The ND Teacher’s Summer Recovery Series: Welcome to Week 1 - Establishing a Baseline

When was the last time you felt genuinely like yourself? Not performing okay, not functioning well enough that nobody noticed, but actually, recognizably, comfortably yourself? If that question takes longer to answer than you expected, you're in exactly the right place.

You made it to summer. And if you're a neurodivergent educator, you already know that "made it" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Making it doesn't always mean arriving restored. Sometimes it just means arriving. Depleted, masked-out, and running on the last reserves of a nervous system that has been giving everything it has since August. This summer we're doing something different. We're starting by getting honest about where you actually are — not where you think you should be, and not where you were before the school year took what it took.

Week 1 of the ND Teacher's Summer Recovery Series is about establishing your baseline. And it starts with one question: where are you right now?

The Continuum

This series works with a four-state nervous system continuum — Regulated, Overwhelm, Burnout, and Shutdown. These aren't clinical diagnoses. They're descriptive markers. Each has a recognizable signature, each is meaningfully distinct from the others, and each points toward what it needs. Before we build any strategies or practices, we need to know where we're starting. That's not a warm-up . It’s the work.

The Data Instruments

This week's download includes two self-reflection instruments built specifically for ND teachers:

The Snapshot Screener — four items, one per domain, completed in under five minutes. Designed to give you a quick continuum placement and to be repeated weekly throughout the series so you can watch yourself move over time.

The Full Inventory — twenty items across four domains, approximately 15-20 minutes. A comprehensive baseline picture you'll compare against your Week 8 results at the end of the summer.

Both tools produce a domain profile. This profile is a visual picture of where your nervous system is carrying the most weight right now. It's the kind of data a single score can't capture, and it will become one of the most useful reference points you have as the series unfolds.

This week also includes:

• a nervous system reset guided activity: a structured, ND-friendly practice for observing your own thought patterns and generating qualitative data about your baseline mental restlessness.

• four open journaling pages for whatever needs space on a page this week.

Ready to Begin?

This PDF is text-to-speech enabled — if you'd prefer to listen rather than read, find accessibility instructions by visiting www.ComprehensiveLiteracySolutions.com/accessibility.

If you'd like a suggested day-by-day path through the Week 1 content, I’ve created a suggested progression as a guide. You can find it by visiting www.ComprehensiveLiteracySolutions.com/guide. 

Download Week 1 using the link below, find a comfortable spot, and begin wherever your capacity is today.

This is only Week 1. There is nowhere you need to be except honest.