Tips for Teachers: How to Help Students With ADHD Do Better in Your Classroom

Thank you to all of our professional educators who are dedicated to our children! We know how difficult it can be working with children with ADHD, so here are your teacher’s tips for the week, brought to you by the ADHD Information Library and ADDinSchool.com. This is a sample of over 500 classroom interventions for use at http://www.ADDinSchool.com. Here are some tips to improve the consistency of performance for students with ADHD: Computer games, art media and action-based play (sports or other physical activity), construction games, and activities outside of the school setting they can be effective. Ask your student what they would like to win. Your student is the best source to identify the reward. Rewards must be changed frequently to maintain their “power of novelty”. An effective system for immediate reinforcement and highly stimulating rewards is a “points system.” Students earn points for the achievement of: 1) reaching pre-set goals that have been discussed and agreed upon by the student, teacher, and parent, and 2) any worthwhile activity or behavior that occurs spontaneously during the school day. Point values ​​are assigned to various tasks/behaviors. Teachers have the flexibility to increase point values ​​or give a point value to any assignment/activity. Points are accumulated and “redeemed” in a rewards menu. Points can be added on an ongoing basis for a running total kept with the teacher/student. This menu can be a hierarchy of reward activities, such as extra computer or playground time, to activities outside of school, such as lunch or bowling, for an accumulation of big points. The student is in charge of when to “spend” her points. This system is designed to improve the delayed gratification of students. It is important in any behavior system that your student finds success early in order to “buy in” to the program. One of the characteristics of attention problems is the variability of work performance between settings, tasks and over time. Instead of taking high performance on some tasks as an indicator that low performance on other tasks is due to low motivation and will, it is important to understand this as the nature of attention problems. Your student will do better on tasks that they find inherently interesting and challenging. It tends to worsen tasks that require sustained attention and are more mundane. Your student may have difficulty with assignments that require complex problem-solving strategies. Difficulty with “executive processes” (strategies used to organize and control thought and action) continues. She may tend to persist in using strategies that have proven to be ineffective. Although your student may seem expansive in her use of oral language, she may be limited in producing ideas in written form. Tasks that require extensive fine motor skills are difficult. If possible, seat one sheet at a time. This will prevent your student from feeling overwhelmed. This is also a useful technique to test it.

Identifying your student’s goals with your participation is effective. Goals should start by being simple and easy to understand. Two or three goals are enough to start any goal-achieving intervention. The criteria for success (or for earning points) should be simple and clear. Successful achievement of the goal early in the process is critical. Ask your student to generate possible target areas or choose from a menu the teacher has created. The greater the role you have in identifying goals, the greater the investment you will have to achieve them. Have someone actively supervise your student during tests, especially multiple choice, complete “bubble” tests. You may get sidetracked and fill in the wrong places or get so frustrated that you might respond randomly to just complete the quiz. Emphasize that part of the work routine is to “check your work.” Students tend to complete work and turn it in without checking. Give the student some instructions on how to check her work and practice it with him. On assignments that require research reports and creative writing, have the student dictate the words to someone instead of typing them. The student can then copy the words using the word processor. This technique will produce higher performance on tasks that require expressive written language skills by removing the written component. Hopefully these will help the ADHD students in your classroom be more successful. You can learn more about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder at the ADHD Information Library.