Helping Students with ADHD Achieve Success: Tips for Teachers

Posted on 26/05/2011 | 0 Comments

ADHD impacts approximately 5-10% of children, which means as a teacher, 1 in 10 students may present with ADHD symptoms. It can seem like a handful with students squirming, drifting off in space, and disturbing others around them. But it doesn’t have to be.
 
As a teacher you are in a unique position to help the student learn habits at school that will help them be successful in their home and with them as they move through the education system.  Assisting young people with ADHD to learn how to feel and think better about themselves, and to identify and build on their strengths can be an important step in helping them control their symptoms of ADHD. Students with ADHD need to learn how to cope with daily problems and control their attention as well as their impulsivity, teachers and parents need to work together to help students achieve this success.
 
Tips for teachers:
 
·         Encourage youth to ‘stop and think’. This could take the form of counting to 3 before asking a question, or writing the question down and asking it at the proper time.
 
·         Create a token reward system – where emphasis is placed on the positive outcomes of behaving appropriately.
 
·         Help your students have a regular routine. Posting the routine, reminding them of homework at the end of the day, use organizers to help them keep their days straight.
 
·         Post rules in the classroom where they are easy to see and adhere to. Out of sight, is out of mind.
 
·         Helping kids who distract easily involves physical placement, increased movement, and breaking long work into shorter chunks.
 
·         Post the day’s schedule each day at the front of the room, and cross of items as they are done. Young people with impulse problems may gain a sense of control and feel calmer when they know what to expect.
 
·         Be brief when giving instructions. Breaking them into bite sized chunks by asking the student to do one step, and then tell them the next step once the first is completed, will help all students, but especially those with ADHD
 
·         Incorporate physicality into learning by giving students opportunities to act out stories, or sing songs. Providing them with outlets for their physical energy.
 
Students with ADHD are often easily distracted and can become that way even in mid-sentence. If you do not know what they are talking about, ask them to help you understand. When speaking with a student, it’s best to not assume you know what a young person is going through (unless you yourself have struggled with ADHD) and instead ask them to tell you what it’s like, and what they need from you to help them be successful.
 
Meet with parents and talk about their son/daughter’s treatment as well as tactics and techniques they use at home. If you can reinforce successful tactics at home and school, you create an increasingly familiar routine for the student. Rewards programs can extend beyond the classroom and into the home life if a parent and teacher can work closely.
 
Each student will be different, so developing a toolkit of strategies that you can use with each child will help you find the best fit for them. Make sure to talk to other teachers and parents, to share great ideas and success stories.
 
--Stan Kutcher, MD, FRCPC and Christina Carew, ABC

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Recent Comment

This is a great set of comments and rings very true. 

I totally agree that scientists (just like everyone else) have their biases and foibles.  After all, scientists are human beings too!  But science is different than scientists. 

The scientific method is the most objective frame that we have by which to evaluate and predict.  Science is not about finding truth.  It is only about being less wrong most of the time.  The scientific method (experimental design and mathematics) gives us the ability to test what we believe.  The scientific method is not used to prove something is correct, on the contrary, the scientific method is designed to prove that something is not correct!  It is designed to test what is called the “null hypothesis”.  It takes ideas that come out of left field (or wherever else they come from) and puts those ideas to an independent test.

t does not drive our beliefs.  It does however challenge our beliefs.  In that way it is self-correcting. Of course scientific inquiry and understanding lives within a wider social context.  That is one of the great features of science. 

But gravity is gravity, social context notwithstanding.  And thus it is nasty, brutish and long.  As Brecht said, (something like this) - the purpose of science is to save us from everlasting error.

By Christina Carew on May 11th

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