K12LEADERS

Author: Melissa Hodgson

  • Three Things I Wish I Knew about ADHD While I Was Still Teaching

    Three Things I Wish I Knew about ADHD While I Was Still Teaching

    Three Things I Wish I Knew about ADHD While I Was Still Teaching

    October is ADHD Awareness Month and according to ADDitude Magazine, a leading resource on all things ADHD, just under 14% of adolescents are diagnosed with ADHD. So I did some quick math and figured out that out of the roughly 2,000 adolescents who have sat in my classrooms over my career, about 250 of them were diagnosed with ADHD. It wasn’t until I recently experienced for myself just how all-consuming ADHD is that I couldn’t help but worry that I had contributed to my students’ struggles out of a sheer misunderstanding of what ADHD is and how it affects individuals. I also couldn’t help but wonder how I would have changed my classroom culture and instruction if I knew then what I know now.

    This post could have easily been titled “Three Hundred Things I Wish I Knew…” but I’m fairly sure there’s a character limit, so here are my top three.

    1) Kids with ADHD have an interest-based nervous system. They physically cannot control their brain to focus on command because of their brain’s wiring NOT because of lack of desire, disrespect, or laziness.

    Perhaps my favorite informative quote I’ve come across while researching ADHD is this one: Attention deficit is a misnomer. ADHD doesn’t deplete attention. It scatters attention unevenly, and activates focus only under certain circumstances. How many times have teachers of students with ADHD thought or said “Well, if he can focus on video games or soccer practice, then he can focus in my class.” I admit to being guilty of having that thought more than once. How can a child who sits for hours building complicated Lego projects and following pages of step by step directions not be able to focus long enough to brush their teeth?!

    This inability to focus, the hallmark of ADHD symptoms, is due to an interest-based nervous system rather than the priority-based nervous system of neurotypical brains. Helping a student with an interest-based nervous system focus in class won’t happen with threats, but could happen by creating a competition around your content or allowing the student to explore an area of your content that they are genuinely interested in. The simple switch in understanding from “this child won’t focus” to “this child can’t focus right now” would have completely changed the way I interacted with my ADHD students.

    2) ADHD looks different in everyone.

    ADHD is complex. It manifests itself differently in every person so the inattentive student with their head on the desk and the hyperactive student doing laps around the classroom may both have an ADHD diagnosis. This is why it’s important to ask questions about the individual student’s symptoms and behaviors. Beyond reading the required accommodations on the 504 or intervention plan, I regrettably admit to never seeking out extra information as much as I could have and should have about the specific diagnosis and what works best for that particular kid. It turns out that something as simple as chewing gum can positively impact concentration. Had I known this was an effective, albeit lesser known, intervention while in the classroom, I would have doled out pieces of chewing gum like I did pencils. (Check your school’s policy on gum-chewing before you hand out gum to students! As an alternative, doodling has also been shown to improve concentration.)

    Kids know what works and what doesn’t work for them, even young ones. If teachers had one-on-one, frank conversations with their ADHD learners about what works best, they would not only learn how to better accommodate that child, but they’d also show the student that they cared which goes a loooong way with kids. The 504 plan and intervention plans are a good (and required) place to start, but conversations with individual students and parents may yield greater results and I only wish I had had more conversations when I had the chance.

    3) So many of the interventions and accommodations for ADHD would benefit ALL kids!

    About 6 million children in the US have an ADHD diagnosis, but what about those that go undiagnosed? Getting a medical diagnosis and certain treatments that require a medical diagnosis is a complicated, lengthy, expensive, time-consuming, often frustrating process. Many children will go undiagnosed because of this and therefore lose out on potentially life-changing academic and behavioral services. Pair this with the uptick in child and adolescent anxiety and depression, hormonal changes in adolescents, and the general drama that exists in school and you can start to see how all students could benefit from a widespread change in classroom culture and instruction.

