Teacher Tech: The ADHD Stategies

Chris always showed remorse when he caused a problem.  And he caused a lot of problems.  That first day of school he looked up at me, pale eyes full of self-doubt, and asked me if he did OK on his first paper.  He hadn't.  Chris wasn’t timid or stupid, he just expected to disappoint the people he loved.  Chris was ADHD.

Despite Chris’s heart of gold, he could not control his attention problems or hyperactivity.  As a result, he entered my fifth grade fully expecting to be a bad boy, yet yearning to please.

After the first day, I realized I had made more behavior corrections for Chris than all other students combined.  By the end of the first week, he probably had many times the behavior corrections of all my other students.  This wasn’t sustainable, either for Chris or for me.

Talking with other teachers and reading up on the subject, I came up with five strategies to make sure Chris and I had a great year.

I’m going to talk about one of the strategies in this blog post and the other four in a future blog entry.

Strategy One: 5:1

My goal became to give Chris five positive affirmations for every correction he received. This strategy would become the most important and effective of anything Chris and I did to make his fifth grade year a good one. 

Since Chris was nearly powerless to control his impulsivity, I had to become creative to make sure he was constantly successful in other areas and try to figure out ways to lower the number of behavior corrections.  I also spent a great deal of time watching Chris to catch him being good.  It’s a powerful thing when a teacher is looking for positive in a student.

Put yourself in Chris’s place for a moment.  How would you feel if, in the course of a day,  your supervisor told you dozens of times that you were making mistakes, being rude or not paying attention?  It would wear on you, right?  Some teachers might be crushed with just one critical comment.  What could I do to make sure Chris received lots of affirmations? 

As often as Chris would interrupt someone, it would have been easy to think he didn’t care about others’ feelings.  In fact, the opposite was true.  When I made him the “super buddy” of Greg, the handicapped student, who came in for certain activities, Chris showed a degree of empathy and tenderness that brought confidence to both himself and Greg.  I could use time-helping-in-Greg’s-class as a reward for Chris.

I also put Chris in charge of our classroom fish tank.   I trained him in the secret arts of tank maintenance and fish care.  He became the fish boss, rising in social rank among his less-knowledgeable peers.  Keeping the feeding and maintenance schedule might have also made Chris more aware of dates and times.  Like many ADHD sufferers, Chris was horribly disorganized.  Also, fish bosses must  be out of their seat to check on the fish, so I didn't need to tell him to go back to his seat so often. 

Chris and I came up with codes for me to tell him he was doing well or if he needed to knock it off.  If I touched his paper, book or desk, it that meant I liked what I was seeing.  If I shook my head at him, he knew to stop doing something.  If I needed a student to model something, I tried to find was to use Chris as a demonstrator or helper.  This got him out of his seat and often out of trouble.

Finding out that he was a valued member of the class gave Chris a new confidence.  His classmates saw him as the loveable clown he had been in previous grades, but also as a successful and respected class member.  With his classmates providing some of the positive encounters for Chris, it boosted him even more.

Chris and I had our good days and bad.  Sometimes, he seemed to need 10 positives for every correction, other times, he got along great with the 5:1 ratio.  Overall, he and I developed a close working relationship built on trust and respect based on the 5:1 plan.  There were four other strategies that helped Chris and me to have a great year, one which came from a completely unexpected source.