ADHD in the Classroom

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 context for the student with ADHD. 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, p. 550).

One example would be a teacher rewarding the ADHD learner with a new book, pencil, notebook or sticker for reaching a target behavior, such as learning quietly alone for an entire session. Computer assisted instruction (CAI) can be very effective in helping students with ADHD to focus on learn more effectively. As Mautone, DuPaul & Jitendra (2005) show, “students and teachers consider CAI to be an acceptable intervention for some students with ADHD who are having difficulty with mathematics” (p. 301).

Computer assisted instruction allows students with ADHD to focus on learning in a manner that is engaging for them, that holds their interest and that is uniquely tailored to their needs by way of the interactive nature of the experience. CAI facilitates the active learning process which helps the learner to more deeply acquire the knowledge that is being transferred over the course of the instruction.

Assessment methods for ADHD learners can be both formal and informal and can also be applied using computers, especially if the computer instruction method proves effective for the child. Assessments can be formally distributed using software on the computer (tests are typically included in educational software for learners using CAI). Assessments can also be informal and consist of direct observation of the learner by the teacher. Either of these two examples can be effective ways for teachers to measure the extent to which students with ADHD are meeting cognitive targets.

In conclusion, students with ADHD can be supported by non-traditional methods of instruction, such as computer-assisted instruction, as well as by proactive and reactive strategies that can help both the student and the teacher in terms of management and discipline of the emotions. The more that a student with ADHD is provided a safer context for learning in which stress is reduced to a minimum, the more favorable the outcomes will be for the learner.

In some examples, this can mean that the student can engage in learning on his or her own, focusing on aspects of the instruction that are most meaningful before moving on to another area of.