    Knowing this while still in the classroom would have motivated me to change the layout of my classroom from pin-straight rows of desks to flexible seating, incorporating frequent brain and body breaks into daily routines instead of bell-to-bell instruction, allowing students to design their own learning experiences to focus on areas of the curriculum that most interested them instead of one size fits all…the list could go on and on.

    Students with ADHD have so much to offer: they are among the most creative, emotionally intelligent, thoughtful, introspective kids in your class, yet many struggle to thrive in the typical, overly-regimented environment that many schools rely on for safety and order. It’s time for schools and teachers to widen their thinking so that ALL students are able to thrive and that starts with learning more about ADHD.

  • Four Quick Fixes for Increased Engagement in Secondary History Classrooms

    Four Quick Fixes for Increased Engagement in Secondary History Classrooms

    In today’s world, one can argue that hi犀利士
    story is the most important subject area for the 21st century student to master. That’s easy for me to say and defend- I’ve taught and supervised history courses in New Jersey high schools for nearly two decades. I have a natural interest in learning more about these time periods, as do most other history teachers. However, that cannot be said for many high school students who are- quite literally- forced to sit through daily history instruction, which for many students may be the worst part of their school day. This reality saddens me and it is one that I am determined to reverse.

    I quite often hear adults remark that they hated history when they were in high school, but love it as adults. The past practice of lecture-based teaching and rote memorization assessment helped create a bad experience for history students (cue images the interactions between Jeff Spicoli and Mr. Hand). But, gratefully, times have changed, and we are seeing a shift in the way history is taught and assessed. Much of that shift is due to the focus on increasing student engagement. Engagement may be the key to permanently moving history to thumbs-up status and for students to finally realize the benefit of the content. It is now widely accepted that increased engagement positively impacts student achievement. Programs such as Brown University’s Choices Program and Stanford History Education Group’s Reading Like a Historian aim to shift the content to a more hands-on, skills-based approach in order to better engage students. However, incorporating these programs into your existing curriculum could be time-consuming or costly. So, I aim to give you four ways to immediately increase engagement in your secondary history classrooms with the end goal of making history as interesting to students as it is to their teachers.

    Quick Fix #1: Focus on the End Game

    History gains new content by the minute, yet the school year is finite. With this reality, teachers must decide which content is most important for their students to master state standards and leave the class with essential knowledge. This is difficult for many history teachers who may feel constantly rushed or that they are doing a disservice to their students by leaving key figures or events out of their instruction. I ask teachers who struggle with abridging content to ask themselves this question: Is this piece of information critical to my students’ understanding of the overall topic? Imagine a lesson on battles as part of a unit on World War II. One teacher has his students independently fill out a chart listing twenty major battles of the war, their dates, locations, and victors during a 45-minute class period. Let’s compare it to another teacher who, in the same amount of class time, gives the students a completed chart of the seven most significant battles of WWII and asks the students to work in pairs to investigate why these battles are considered most significant to the war’s outcome and to rank the battles from most to least significant. A simple switch in instruction, where the breadth of content was decreased, changed engagement entirely. While the first lesson exposed students to the names of twenty World War II battles, the second lesson required students to investigate, dialogue, reason, and debate. The students in the latter teacher’s class undoubtedly experienced a more engaging, hands-on lesson.

    To those teachers who are hesitant about abridging content, I urge you to try a different approach to content-heavy instruction. Decide what the most important details are- which details help meet your ultimate goal- and deliver them to the class, then offer students enrichment lessons. Post additional readings on your class website, hold an enrichment session after school for interested students, or keep a list of recommended readings on your classroom bulletin board.

    Quick Fix #2: Facilitate Frequent Class Discussions

    Using discussion as a method of instruction and assessment is an efficient use of class time. Discussions are a great way to engage students with content, assess for understanding, and improve speaking and listening skills. To use discussion as a method of instruction, give the students a reading, a set of documents, or short video to examine along with focus questions before the discussion begins. Student preparation around these focus questions is an important part of facilitating an effective class discussion.

