Saturday, January 13, 2018

There's a way out of this (Edie Brickell)

Photo by Hamza El-Falah on Unsplash
Attention. Spans. 

Mine is lousy. I flit like a fantail from idea to idea. 

However, I'm not anywhere near the severe end of the attention deficit hyperactivity (ADHD) spectrum and my failures as a school student are not blamed on my short attention span. 

It's just that my boredom threshold is comparatively low. And I didn't think this is a bad thing. I don't see it as a problem to be solved.

All these things come to mind as I embrace a new timetable this year. I wonder how I would cope with three long periods in a day, or a whole day in the learning centre.

Without some awareness of my issue and some careful chunking of my day, I suspect I'd be in trouble. Then problems ensue.

So, some advice for teachers that helps me with my attention span issues:

  • Establish good routines and habits
  • Build in breaks and movement as part of the routine
  • Establish positive relationship with me - acknowledge my challenges
  • Use socratic questionning skills
  • Offer choices - foster self-directed learning (and I need routines and structure for this too)
  • Variation - use a variety of strategies - small groups, pairs, independent work
  • Encourage practical hands-on real world learning - have me write and act out stuff, record an assignment on video, make models, solve problems, do SOLEs
  • use UDL techniques to suit my strengths

Thanks. I feel better having shared that.

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