I don’t just survive constraints. I need them. They empower me to do not just hard things but big things.

Example: for a graduate course challenging me to work within a constraint of my own choosing, I decided to rebuild a teacher training I had originally authored in D2L two years earlier — at the very beginning of my graduate program in learner experience, design — and capture the walkthrough in PechaKucha format. I went in expecting the video production to be the heavy lift. The original predated my Camtasia skills entirely, and I knew the rebuild would benefit from having since acquired them.

I was right about the need; I shaved off a third of the video’s length without losing a single syllable. I was wrong about the video needing most of my attention. The course I returned to had been built by someone who had not yet finished becoming who I am now. My thinking had changed enough that my words were no longer mine. The narrow aperture through which I had originally designed this experience had excluded its potential audience to all but classroom teachers serving student learners— despite the course, itself, building a rhetorical claim composed almost entirely of lived adult ADHD testimony including an original framework I coined from my own experience. The core argument, and the potential for application, had never actually been limited to classrooms. I had just written it that way because the problem directly in front of me at the time was my children’s teachers — and solving the immediate problem was what I knew how to do.

What I know how to do now is wider than that. I know because the constraint of synthesizing 25 years of demonstrated competencies into a single website has forced me to reckon with the single pattern therein— that I’ve executed dozens of organizational change management initiatives of my own creation within crushing constraints because the seemingly hidden solutions were too obvious to me and the stakes of not acting on them were too high—and ask myself if I, as someone with not a single organizational change management role on her resume, am ready to put on my big girl pants.

One of the disability community’s most consistent demands is that adults with disabilities stop being infantilized. I had built a course in which nearly every ADHD voice — including my own — belongs to an adult. But I had written every word with the narrow intent to train only one audience, teachers, because at the time, a couple of kids with my eyes were standing immediately in front of my aperture and I couldn’t see anything else.

Revising the course meant applying my own framework to my own design. I found much to do. Silent steps were everywhere: assumptions I had silently shifted onto learners, configurations I had left for them to figure out, framings that quietly excluded the audience the content had always been capable of serving. Eliminating them didn’t just improve the course.

It enacted the principle the course was built to teach.

I don’t know with certainty that starting from scratch would have produced a lesser result. But the pattern behind me suggests it. The constraint of the inadequate original — too narrow, too small, built by someone still early in her thinking — is what made the excellence of the revision possible. I had to work inside it before I could work past it.

Constraints, like disabilities, don’t obstruct design excellence. They produce it.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Experience the learning design as it now lives inside Rise. For an in-depth tour of the many perspective-based — not simply video editing—revisions this project required, explore the table below.👇 

Element	D2L (Original)	Rise (Revised) + Delta
Course tagline	This is an introductory course on the experience of trying to function with ADHD	“This is your learner on ADHD” — subject shifts from the condition to the person the facilitator is responsible for; audience widens from teachers to anyone who leads anyone
Anticipate — peer prompt	“Ask your neighbor(s), if available, what they expect to hear”	“Ask a colleague, if you’re in a synchronous experience” — ‘neighbor’ → ‘colleague’ completes the workplace reframe; modality condition named explicitly rather than hedged
Anticipate — reflection prompt	“Reflect on what you’ve heard. Share what you noticed, what stood out to you.”	“What did you notice?” — share prompt removed; single open question signals adult learner agency; trusts learner without repeating collaboration prompt
Anticipate — section label	No label on video resource	“Perspective-taking” — names the pedagogical move; standard OD/leadership development language extends the audience reframe
Explore — objectives	“become familiar with executive functions” / “discover how much they lean on students’ executive functioning”	“train for and evaluate only the performance they’re targeting” / “reduce how much their instruction silently depends on executive function” — awareness register → performance register; ‘students” → ‘their learners”
Explore — vocabulary	20+ decontextualized terms listed	Peer-reviewed taxonomy diagram (Diamond, 2013) with relationship architecture — list eliminated; same content as relationship map; the steps of ‘figure out what matters and how these connect’ removed
Silent Steps — authorship	No byline	“an original framework by Kristen Green” as subtitle — intellectual ownership asserted directly in the course; trademark claim in the byline rather than a footnote
Silent Steps — visual	Staircase from below, destination obscured by fog — ‘I can’t see where this leads’	Infinite recursive spiral from above — ‘look how many steps there actually are’; actual photograph by a paid photographer; reframes argument from mystery to magnitude
Silent Steps essay — language	“learning activity” / “well-sharpened back-up pencil or a freshly charged Chromebook” / “necessary learning materials”	“task at hand” / “full pen, a full battery, or a full briefing” / “what the task requires” — classroom-specific language → context-neutral; ‘full briefing’ extends framework explicitly to professional contexts
Silent Steps essay — pull quote	Phrase buried in body text	“left unspoken because there seemed to be no need” extracted as standalone visual block — description → indictment; the design failure named in isolation
Explore — Desmos framing	Axes explained in text before video; activity labeled as Desmos graph	Section header names the comedian clip; one-sentence instructional text; setup happens inside the video — pre-explanation eliminated; silent step removed: don’t explain what the learner is about to watch you explain
Play — We Do label	“Desmos graph / This is your breakfast on ADHD”	“Plotting Breakfast” as header + explicit bridge from I Do — transition between modeling and guided practice named; silent step of ‘figure out that we’re switching modes’ eliminated
Play — perspective shift	No equivalent	ADHD Simulator video added after We Do graphing — observer → experiencer sequence; learner graphs dysfunction from outside, then experiences it from inside
Play — scaffold	No equivalent	Pre-loaded Desmos template with Goal and Done plotted; learner adds derailment coordinates only — setup eliminated as learner responsibility; silent step of ‘configure the tool’ removed
Practice — You Do prompt	“a common classroom activity”	“a common task you routinely require from your people” — audience reframe completed at application level; framework explicitly portable to any organizational context
Practice — reflection/share	“Reflect on potential silent steps” / “share your reflections, offer, and receive help”	Same + “or even delete some of! — these (previously silent) steps” — deletion made explicit alongside accommodation; second half of the framework’s prescription appears in the course itself
Practice — cognitive accommodation	“Trying” (muted background play during assessment if synchronous) — buried label	Bolded pull-block: “Doing this live? Hit play and mute the sound…” + “Definitely worth a rewatch later as well” — accommodation treated as independent value; dignity encoded in the closing line