Put four teachers in the same staff meeting, after the same six periods, in the same fluorescent-lit room. Same bell schedule behind them, same corridor noise, same pile of things to get through before everyone can go home:

• One’s completely unbothered, barely notices the room at all.

• One’s positioned themselves near the door, fidgeting, ready to move.

• One’s shut down halfway through, overwhelmed by everything landing at once.

• One’s been quietly managing the whole time, filtering, pacing themselves, working hard to look like the first person.

Same school day. Four different nervous systems, each doing something completely sensible for how it’s built.

This is Winnie Dunn’s Sensory Processing model, and it’s the frame underneath everything I’m building in the Neurodivergent Staffroom. Two axes.

How much sensory input your nervous system needs before it registers something (your threshold), and what you do once it does (passive, where you let it happen, or active, where you do something about it).

Cross those two axes and you get four navigation styles, not four types of person and not four diagnoses. Everyone has a tendency, and most people move around depending on the day, the room, the demand.

The Sensory Profile Compass

• Low registration. High threshold, passive response. You need more input to notice it’s there, and you don’t do much about the gap. You’re often the one still going strong at period six, the one who can run a fifth meeting of the week without visibly flagging. The cost sits in what you miss, your own fatigue included, because the signal has to get loud before you catch it, and by the time it does you’ve already run past empty.

• Sensation seeking. High threshold, active response. Same high bar for noticing, but instead of waiting, you go looking for more. You’re the one who volunteers for the excursion, the new initiative, the thing nobody else wants to run. The cost shows up in the sit-down PD session, the timetabled block with no movement built in, the paperwork that never seems to end.

• Sensory sensitivity. Low threshold, passive response. Everything lands, and lands early. You catch the tone shift in a classroom before anyone’s said a word, the flicker in the lights nobody else has registered, the undercurrent in a meeting that hasn’t surfaced yet. You don’t necessarily do anything about it, you just absorb it. The cost is volume. A changed timetable, a substitute period, overlapping conversations at recess duty, it adds up fast and quietly.

• Sensation avoiding. Low threshold, active response. You notice early too, but you act on it. You eat lunch in your classroom, not the staffroom. You know exactly which corridor to take to avoid the between-period crush. What looks like being closed off is often just good self-management. The cost is what gets missed by staying inside what’s safe and known.

None of these are the problem.

The problem is a school day built with only one of these four in mind, bells, fluorescent lighting, back to back periods, PD delivered sit-down and passive, all calibrated for the person who barely notices the room at all, because that’s the version that reads as “coping fine.” The other three are managing constantly, in a building designed around a six-hour student experience rather than the two hundred days a year an adult actually spends inside it, and most of that management is invisible, which is exactly why it gets mistaken for ease.

This is the frame the whole sensory profiling system sits on. Not a diagnosis, not a deficit, just an honest map of how different nervous systems are actually navigating the same space, and what each one needs to do it well. It’s starting to take shape as a proper toolkit, a short profiling experience, a workshop, eventually a deck of cards that puts each quadrant in someone’s hands rather than just their head. Cards as a way of noticing what’s already there isn’t new ground for me, just applied here to a staffroom instead of a kitchen table.

More on the eight modalities that sit underneath each quadrant next week.

"Four different ways of navigating the same room. The room was only ever built for one of them."

~ Pip

When a neurodivergent staff member is struggling, most schools respond well.

A conversation. A mentor. A coaching referral. A PD recommendation. A shift of classes or roles. A nudge toward counselling or an EAPs session.

The intent is genuine. The care is real.

And almost none of it reaches the thing.

Not because the support is wrong. Because the question underneath it is.

Every one of those responses answers the same question: how does this person adapt to our environment? It’s a personal question. It produces personal answers. And it leaves the environment completely untouched.

The staffroom stays open-plan. The bells still fire eight times a day. The 3.30 meeting still happens when cognitive reserves are gone. Communication stays ambiguous. The sensory load keeps accumulating – quietly, in the people absorbing it.

The individual gets support. The conditions stay fixed. Six months later, the same conversation happens again. Same school. Same role. Sometimes the same person. Sometimes a different one.

