“Thrive” is one of the most talked about words in learner-centered education. We want young people to thrive. We build environments where they can thrive. We assess whether our programs help them thrive.
It’s a word worth using. But it’s a word that can be a little vague.
At Understood.org, a nonprofit focused on supporting neurodivergent people on their path to thriving, we kept bumping into a question we couldn’t answer well. What does thriving actually mean? And how do we know if a person is on the path to thriving?
That question led us to build a model. We’re sharing it here as an invitation to further develop it together.
Thriving isn’t all-or-nothing
Thriving means growing and doing well in a way that fits your own needs, goals, and values.
That definition asks us to consider the whole person. It includes someone’s physical, psychological, and social development. It also accounts for the circumstances around them, which shape how they navigate everyday life.
So thriving can look different from one moment to the next. In practice, it sounds like this: “In this situation, with these supports, I’m making progress. In another situation, I might not be.”
Picture a student who learns a strategy for joining social conversations with peers and uses it at a birthday party. That’s thriving, right then. The same strategy might not carry over to a group project on Monday. That isn’t failure. That’s context.
We wanted our model of thriving to be multidimensional, because there’s more than one way to grow.
A few other everyday moments:
- A student with ADHD tries a new way to stay organized and gets through the week with less stress.
- A student who never speaks in class gets to submit questions in writing, and it turns out they have plenty to ask.
- An educator with dyslexia asks for a tool at work and, as a result, finds the job easier to do.
- A parent learns something new about their child’s diagnosis and feels more confident offering support.
Once we treat thriving as situational and changeable, something useful happens. It becomes possible to notice thriving. And what we can notice, we can design for.
Five places where growth shows up
When developing our model of thriving, we wanted a model that was grounded in research, shaped by the lived experiences of neurodivergent people, and practical enough to guide everyday design. We also wanted it to be multidimensional, because there’s more than one way to grow.
We developed “SPARC.” It describes five connected dimensions of thriving. Each one is shiftable, meaning a person can move within it. And each one moves through small, specific actions—the kind that can seem almost too ordinary to count.
- S — Self-concept: who I am. This is how you see yourself, built over years of feedback from yourself and others. It shifts when a person swaps “I’m bad at this” for “I’m still learning.”
- P — Purpose and meaning: why what I do matters. This is your sense of direction. It can be a large goal or something smaller, like a reason to start a hard task today.
- A — Autonomy: what I choose. This is agency, or making choices that reflect your own values and preferences. It grows in moments like pausing before reacting so you can pick your next step.
- R — Relationships: who I’m connected to. Thriving doesn’t happen in isolation. Reaching out to a friend for support, or offering it, builds the belonging that makes other risks possible.
- C — Capacity: what I can do. These are skills, tools, and the “I can do this” feeling. Learning one new strategy, or getting slightly better at an old one, opens doors.
These five dimensions don’t operate separately. A shift in one can unlock another. Building capacity can lift self-concept. Feeling supported by others can make it easier to act on your own behalf. Finding meaning can keep someone going when progress stalls.
That’s a cascade. Small changes rarely stay small.
Change arrives in pieces, not breakthroughs
If SPARC describes what thriving looks like, then “behavior change” is how people get there. That term can sound clinical, so it’s worth saying plainly: we’re talking about small, intentional shifts in how someone thinks, feels, or acts.
Change is hard for anyone. But when we talk about changing behavior and making progress on thriving, we aren’t talking about dramatic, overnight transformations. It comes down to small behavior changes that add up to big change over time.
In practice, researchers describe change as a series of stages. People move from not yet seeing a need, to noticing one, to intending to act, to changing, to holding onto the change.
A learner might recognize a challenge long before they’re ready to do anything about it. Another might try something, stop, and come back to it months later. Every stage counts, and the path isn’t a straight line.
This has real consequences for how we design learning experiences. Telling someone to change rarely works. Creating openness to change tends to take hold when support meets three conditions:
- Meeting people where they already are.
- Feeling doable in the moment.
- Connecting to a challenge that’s real right now.
When those conditions are met, small actions build momentum. Confidence grows. Habits form. Over time, the shifts add up to behavior change.
What if we designed with and for communities?
Most tools are built for an imagined “average learner.” But that average doesn’t exist, and designing for it leaves out the people who most need something different.
We take another approach. We design with and for people who’ve been overlooked by traditional systems. That includes people who haven’t found much use in generic advice, and people who need support that reflects how they navigate the world.
“Nothing about us without us” is the working rule. If we’re designing for parents of neurodivergent children, parents of neurodivergent children help design it. If we’re designing for women with ADHD, women with ADHD help design it.
Here’s the part we’d offer to anyone building for learners: when something works for the people a system has underserved, it usually works better for everyone.
We lean on research-backed approaches, like cognitive behavioral techniques, behavioral activation, and self-determination theory. Then we evaluate it, because research-backed isn’t the same as effective.
For example, we ran a study with Torrens University Australia on how women with ADHD use podcasts. Every researcher on the team identifies as neurodivergent, and the study was built for accessibility from the start. We surveyed 424 listeners of two Understood shows, with 36 of them completing interviews or journals. Women with ADHD are diagnosed late, if they’re diagnosed at all, and many leave the appointment with a diagnosis and little else. No next steps. No actionable guidance. No follow-up plan. We wanted to know what they were finding in a podcast feed that the system hadn’t given them.
What they described maps onto SPARC dimension by dimension.
- Self-concept: 94 percent said listening had a positive impact on how they view themselves. And 73 percent said they no longer felt ashamed of their ADHD-related challenges.
- Purpose and meaning: 86% said podcasts gave them a sense of hope for their future. And 72 percent said listening to podcasts helped them find a sense of what makes their life meaningful.
- Autonomy: 95 percent said podcasts helped them understand how ADHD affects them, and that kind of understanding allowed them to make choices aligned with their needs.
- Relationships: 92 percent said that they felt connected to other women with ADHD
- Capacity: The women in the interviews kept returning to the practical, describing bite-size information and strategies they could use that day. And 85% believed that they could think of many ways to navigate ADHD-related challenges.
No one in that study pointed to a breakthrough. They described listening to episodes in the car or on a walk and trying small things, like mindfulness techniques, that day. Podcasts don’t replace clinical care. But for the women failed by the traditional health care system, podcasts are already there—accessible, familiar, and trusted.
Here’s the part we’d offer to anyone building for learners: when something works for the people a system has underserved, it usually works better for everyone. Curb cuts were built for wheelchair users. They also serve parents with strollers, travelers with luggage, and delivery workers.
Designing with and for a particular community isn’t a smaller effort. It requires more care, consideration, and collaboration, but the benefits can reach far beyond the project itself.
An open invitation
We share SPARC because naming something makes it possible to work with it. When we can describe thriving, we can notice it. When we can notice it, we can evaluate whether our efforts are effective. And when we can evaluate it, we can grow what works.
We don’t think this is finished just yet. A model built by one organization, drawing on one set of experiences, will have gaps that others can see clearly.
So here’s our question for this community: if you could name what thriving looks like for each learner you serve, what would you design differently?
If you’re wrestling with that question—in program design, in evaluation, or in a classroom—we’d welcome the conversation. Reach out to our team at evaluation@understood.org.
This blog was adapted from Understood.org’s original blog series about SPARC. You can find the original series here.
