inform each other.

In the creative environment, things like free time, choice, and open-ended assignments are accessible ways to make the learning environment more creative for students.

In the emotional environment, we focus on making the implicit explicit. There are a lot of implicit understandings, rules, and boundaries in learning environments that aren’t overtly obvious to many of our students, so they need to be made explicit at every opportunity.

This is something I write in nearly every single strength-based talent development report I create: “This child will do well with a flexible and warm teacher who overlooks small mistakes.”

I don’t know of a single teacher who would say, “I’m not flexible or warm,” but some educators benefit from the reminder. I say that as a longtime educator myself.

Then there’s the physical space—the built environment. This includes space to move, sensory toys, and tools so the child can regulate themselves physically to access learning.

What do you do when you don’t have a flexible and warm teacher? It’s difficult for me to speak to that. I would start by getting curious and asking questions.

I would ask the teacher specifically: When do you see my child thriving? What do you see as my child’s strengths? What does my child have going for them in the classroom?

Begin a conversation and build some shared language around what the child is doing right, hoping that will open the teacher’s heart and mind to what’s possible with that child.

I think curiosity is pretty much always the best way to start any conversation with a person who is in a position to affect your child’s life and learning.

Okay, now I think the best thing to do is to start getting into some of these goals. These are sample goals I’ve received over the years—completely anonymized.

You can see here how I’ve created an “insert strength here” placeholder. When I received this goal originally, there was no mention of what the child is doing right in the learning environment or where the adults see them thriving.

That’s a big hole missing, but it also creates a cool opportunity to begin the conversation around strength identification and ways to incorporate their strengths into these goals.

California has a state mandate for strength-based IEPs that’s either in effect or about to go into effect. That’s a piece of data you can bring into these discussions.

We know there are two levels here: writing the IEP and then ensuring the IEP is implemented according to what’s been discussed and agreed upon. Unfortunately, those sometimes exist in two different universes.

The first goal is about developing conversational skills to support reciprocal interaction—again, a lot of onus on the child.

The goal is to retain details about three different peers or conversational partners and recall those details to ask questions or comment on their interests.

What are we trying to do? We’re trying to support the child socially. We want them to build social skills and have social success. I want that for them too, but I think there’s a better way to go about it—one that’s more peaceful, consensual, and aligned with their needs.

Given this child’s passion for [thing] and their strong memory for details about the subjects they love—I’m making an inference here that this child is autistic—this goal aims to extend these skills to social interactions.

They’ll use their strength in recalling details by learning about similar interests of three peers or conversational partners. We’re trying to match this child with people who share their interests.

I can’t talk about anything with anybody—I’m not that kind of person—and I don’t know that many people are. Expecting this child to just become this person after they’re already struggling is completely unfair.

They will then engage these peers by sharing their own insights and asking informed questions about the peers’ interests, aiming to sustain meaningful dialogue in at least three exchanges in different settings.

This will be facilitated through activities and discussions that align with the child’s interests and strengths—not just expecting them to be excited to speak about anything.

I’m excited to speak to you about strength-based education practices because that’s what I’ve dedicated my life to. Of course, that’s what I’m going to speak on.

Let’s look at the next goal. Do we have any questions about this specifically?

Okay, great. Here’s the second goal. You know, one of the things is, in general, I think a characteristic of a twice-exceptional child generally is this sort of non-linear growth. I think another way we say it is asynchronous development. So, expecting these children to align with standards of growth and communication in this linear fashion, like the laying out in this goal April 2024, as if we just go from one thing to another, I think is not ideal. I know that IEPs require those smart goals, but if you can get a way or extend the amount of time in which to meet a goal, I think that's always going to be ideal.

This goal asks the child to identify a variety of emotions and demonstrate and verbalize effective responses in four out of five opportunities.

I have some problems with this goal as it’s written, so I’ve rewritten it. Anytime you can bring talent development or interests into a goal, you’re setting the child up for success.

Again, it goes back to identifying those talents and strengths at that time in the child’s life.

I’m making some inferences about this child’s neurological profile. Perhaps they have a preference for clear rules and sequences—great, we can build upon that.

They’ll learn and practice specific scripted responses to these emotions. Here, we’re making the implicit explicit.

There’s an amount of onus put back on the adults in this child’s life to notice these things and speak to them in a targeted fashion to set the child up for success.

The first goal was all about the child doing A, B, or C. The second is more about how we’re setting up the child so they can do A, B, or C.

The child will demonstrate the ability to use these structured responses in real-life situations. We’re making the learning authentic, which is another key piece for twice-exceptional children.

We’re hoping to provide this child with clear, consistent strategies to understand and react to emotional cues to foster independence and interpersonal skills.

These are very human needs. We’re not asking the child to do anything unnatural or outside conventional understanding of human development.

This is relevant for older students. How do you provide moments for kids ages 10+ to practice these skills?

Whenever you give them social opportunities aligned with their interests and social energy—what I call their “social battery”—and prepare them beforehand by explaining what the interaction will look like (what I call “front-loading”), you’re creating those moments.