This isn’t a criticism of leaders who respond this way. It’s a description of what happens when the question is too small for the problem.

How does this person adapt? can only ever produce personal answers. It can’t see the conditions because it isn’t looking at them.

A different question produces different answers.

What does this environment need to be for the people who work here?

That question looks at different things. Not capacity to cope – conditions generating the load. Not how to support someone through an environment – whether the environment needs to change.

Weber et al. (2024) found that physical workplace adjustments produce meaningful improvements in wellbeing and performance for neurodivergent workers. Not adjustments to the person. To the conditions.

The environment is a design problem. Design problems have design solutions.

In a school that looks like: auditing where sensory load accumulates and what reduces it. Communication norms that don’t require constant inference. Meeting design that accounts for cognitive load, not just agenda items. Transition buffers. Recovery space that exists for staff, not just students. A staffroom that functions as a rest point rather than a social obligation.

None of it radical. None of it expensive. All of it requiring a different starting question.

The shift matters for neurodivergent staff because the personal response – however well-delivered – still places the adaptation burden on the person least resourced to carry it. They already know how to adapt. They’ve been doing it for years.

It matters for school leaders because the personal response doesn’t hold. Schools that keep losing good ND staff aren’t failing to support them personally. They’re failing to ask

A conversation. A mentor. A coaching referral. A PD recommendation. A shift of classes or roles. A nudge toward counselling or an EAP.

The intent is genuine. The care is real.

And almost none of it reaches the thing.

Not because the support is wrong. Because the question underneath it is.

Every one of those responses answers the same question: how does this person adapt to our environment? It’s a personal question. It produces personal answers. And it leaves the environment completely untouched.

The staffroom stays open-plan. The bells still fire eight times a day. The 3.30 meeting still happens when cognitive reserves are gone. Communication stays ambiguous. The sensory load keeps accumulating – quietly, in the people absorbing it.

The individual gets support. The conditions stay fixed. Six months later, the same conversation happens again. Same school. Same role. Sometimes the same person. Sometimes a different one.

This isn’t a criticism of leaders who respond this way. It’s a description of what happens when the question is too small for the problem.

How does this person adapt? can only ever produce personal answers. It can’t see the conditions because it isn’t looking at them.

A different question produces different answers.

What does this environment need to be for the people who work here?

That question looks at different things. Not capacity to cope – conditions generating the load. Not how to support someone through an environment – whether the environment needs to change.

Weber et al. (2024) found that physical workplace adjustments produce meaningful improvements in wellbeing and performance for neurodivergent workers. Not adjustments to the person. To the conditions.

The environment is a design problem. Design problems have design solutions.

In a school that looks like: auditing where sensory load accumulates and what reduces it. Communication norms that don’t require constant inference. Meeting design that accounts for cognitive load, not just agenda items. Transition buffers. Recovery space that exists for staff, not just students. A staffroom that functions as a rest point rather than a social obligation.

None of it radical. None of it expensive. All of it requiring a different starting question.

The shift matters for neurodivergent staff because the personal response – however well-delivered – still places the adaptation burden on the person least resourced to carry it. They already know how to adapt. They’ve been doing it for years.

It matters for school leaders because the personal response doesn’t hold. Schools that keep losing good ND staff aren’t failing to support them personally. They’re failing to ask the right question about the place those staff are working in.

Better environments don’t just help neurodivergent staff. They lift conditions for everyone in the building.

This is what Pattern & Thread works on in its ‘The Neurodivergent Staffroom’ focus area. .

The workshop gives schools their first real picture – what the staff profile looks like, where load concentrates, what a different design brief might address. The systems work turns that into change.

The question is available to any school willing to ask it.

What does this environment need to be for the people who work here?

That’s where it starts.

patternandthread.com.au

School leader – if this landed, reach out. Not a pitch. A conversation about what you’re seeing.

Neurodivergent educator – the next piece goes into what a different design brief actually produces.

Every design decision in a school was made with students in mind.

The lighting. The acoustics. The rhythm of the day. The way spaces open onto each other. The bells. The timetable. The assumption that social intensity is temporary, that noise is manageable, that the environment is a backdrop you move through rather than a place you inhabit.

