ADD-Friendly Classroom Management

Part II of a 3-part Series:

Recently I sat down with my daughter Signy Gephardt, who was diagnosed with ADHD in the first grade, and who graduated from college last May. I quizzed her about “best practices” from a student’s point of view, and she shared a few ideas that all teachers may want to consider, if they hope to help their more distractible students succeed.

This is Part Two of my notes from that discussion.

How does your class start an early day?

Keep it interesting!
If you have a really early class (8:30 counts as early), some incentive needs to be available as an added reason to show up and tune in: take up a collection for coffee and bagels, or something (decide as a class). However, don’t allow refreshment to be more of a distraction than a help!

If you have to take attendance, ask an engaging question—requiring responders to answer with comments about personal experiences or opinions, but with no “right or wrong” answer. Students answer the question as their check-in, for a much more interesting class-opening than listening to students rattle off “here!” repeatedly.

Keeping your classroom and your routines well-organized will help
all your students, especially those with ADD.

Organize for success
Do all you can to help students not to feel stupid. With their wandering attention spans, ADD students frequently do feel embarrassed when they are caught being distracted, and are unsure what you just asked. Consider this when you structure questions, and find ways to help them “find their place again” without losing face.

ADD and ADHD students have a lot of difficulty organizing themselves, because their minds are pulled in a million different directions all the time.

Structure your class routines to help students stay organized: use regular, predictable routines, explicitly teach age-appropriate organizing skills (sequential processes for younger students, how to use time management and scheduling tools as they grow older, etc.), and allow time for students to file notes, gather homework, make sure they turned things in, etc. As appropriate, encourage parents to help with similarly organized structures at home, or offer older students tips for keeping themselves organized.

The teacher in the kimono-looking Yukata, presenting a PowerPoint to his class, is
Martin Boyle. He was student-teaching under the supervision of Judy Flamik in 2010,
and talking about Japonisme to a high school printmaking class in Ohio.
He is doing many things "right" for any of his students with distraction issues.

Presentations that hold attention
Remembering their distractibility also is important when you structure presentations. If a presentation approach is too simple-minded, ADD students’ attention will quickly wander. These guys can double- or triple-track with ease, and they can’t abide boredom.

Making PowerPoints available at least 24 hours ahead of time to college students, to download, print, and bring to class, or just providing printouts of them to younger students, is extremely valuable. Students can make handwritten notes on the printouts, and they’ll be sure of having all the information they need.

Taking notes on a computer may be a good focusing tool--or it
may open a world of distractions. Handwritten notes also may
be a good idea, or create problems.

Computers: good and bad
Computers are an extremely mixed blessing. They are a powerful tool and an indispensible part of modern life—but the Internet is also a powerful distraction. Know for an absolute FACT  that if your classroom has Internet access and you do not have “master control” over your students’ computers, many students will be shifting from tab to tab during any class activity, and they’ll have several programs and websites open simultaneously.

There will almost always be some students who really do have only their notes up, and who are paying attention.  Others will only have notes up, but will be texting or playing a game on their phone (computers aren’t the only electronic distraction!), or just simply spacing out.

Taking notes on a keyboard may be a good focusing tool for some, depending on several factors—especially if they type well, and can type faster than they write by hand. Some students’ penmanship is so bad they can’t read their own handwriting, so the ability to type their note is extremely helpful.

Taking notes by hand can be a good “focusing approach” for many ADD students, however, especially for “fact-heavy” classes, as long as you allow them to doodle in the margins as a self-quieting aid.

In Part III, we'll examine Signy's advice for teachers of specific types of classes.

PHOTO CREDITS: The coffee-and-bagels photo is from the Castle Braid website. The organizational aids for the classroom are from the “Classroom Options” page of the Innovative Literacy website. The photo of Martin Boyle giving the PowerPoint presentation is from Boyle's blog, "Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mannequin," copyright 2010 by Martin Boyle, and is used with his permission. The photo of students taking notes—one with a computer, while another takes notes in handwriting—is from the blog Chron (Houston Chronicle online), specifically an article by Gina Carroll, on the relative merits of handwriting versus technology for note-taking.

ADD-Friendly Classroom Arrangements

Part I of a 3-part Series

What if ALL  your students had ADD or ADHD?

Students frequently are diagnosed with ADD or
ADHD when they are in early grades.

That may sound like a teacher’s worst nightmare—or, depending on the class, maybe you feel as if you already do have an all-ADD class!

In any case, I have felt for a long time that, whatever the reasons for recent trends of steadily-increasing diagnoses of ADD and ADHD, the fact that these students often have such a tough time in school should inspire all teachers to make their classrooms more ADD-adaptive.

I also think it is a serious mistake to label the condition a “disability,” (even if that label sells more drugs). It doesn’t have to be one. I’d rather think of it as a DIFFERENCE—a different learning style and way of perceiving the world that has characterized many of the great creative and entrepreneurial giants throughout the centuries.