That works for children of all ages.

Okay, let’s look at goal three.

When given the opportunity for peer interactions—lunch, recess, free time, games, activities—the child will independently interact with peers by initiating and maintaining conversations or activities, participating in a minimum of five back-and-forth turn-taking exchanges.

I’m always curious: How are you tracking this? Is there a checklist? It’s very specific numerically, but regardless, I know what they’re aiming for.

Again, I’m making inferences because these are anonymized samples. Your mileage may vary, but you can adapt this like a Mad Lib—insert the child’s specific strengths.

Proficiency with structured tasks and visual or tactile learning. What is the goal even for? It’s to enhance their social engagement through preferred mediums.

When you revisit the goal’s purpose, it opens brainstorming for shifting the goal to be more targeted and effective. Always come back to: Why are we talking about this? What do we want for this child? Is it appropriate?

For peer interactions like lunch, recess, or class activities, I’d ask: Is lunch the best time? Is it loud? Rushed? Do they sit with peers who share their interests?

We need to tease out these “opportunities” and ask: Are they truly opportunities aligned with the child’s sensory needs?

The revised goal focuses on structured activities that align with their strengths—puzzles, building blocks, drawing, shared interests—as a foundation for interaction.

The aim is to participate in at least five turn-taking exchanges, really doubling down on personal interests and fostering a sense of belonging and mutual respect.

Reciprocity matters—it’s not a one-way street.

Next goal: Maintain attention on-task during class lessons and assignments to complete assignments on a daily basis across all academic settings with 90% success.

If it were me, I’d advocate for lowering that 90% to 70% to expand the window for success. We want to set them up for easy wins to create a virtuous cycle of growth.

The updated goal utilizes their strengths in varied short-term activities, incorporating creative, project-based elements and breaking assignments into smaller segments.

Success is still measured (I kept the 90%, though I’d argue for less), but the focus is on their unique learning style and promoting sustained attention through strategies that resonate with their natural inclinations.

We’re acknowledging the child holistically—not as an automaton programmed to achieve a goal.

The original goals remind me of that, even though the intentions are good. People want your child to thrive but may lack the tools to make it happen.

That ties back to the discrepancy I mentioned earlier.

The fifth goal is about expressing negative emotions at school and using coping skills like perspective-taking, assertive communication, deep breathing, or problem-solving.

I’d ask: Why is the negative emotion happening? What can we do to prevent it from reaching that point?

Encourage personalized coping strategies aligned with their interests. Well-meaning adults introduce mindfulness tactics, but for some twice-exceptional kids, that doesn’t work—especially sensory-seekers.

Sitting quietly to breathe deeply isn’t aligned with their sensory needs. We’re setting them up to fail.

If a child is sensory-seeking, they need stimulation to regulate. Their “calm-down kit” might involve movement or pressure—not what we typically think of as calming.

The revised goal prioritizes autonomy and self-knowledge, supporting emotional regulation in a way that feels respectful and empowering.

When updating goals, you’re zooming way out (long-term success) and way in (specific strategies) at the same time, tailoring them to the child’s profile and advocating for environmental shifts.

Bonus sixth goal: Self-determination. By the next annual review, the child will independently organize 80% of his classwork for multiple academic periods for three consecutive weeks.

Involve the child in creating personalized organizational systems—color-coded binders, visual schedules, apps that gamify task management. Gamification is huge for organization.

I thrive using the Pomodoro technique with a cute app reward. If it works for me (a 45-year-old), imagine how engaging it is for kids!

Regular check-ins let the child reflect: “How is this working for you?” That question—asked non-confrontationally—is powerful.

As mentioned, I’m the lab director at Bridges Graduate School. I’d love to talk more about our work if you’re interested.

Now, let’s open it up for your questions. How was that for you?

I’m rewriting an IEP and feel daunted approaching the school. How do I advocate for child-centered, strength-based goals?

Lead with curiosity. Ask, “What’s possible here?” Offer solutions. Most teachers would appreciate a parent saying, “I made this draft—could we build on it?” Frame it as a gift.

Schools often write tiny goals to “graduate” kids from IEPs. How do we address deeper needs?

First, ensure instructional strategies match the child’s learning style. Use metaphors: “Glasses aren’t removed just because vision improves.” Accommodations are accessibility.

How do we bridge the gap between IEP goals and real-world expectations?

Reverse-engineer skills. If a child struggles with step D, have they mastered A, B, and C? Observe “sensitive periods” when they’re primed to learn.

Will you share the slides? What happens when a child masters IEP goals but still needs support?

Yes, slides will be shared. For mastered goals, document how accommodations led to success (e.g., “Advanced math reduced meltdowns”). Advocate to maintain those supports.

For student-led conferences, how can parents prep kids to guide teachers?

Practice beforehand. Ask, “When do you feel most engaged?” Keep it conversational—in the car, at bedtime, during play.

Thank you, Jade! We’ll share the recording and slides. Happy Neurodiversity Celebration Week, everyone!