    To those worried about students slacking off, dominating the discussion time, or the discussion going off-topic in a negative way, set rules and review them with the students before opening the discussion. Using a rubric, frequently reviewing rules for discussion, and using facilitation techniques will keep the discussion on track. Some teachers also find success in setting up small group discussions before facilitating a whole-class discussion. Just like most things in life, discussions will get better with practice. Your students will become more comfortable expressing their ideas and you will find it easier to facilitate discussion as they become a regular part of the class.

    Quick Fix #3: Incorporate Social-Emotional Learning into Lessons through Primary Source Analysis

    A great way to study the past and engage with the content while developing social-emotional skills is to examine primary sources. Primary sources give students firsthand accounts of the time period they are studying and help students to contextualize the events of the era. They help students realize that history is not just a story about the past, but that it is filled with real people who had feelings, dreams, and setbacks just like them. Primary sources help take these figures out of the history books and make them come alive while also helping students gain a sense of empathy for those figures of the past.

    What is more engaging for students learning about the Civil Rights Movement: reading pages from a textbook about the movement, or studying firsthand accounts from the people who actually lived through the movement paired with photographs from the era? Examining the photograph of Elizabeth Eckford integrating Central High School while Hazel Bryan scream at her and reading Elizabeth’s account of that day is a powerful teaching tool. Photographs are simple primary source with the ability to spark questions about the era, as well as about human behavior; students can contemplate not only “what” is happening in this picture, but “why” it is happening. Asking students to imagine how those teenagers pictured felt the moment that photograph was taken evokes not only a potent history lesson, but also a powerful life lesson. The goal of developing students’ social-emotional skills, in this case their sense of historical empathy, is to transfer that empathy to their everyday lives.

    Quick Fix #4: Connect the Past with the Present

    Just when you thought you could pare down your lesson on Populism, the 2016 Presidential Election happened! We all know the adage “history repeats itself,” and what a great time to bring this phrase into our classrooms. Ask students to decide if this phrase is, in fact, true by comparing current events with events of the past. This is a great technique to pair with the three previously suggested strategies. Craft a question that aligns with your end game, have students prepare their answer to the question using primary source evidence (provided by you or researched by the students themselves) from the past and present, and facilitate a class discussion where students discuss their findings. Connecting the past with the present helps students realize that history is alive.

    Teachers should feel empowered to take these suggestions and tailor them to fit their students’ needs. For educators who are hesitant about changing their instruction, I advise you to start small. Try one strategy and see how it works, and do not hesitate to ask your students or a colleague for feedback.

    You have about 180 tries to get it right!

  • Not Your Parents’ History Class

    Not Your Parents’ History Class

    Bueller? Bueller? The image of Ben Stein’s sleepy-headed, gum-popping history students in the 80’s classic Ferris Bueller’s Day Off is probably not far from the history class adults experienced in their own high schools across America during the last few decades of the 20th century. Given this, it is no surprise that parents of today’s teenagers may believe their child’s history class experience would mimic their own. However, the technology explosion, shifts in pedagogical approaches, changes in historical interpretation, and the increase in the number of students moving on to post-secondary education have caused twenty-first century history classrooms to look very different from years past. Here is a breakdown of the differences between their parents’ history class and the history class of today’s high schoolers.

    THEN: NO STATE STANDARDS
    NOW: STANDARDS-BASED INSTRUCTION

    Prior to the 1983 seminal and controversial report A Nation at Risk, standards were not, well, standard.  The State of New Jersey, where I spent twenty years of my career, had no academic learning standards until 1996, which resulted in content being left up to the schools. Content from classroom to classroom may have differed dramatically depending on the content preferences of teachers and interests of the students, especially in non-tested areas like Social Studies. The adoption of standards narrowed down the focus of history instruction to a set of standards that all schools and teachers were required to follow. This affected what was taught in the classroom and gave individual teachers a collective roadmap to follow when planning instruction and assessment.

