How Ezra Reimer Built a Classroom Where Neurodivergence Thrives

When Ezra Reimer left a 15-year career in graphic design and branding at Red River College to become a teacher, he expected the challenge of a new profession. What he didn’t expect was how difficult the transition would feel, not because of the students, but because of the gaps in his own working style. It wasn’t until a psychologist suggested he be tested for ADHD that the missing piece clicked into place. Reimer was diagnosed in his thirties, and suddenly the struggle made sense.

“I had come from an environment that was unconsciously built around supporting my neurodivergence,” he explains. At Red River, he was surrounded by systems that filtered distractions, streamlined communication, and allowed him to focus solely on creative work. He had a manager who acted like a “traffic controller” and managed requests, phone calls, and all the administrative aspects of design.

Teaching, by contrast, was the opposite – frequent interruptions, endless organizational tasks, and an assessment process that was both time consuming and frustrating. “I kept trying new systems and watching them fail,” he says. “I’d think, ‘Oh, I’ll build a spreadsheet,’ or, ‘I’ll set up Google Classroom this way’.” Every effort that he tried just made things harder for himself and his students.

That four-year period of trial and error eventually led Reimer, now the Interactive Digital Media and Photography teacher at Niverville High School, to a guiding philosophy: If a system works for the ADHD brain, it will work for everyone. Instead of creating separate accommodations for individual students, he redesigned the structure of the entire class so that he and his neurotypical and neurodivergent students benefit equally.

He identified four key barriers for learning: organization, time management, feedback and accountability, and balancing big picture thinking with small details, and began rebuilding his course around them. To his surprise, the solution wasn’t more technology, but less.

Reimer realized that for many students, especially neurodivergent ones, the tablet or computer was a dopamine machine. “There are so many ways it can interrupt learning as opposed to support learning, because it’s got too many easy paths to where we don’t want to go. And, digital things are abstract, and digital pathways are longer than we think.” Computers meant too many steps, too many tabs, and too many ways to drift away from the task. “It was an entire series of executive functioning steps that have to be executed before you can even start your work.”

His answer was analog project management. Every student receives a printed project booklet outlining the entire course, broken into small, trackable milestones. Nothing lives in a digital inbox. Nothing gets lost in a Google Drive “sock pile.”

The classroom whiteboard echoes the same structure: every student’s name, every checkpoint, all visible at a glance. Students cross off progress boxes themselves, and Reimer checks in and signs off each step, keeping them accountable. No student can move on without direct feedback, and no one can quietly fall behind. And the organization and documentation along the way make final assessments much easier.

The result is a studio-style environment where students own the process of their learning. They build portfolio websites, design board games, create 3D-printed models, and in the extensive Grade 11 project, spend three months designing and programming a fully playable 2D video game from scratch.

The effect on both classroom culture and student output has been very positive. “My Grade 9 students are doing almost triple the work my first group ever did. It’s made a difference for all of us.” Reimer says that above all, he’s trying to build those softer skills with his class. “The technical is important but it’s really the project management stuff that serves them best long term. And I’m a better teacher because I’m more involved in their projects and I know exactly where they’re at.”

Students seem to know it too. They work outside of class, revisit old feedback, and push projects beyond ‘good enough’. Last year Reimer had a group of students who built a board game complete with an entire book of rules, and almost 30 individual 3D model game pieces. Another favorite project was a 2D video game about a pina colada, where you could switch between two characters – a pineapple and a coconut. “It was professionally done, with great coding and animation.”

Reimer recently presented his classroom model at a GAME MTS PD Day session, sharing templates and strategies with other teachers who are looking to remove learning barriers in their own classrooms. He says, for him, teaching is a lot more fun these days.

“I hate marking. I hate admin,” he says with a laugh. “So, if I’m not ramming my head against that all the time, it just makes it so much easier. I love teaching.”