Stepping away from sitting still: effective teaching strategies for ADHD students

Educators constantly make great strides progress to reach the needs of their students. However, children with Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are a big percentage of students who have been disregarded as malfunctioning cogs in our forever complicating educational system. For a long time, parents, physicians and educators agreed that the best possible treatment for these children -some as young as three years old- was prescription stimuli to assist in regulating behavior and staying on task. Medicating children with these “treatments” is still common practice, but research has shifted focus in a different direction. Today, many psychologists, teachers and cautious parents are looking to alternative teaching pedagogies to help facilitate learning and behavior for students with ADHD instead of medication. Research shows that medication for this neuro condition is ineffective and mislead, but research based interventions -such as Integrated Dynamic Representations for math, reading motivation, and positive overall class moral- continue to be extremely beneficial, not only for students learning with ADHD, but for the entire classroom. The pedagogies in this research are examples of what teachers implement to create safe, constructive learning environments for all students. In order to start eliminating negative connotations around ADHD, the neutrally-connotated term, “Neurodiversity;” is used as a descriptor in place of common phrases such as “disability”. With this benevolent change of philosophy in mind, this study sets out to answer two questions: (1)What pedagogies are teachers using today for these students? (2) What should be done to decrease the use of dangerous, unnecessary stimuli? Research and information presented is primarily a review of literature supplemented by interviews and observations in the San Francisco Bay Area