All of it calibrated for people who arrive at 8.45 and leave at 3.15.

Schools were built for visitors. Some of us live here.

The average student spends around 1,000 hours a year in a school building. The average teacher spends closer to 1,400 -- and carries the residue of it home. Two hundred days. The same corridors, the same staffroom, the same sensory conditions. Not passing through. Residing.

When the environment was designed without residents in mind, the cost of staying in it falls entirely on the people who do.

For neurodivergent staff, that cost is structural. Not incidental, not occasional -- baked into the conditions of the job. The open-plan staffroom that offers no recovery space. The bells that punctuate the nervous system eight times a day. The meeting at 3.30 when cognitive reserves are already spent. The ambient unpredictability of a building full of children, where the sensory load doesn’t reduce between lessons -- it just changes shape.

None of this was designed to be hard. It was designed for someone else.

Spiegler et al. (2025) found that workplace culture -- not just workload -- is a primary driver of belonging and exclusion for autistic educators. The physical and social environment shapes whether a person can bring their actual capacity to work, or whether they spend it managing the environment first.

If the environment is the problem, adjusting the individual is the wrong intervention.

This is where most school approaches to neurodivergent staff stall. The response is almost always personal -- a conversation with HR, a reasonable adjustment form, a suggestion to try mindfulness. The design of the school day, the staffroom, the meeting culture, the communication norms -- those stay fixed. The person is expected to adapt to conditions that were never built for them and find a way to perform fully anyway.

The adjustment burden sits entirely with the individual. The institution remains unchanged.

A systems approach asks a different question. Not “how does this person adapt to our environment” but “what does our environment need to be for the people who spend their working lives in it.”

That question changes what you look at. It changes what you audit, what you redesign, what you protect. It moves the work from pastoral care to design practice.

This is the work Pattern & Thread is built to do.

The Neurodivergent Staffroom workshop is a starting point -- a session that gives staff a shared language for their own sensory and cognitive profiles, and gives schools their first real picture of the aggregate experience in the building. What it surfaces often surprises leadership. Not because the experiences are new, but because nobody has asked about them at scale before.

From there, the work can go deeper. A systems engagement that audits the ambient conditions -- communication norms, physical environment, meeting design, policy language -- against what the staff profile actually needs. Not a wellbeing program. A design audit.

Or it can go inward. One-on-one work with individual educators who want to understand their own profile, name what it costs them, and build practice that fits how they actually work.

Three entry points. One argument underneath all of them: schools that work for neurodivergent staff work better for everyone in them.

If you’re a school leader reading this and something in it landed -- that’s worth a conversation. Not a sales call. A conversation about what you’re seeing in your staff and whether a different design brief might help.

If you’re a neurodivergent educator and this is just your life, named: the workshop is open for individuals too. And there’s more coming.

patternandthread.com.au

You arrive before the others.

Not because you’re more committed. Because you need the building to yourself for a bit. Because small talk in the corridor before 8am costs something, and you’d rather spend that on the students.

By the time the day officially starts, you’re already running.

The staff meeting is fine. You know how to do staff meetings. You follow the content, track the room, monitor your own face, manage whatever your hands are doing, and calculate when to speak and how much. Your colleague next to you is just... listening.

Same room. Different work.

Mid-morning. Corridor. Someone stops you for a quick chat. Friendly, unremarkable. You interpret their tone, calibrate your response, manage eye contact, find the exit. Thirty seconds. You won’t consciously remember it by lunch.

Your nervous system will.

An unclear directive lands. An email. A comment in passing. Something from leadership that could mean two different things. A colleague clarifies and moves on. You decode it, re-decode it, anticipate how your interpretation might be wrong, rehearse how to ask without making a fuss. Then you clarify. Then you move on.

Same outcome. Different cost.

By afternoon the sensory load has been accumulating for hours. Lights. Noise. Movement at the edges of your vision. The effort of staying regulated in a building that was never designed with your nervous system in mind.

You’re still teaching. Still planning. Still present.

You’re doing it on reserves.

End of day. Colleagues pack up and head out. You need a minute first. Not laziness. Not being unsocial. You need to process the day, release what you’ve been holding, recover enough to be a person again at home.