    THEN: CONTENT-BASED CURRICULUM
    NOW: SKILLS-BASED CURRICULUM

    While parents’ history classes were primarily content-based, focusing largely on the recall of facts and retrieval of information, today’s history classes are skills-based, which focus more on the development of skills that will benefit students in college and career. These skills include reading, writing, speaking, and listening– more commonly known as literacy skills– as well as historical thinking skills. Today’s teachers utilize tools such as Webb’s Depth of Knowledge to create lessons and assessments that require students to apply a range of thinking skills, from basic recall to the synthesis of information from multiple sources. An outcome of this approach has been the incorporation of assessments that had historically been reserved for higher-level AP classes into all history classrooms. The recall writing that was common in classrooms of the past has now been replaced with analytical writing tasks, such as the DBQ (document-based question), which had historically been the hallmark of AP classes. Incorporating higher order thinking into all history classrooms has elevated instruction and assessment to better prepare students for life after high school.

    THEN: DATES AND NAMES
    NOW: HISTORICAL THINKING SKILLS

    Anyone who took a high school history class more than 20 years ago can probably recall asking the teacher “will we have to know dates?” And, the answer was most likely “Yes.” This method resulted in kids with great memories getting the A’s and kids with not-so-great memories struggling. In today’s classroom, teachers are more focused on teaching students historical thinking skills rather than simply a timeline of events. Historical thinking skills allow students to develop a more comprehensive understanding of historical themes. They help students analyze rather than simply describe historical events, explore multiple perspectives, and make connections between events past and present. The deliberate comparison of historical events to current events help students see the relevance of history to their lives today.

    THEN: ACCEPTING HISTORY AS A SET OF FACTS
    NOW: TEACHING HISTORICAL INQUIRY

    History instruction of the past largely consisted of a series of historical events presented to students one after the other. In the past, history students accepted the facts as presented by their teachers or history books and were assessed solely on their recall of the facts. The facts, often presented from a single perspective drawn exclusively from secondary sources, were the focus of the lessons. This method has changed in recent years. Today, historical events are presented and analyzed from multiple perspectives through primary sources in order to give students firsthand accounts of the event. Viewing a historical event from the perspective of different groups allows students to have a more nuanced understanding of the event and its consequences.

    A common approach to teaching and learning in today’s history classrooms is the inquiry model. Through this model, students investigate a historical question by utilizing the techniques used by historians to evaluate multiple perspectives and make claims supported by credible evidence. This model is used by teachers to explore perspectives on historical figures, such as Christopher Columbus. In classrooms of the past, certain historical figures were presented from a single perspective, leaving no room for students to deliberate on the legacy of those figures. In today’s classroom, legacy is one of those topics that is ripe for use with the inquiry model where students can examine multiple perspectives and evaluate claims and evidence to come to their own conclusions about the impact of historical figures and events.

    THEN: BOOK RESEARCH
    NOW: DIGITAL RESEARCH

    Anyone who went to school before the Internet remembers spending hours in a dusty library combing through books and feeding nickels into a copy machine. The Internet and digitization of information changed the entire research process, leading to the need to teach students digital research skills. In addition to teaching digital research skills, teachers today focus on equipping students with the skills needed to evaluate all sources for validity and credibility. The evaluation of sources, both digital and print, is a necessary historical research skill that adds to a student’s ability to form a more comprehensive understanding of history as well as a way to manage the overflow of misinformation that is present all around them.

    While many aspects of history education have changed over the past several decades, there are still constants. So, what hasn’t changed in history classrooms?

    Great teachers!
    Regardless of approach, pedagogy, instructional models and new research, great teachers have always existed. These are the teachers who make even the most mundane content come to life, the teachers who have classrooms full of engaged learners. They make connections with students, invest in their students’ well being inside and outside the classroom, and making learning easy. Great teachers have always existed and will always exist.

    Changing approaches to teaching history.
    With new research, the increased accessibility of information, and school districts’ commitment to professional learning, the approaches to teaching and learning – – in all subject areas- – will undoubtedly change as we creep further into the 21st century. While history teachers focus largely on events of the past, their strategies used to teach these events will continue to develop into the future.