EduCon 2027Rethinking the Systems We Ask Students with Learning Differences to Navigate
Schools often devote significant time and resources to helping students become more successful within existing educational systems. We teach students to organize more effectively, work independently, manage time, read increasingly complex texts, communicate their thinking, meet deadlines, and navigate established schedules and expectations. But what happens when we turn the question around? Instead of continually asking how students can better navigate school, what might we learn by asking how school could be better designed for the students actually sitting in our classrooms?
This conversation draws from the experience of a K–8 school intentionally designed for students with learning differences, including dyslexia, dysgraphia, dyscalculia, ADHD, and executive-function challenges. Working with learners who have often struggled within traditional educational structures provides a unique opportunity to reconsider assumptions about pacing, intervention, assessment, independence, instructional design, scheduling, and academic rigor.
Participants will examine common school structures and identify which elements we tend to treat as fixed—and why. Small-group conversations will invite participants to take familiar student challenges and “flip the problem,” shifting from “How do we help this student fit the system?” to “What could we change about the system or learning environment?”
The conversation will also explore an important tension: If we design schools to be increasingly responsive to individual learners, how do we simultaneously prepare young people to navigate a world that will not always adapt to them?
In connection with EduCon’s question, “Who are the kids the world will need?”, participants will consider whether independence should mean doing everything without support—or developing the self-awareness, agency, strategies, and ability to advocate for the conditions needed to succeed.
Rather than leaving with a prescribed model for redesigning school, participants will collaboratively identify principles of learner-centered design and one assumption within their own educational setting that may be worth challenging.
Conversational Practice
This session will be structured as a facilitated conversation rather than a traditional presentation. After a brief introduction and learner-profile provocation, participants will be asked, “Where is the problem located—the learner, the instruction, the environment, or the system?” Their responses will establish the starting point for our conversation.
Participants will then engage in a “What Do We Treat as Fixed?” protocol, collaboratively identifying school structures and expectations that are rarely questioned, such as schedules, pacing, deadlines, assessment formats, intervention structures, and definitions of independence.
In small groups, participants will use a “Flip the Problem” protocol. Each group will examine a familiar student challenge, but instead of asking, “How do we fix or support this student?” they will ask, “What could we redesign in the instruction, environment, or system?” Groups will share their thinking and identify common themes.
We will then facilitate a whole-group dialogue around a productive tension: Where is the line between designing responsive environments for learners and preparing students to navigate a world that will not always adapt to them?
Rather than providing participants with predetermined conclusions, the group will collaboratively develop a set of learner-centered design principles based on the conversation. Participants will close by responding to one final question: “What is one thing your school treats as fixed that might not actually need to be?”
The facilitator’s role throughout will be to pose questions, surface differing perspectives, connect ideas across groups, and create space for participants to challenge both existing systems and one another’s assumptions.
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