That’s not a personal failing. That’s arithmetic.

One thing to try

Start naming the tax as it happens. Not out loud. Just internally. That conversation cost something. That ambiguous email cost something. You don’t have to fix it or explain it to anyone. Just stop letting it disappear into a general fog of depletion that you then blame on yourself.

When you can see where the energy goes, you start making different choices. Protect your transition time. Build recovery in rather than hoping it turns up. Notice which moments are highest cost and whether anything around them is within your control.

You’re not managing your energy badly. You’re managing more of it than anyone around you can see.

And for school leaders

Your ND staff aren’t struggling because the work is too hard.

They’re doing the same job as everyone else. They’re also running continuous background processes that most workload models don’t account for and most school cultures don’t see.

The same care schools are learning to extend to neurodivergent students is owed to the adults in the building. Clear communication. Flexible meeting formats. Environments that don’t require constant sensory management. Permission to work in ways that actually fit.

This isn’t a wellbeing add-on. It’s a design problem. Schools have all the conditions to solve it -- if they decide it’s worth solving.

That’s the work Pattern & Thread is here to do. Launching July 2026. Follow along, or reach out if you want to start the conversation now.

patternandthread.com.au

If this landed, share it with someone who needs to read it.

Just stillness. And possibility.

At GVL, we’re in that delicious pause between our Autumn and Winter sessions. We don’t do terms. And I don’t do time off the “normal” way. I let myself sleep through the weekend, body heavy with release. Now, the sparks are flickering to life again.

So I sit at my desk. Crank open the laptop.
And begin the ritual.

Cleaning the desktop.
Reorganising files.
Clearing the downloads folder (which may or may not be a digital wasteland).
Tidying Notion.
Filing ChatGPT chats into projects. Deleting half-finished Midjourney experiments that have lost their magic.

It’s a digital house clean. A reset of the inner and outer systems. Once it’s done, I let myself go. Anywhere I want, anywhere inspiration takes me.

It’s a joy. A brain tickle. A kind of indulgence that term-time doesn’t allow.

Over the next two weeks, I’ll draw boundaries around myself—gentle ones that protect the reset. That help me do the bare minimum on the have-to-do’s and go all in on the want-to-explore’s. The boundaries that say: this time is mine. And yes, I might work, but it will be my kind of work.

I used to hide the work I did during holidays. People would say, “Aren’t you meant to be resting?” But they didn’t get it. Tinkering with new thinking, playing with broken systems, chasing creative rabbit holes—this is my rest.

This break? I’m diving into GPTs, AI agents, thinking about new systems, creating in MidJourney, building automations, and who knows what else. It’s meandering. Wandering. Following the sparks.

Observed quietly by Mabel the cat, of course. As all good adventures should be.

I’ve created something to help me keep pace.

Many of you ask how I manage to stay across the flood of AI, EdTech, and innovation trends—how I keep up while doing all the other things I do. The honest answer? I outsourced it to myself.

Well… sort of. I built a custom GPT. One that scouts the AI landscape, filters for relevance, and delivers exactly the kind of insights I actually want to read. It’s become a quiet partner in my workflow—curious, provocative, and tuned to the future of learning.

So I figured, why keep that to myself?

This is the first edition of what I hope will become a useful monthly drop: a snapshot of AI tools, agentic trends, and radical prompts tailored for educational leaders who want to stay ahead of the curve—without drowning in noise.

Scroll down to explore, and let me know what resonates.

Your feedback will shape where this goes next.

🔍 From Google’s AI classrooms to Socratic coding coaches, this week’s scouting report delivers agentic insights, fresh prompts, and wildcards shaping the future of learning.

🌱 AI Tools & Technologies for Education and Beyond

1. Google Gemini for Education

A new AI suite integrated into Google Workspace, enabling interactive diagrams, personalised quizzes, and multimodal content generation.

🔗 Read more

GVL Use Example: Create differentiated content for diverse learners using AI-powered visuals and quizzes.

• Simple Implementation: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

• Beginner Simplicity: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

• Educational Innovation: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ 🛠 Strategy: Embed in Google Classroom workflows to amplify planning and student engagement.

