For a student with attention deficit hyperactive disorder (ADHD), a teacher’s plan for best practices should include behavioral and cognitive approaches that target the learner’s IEP goals and help to ensure a positive experience in the classroom. Students with ADHD are identified as learning disabled because of “deficits in the acquisition of specific academic skills” in their overall ability to learn in traditional ways (Clarfield & Stoner, 2005, p. 246). To help these students overcome the challenges associated with their learning disorder, Pfiffner, Barkley and DuPaul (2006) point out that teachers should consider alternative approaches to instruction—namely: “school-based interventions should include both proactive and reactive strategies to maximize behavior change” (p. 547). Thus, the plan for best practices should be focused on employing proactive and reactive strategies to facilitate the student’s acquisition of knowledge and maintain discipline and effective management of the classroom (Pfiffner et al., 2006). This paper will discuss these management techniques along with appropriate instruction techniques that can be implemented to assist the ADHD learner and how teachers can provide emotional support and use effective assessments.For discipline and management, teachers can adopt proactive and reactive strategies. Proactive strategies involve approaches such the modification of instruction or providing a more suitable classroom...
By reducing the amount of stress that the student might otherwise encounter, the teacher can clear the pathways to education in a proactive manner. For ADHD children, stressors can come from peers, from instruction methods that do not hold their attention or engage them effectively, or from the environment in which the child is situated. Using appropriate instruction methods in which the child is supported in focusing on aspects of the lesson that are of interest and ensuring that these are understood fully before moving on to a separate area of instruction can be facilitative, for example (Pfiffner et al., 2006). Proactive strategies can also help the teacher to provide emotional support for the student: one example is to allow the student to spread out in a designated section of the classroom so that the child is more comfortable and less inclined to distractions from peers, which can lead to emotional stress and destabilization. The more focused the child is, the more emotionally stable he or she will be.
Reactive strategies focus more on showing the student that there are consequences for “following a target behavior” (Pfiffner et al., 2006, p. 550). The teacher should implement positive reinforcement to support the student’s behavioral goals and to support this initiative, the teacher may include “the use of peers, parents, or computers to deliver classroom interventions” (Pfiffner et al., 2006,…