Recently I sat down with my daughter Signy Gephardt, who was diagnosed with ADHD in the first grade, and who graduated from college in May. I quizzed her about “best practices” from a student’s point of view, and she shared a few ideas that all teachers may want to consider.

Suggestions for Classroom Arrangements:

A U-shaped arrangement puts
all students close to the teacher.

The ideal is to put every ADD student directly in front of the teacher—in front of his/her desk, or right in front of the podium. That would not be possible in an all-ADD class, but there are a couple of almost-as-good solutions.

A U-shaped desk arrangement around the teacher, not too many students "deep," is a good arrangement, unless you want to show a lot of PowerPoint-type presentations—in that case, a U-shape may hinder visibility for some.

A shallow rectangle arrangement, also with not too many students “deep,” works okay, and might be better for showing PowerPoints.

It also is helpful to have desks or chairs that can be re-arranged quickly and easily. As we will discuss in more detail next time, small-group discussions can be a helpful tool for keeping ADD students engaged. Reconfiguring the room to facilitate small groups can be a great distraction if the furniture is hard to move, however.

This visually stimulating classroom would be 
overwhelmingly distracting for many ADD/ADHD students.

Walls should either be blank (Signy’s warning: “BOR-rrrring!” but at least not a distraction), or covered with RELEVANT information. To be relevant, information should be focused on whatever the topic of this lesson may be. When it is relevant, it provides something for distracted minds to “bounce against” that is focused on the learning at hand and “bounces them back” on-topic.

Irrelevant information—which is any material that provides information about something other than the lesson at hand—distracts. The more attractively it is presented, the more powerfully it distracts!

In other words, all those inspirational posters about attitude, respect, or stick-to-itiveness, while meant to motivate students, are incredibly distracting to an ADD individual, unless the topic of your class work at the moment is attitude, respect, or stick-to-itiveness.

Point desks away from the windows, whenever possible.

IMAGE CREDITS: The photo of the classroom full of children is from the Buzzle website's page on "Hyperactive Children," an article on ADHD. The “U-shaped” classroom diagram came from an interesting discussion of Room Layout on the Teaching and Learning website. “The classroom is a gold mine of information," wrote the author of the cutline for the classroom with varied display of posters, etc. The photo is from the James Dinan School.

Are We on Digital Overload? Can We Protect our Kids?

Many people today watch the expanding role of digital media in our everyday life with—let’s be honest—mostly feelings of fear and dread. They focus wistfully upon things that we are losing or moving away from, in the changing cultural climate: things they value, such as silence, long stretches of uninterrupted time, or the act of reading a physical, bound, made-of-paper book.

And they worry—a lot.

While he's clearly not a young student, this man is juggling many different kinds of inputs. Is he on "overload?" Are our kids?

They worry that our digital gadgets put us on “overload,” and that this goes double for students. They feel that these devices keep kids (and all of us) too over-stimulated, that they load too much of the wrong kind of artificial light into our eyes, and that they keep us too sedentary on our ever-expanding buttocks.

They also live in terror that through social media their children will become entrapped by sexual predators and identity thieves, that they will become addicted to pornography from exposure too young, or that they will become addicted to games.

They worry that in the name of “multi-tasking,” we are doing more and more things superficially, distractedly, and just plain badly.

Online predators are a genuine threat to young Internet users.

Unfortunately, all of these things can and do cause problems. People who have concerns about digital media and the “information” or “services” they can deliver have many very valid points. There are a vast array of downfalls, dangers, and unintended results associated with digital media. And all of those fears/worries go double for the people who run schools. In most parts of the world, educators are operating in loco parentis legally. All sorts of bad results could rain down upon them if they fail to keep the students entrusted to their care safe from such threats.

How do they attempt to protect kids? Usually they clamp down, restrict access, and seek to control as much as possible how and when students use the Internet. They install blocking software, patrol computer labs relentlessly, and the best practitioners also talk seriously and frankly with students about the dangers that can lurk “out there.”

This is perfectly in keeping with a custodial role. But we need to think carefully about what we restrict and how we restrict it—or we can end up impeding the very education we are attempting to enhance.

Take as an example the story told by Susan Einhorn about her daughter and some of her classmates. They were preparing for an exchange-student trip to France. They developed friendships with their French “opposite numbers” through Facebook . . . but they couldn’t communicate with each other via Facebook at school, because the site was blocked.

This single example is hardly definitive, and it in no way diminishes the genuine dangers touched upon here. But it represents a dissenting opinion. As this series continues, I’d like to explore some of the ways that the use of digital media has become controversial, and some of the new and imaginative ways in which it can be used to deepen learning and enhance thinking skills.

IMAGE CREDITS: Many thanks to the University of Phoenix for the "distracted man" illustration, which they ran with an essay about digital distractions. The "online predator" illustration appears to have originated in Latvia(?), but I was unable to track down the artist's name. I first located the (unattributed) image in a post about tips for parents on the "Tech Welkin" blog.