2. Codio Coach

An AI teaching assistant using the Socratic method to support computer science students—nudges understanding rather than giving answers.

🔗 Read more

GVL Use Example: Guide learners through code debugging with gentle, question-based prompting.

• Simple Implementation: ⭐⭐⭐☆☆

• Beginner Simplicity: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

• Educational Innovation: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 🛠 Strategy: Integrate into digital tech courses to promote independent reasoning.

3. Wayground (formerly Quizizz)

A reimagined formative assessment platform with adaptive learning paths and AI analytics.

🔗 Read more

GVL Use Example: Use adaptive quizzes to identify and respond to learning gaps in real time.

• Simple Implementation: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

• Beginner Simplicity: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

• Educational Innovation: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ 🛠 Strategy: Layer into existing diagnostic routines to deepen data-informed teaching.

4. Kira Learning

AI-powered teaching assistants for grading, lesson planning, and analysing student performance.

🔗 Read more

GVL Use Example: Automate administrative load to free educators for relational teaching.

• Simple Implementation: ⭐⭐⭐☆☆

• Beginner Simplicity: ⭐⭐⭐☆☆

• Educational Innovation: ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 🛠 Strategy: Trial in pilot settings to evaluate time saved vs. learning impact.

5. NotebookLM by Google

Now open to students under 18, this AI note-taking assistant summarises and synthesises research into guides and audio explainers.

🔗 Read more

GVL Use Example: Equip students for project-based learning with smarter synthesis tools.

• Simple Implementation: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

• Beginner Simplicity: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆

• Educational Innovation: ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ 🛠 Strategy: Introduce in inquiry units to support deep reading and synthesis.

This Week’s 5 Fresh ChatGPT Prompts for GVL

1. Design a community-based project integrating AI tools to address a local environmental issue, outlining objectives, stakeholders, and expected outcomes.

2. Create a professional development workshop agenda for educators on implementing AI-driven personalised learning in diverse classrooms.

3. Develop a policy brief advocating for ethical AI use in schools, considering data privacy, equity, and student agency.

4. Generate a series of interdisciplinary lesson plans that incorporate AI tools to enhance critical thinking and creativity.

5. Simulate a school board meeting discussing the adoption of AI technologies in the curriculum, presenting arguments for and against.

🎲 Wildcards & Emerging Uses (Non-Education)

1. AI Mentor for Business Leaders

Decidr and Growth Faculty’s new AI platform offers 24/7 leadership mentoring and strategic support.

🧠 Unique Angle: AI trained on leadership frameworks rather than general language models.

🔗 More here

2. AI & Workforce Redeployment

Salesforce forecasts 23% of global jobs will be redeployed due to AI—not lost but radically reshaped.

🧠 Unique Angle: Workforce shift as design challenge, not just job loss crisis.

🔗 More here

3. OpenAI vs Anthropic in Higher Ed

Two AI giants race to embed themselves in tertiary institutions as next-gen educational copilots.

🧠 Unique Angle: Competing visions of “AI as university tutor” are now going mainstream.

🔗 More here

🧭 Agentic AI: Tools, Trends & Step-by-Step Guide

ChatGPT with Actions

• What it does: Custom GPTs that perform multi-step tasks like research, summarisation, emailing, and more.

• Sample Use: Create an agent that auto-generates parent newsletters by scanning recent class updates.

• Provocation: What’s one leadership task you could outsource to a capable digital teammate?

🚀 How to Start:

1. Go to ChatGPT (Pro) and click “Explore GPTs”.

2. Click “Create” and define your agent’s role (e.g., “Create weekly summaries for my learning community”).

3. Enable tools like Browsing, Code Interpreter, or File Upload as needed.

4. Test with real inputs and refine your prompt as you iterate.

Not sure if this is useful for anyone else, but this is how I learn.

You’ll probably notice that my GPT has a distinct flavour of GVL running through it—Global Village Learning is the context I’m always thinking in. It helps me place new tools, prompts, and trends not just in theory, but in the everyday reality of a learning community.

If what’s here doesn’t quite work for yours, adapt it. Remix it. Make it make sense where you are.

Anyway—that’s my AI learning for this month.

What’s yours?

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