‘Write Your Name’ Should NOT Take 20 Minutes. But Here We Are.
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An ADHD Expert Explained My Middle School Classroom
I teach an elective that spans 6-8th grades, and I participate in the “grade level” meetings for this age range with my teacher colleagues. One of the particular struggles of this age group is the “Work Pacing Gap” between the lowest and highest performers in the class.
On every single in-class task, I have students who follow directions, get right to work, and finish their assignments in the allotted time. During that same time period, another group of students has barely made it to writing their names on their papers. . . and that required coaxing. My colleagues and I have been commiserating all year because the tried-and-true methods (careful directions, nudging, frequent check-ins) don’t seem to be working with them.
Work Pacing Gap: the classroom phenomenon where students work at wildly different speeds on the same task — with some completing the assignment before others have even written their names. This gap affects classroom flow, transition timing, and teacher workload.
I was stumped and frustrated. Then, several weeks ago, I attended an excellent virtual conference about ADHD hosted by Pearson. The first session of the day lit up my mind with a bunch of new ideas for working with our middle schoolers. It was, quite literally, the best 45 minutes of PD I’ve had in 4 years. Just a warning – this is going to take me several newsletters to fully unpack, so you’d better subscribe if you want all my insights.
In the conference session, Beyond the Checklist: Building Independent Executive Functioning Skills in ADHD, Sarah Ward (co-founder of Cognitive Connections) discussed many of their principles for working with children with ADHD or any child struggling with executive functioning deficiencies.
I can’t share the Pearson conference session with you, but we found a similar session published on YouTube: Build Executive Function & Time Awareness in Students with Sarah Ward and Kristen Jacobsen | GPS
So, let’s dive into the basics. Students with strong executive function can see the end-product, envision the many steps along the way, and decide which parts to accomplish in the time they have. These students quickly get to work on an assignment and most likely finish it in the adequate time allotted for the activity. We could call this group in the Work Pace Gap the Early Finishers.
On the other hand, “waiting paralysis” keeps some students waiting for the perfect space, time, and ideas to start a project. These students struggle with awareness of time. We could call this group in the Work Pace Gap the Delayed Starters.
Executive function weaknesses are a core component of ADHD. What I immediately recognized was that it is not just the middle school kids diagnosed with ADHD who have this problem. Fully half my classes seem to be suffering from some kind of “waiting paralysis” in the face of assignments.
According to Ward and Jacobsen, students need help developing and extending their own “Time and Space Horizon” – how far they can see into the future, both time and space. The capacity to do this varies by age. By around age 11-12, students typically begin shifting from thinking in hours to thinking in days — but not all at the same pace. That’s under normal development. However, research is beginning to show that heavy use of fast-paced, instant-reward digital platforms is associated with shorter attention spans and weaker executive functioning. It’s early research, but the patterns in classrooms match what’s emerging in the science.
Our problem with middle schoolers runs deep. The 6th-8th graders I teach are immersed in a social world where they constantly play games and browse 15-second videos, receiving instant gratification on these platforms. Teachers know something is different. I suspect a strong correlation between the middle schoolers who can’t keep their devices shut and Delayed Starters on tasks. Compared to Roblox, there’s just too little reward between receiving the task and finishing it. The horizon is a distant 20 minutes, and the gap between blank and filled page is too great.
I’m curious about the connections between device-addiction and delayed starters, so I’m going to measure the correlation over this next week. I can use Socrait to track the number of times I have to warn students to close iPads or get back on task, then see if this data correlates with the list of unfinished or missing assignments. For those of you already using Socrait, you could try this too and let me know what you discover!
I’ve barely touched the surface of this topic and will say more about practical changes we’ve been making in middle school classrooms as a result of this ADHD session in a future newsletter. In the meantime, maybe catch up to me by watching Build Executive Function & Time Awareness in Students on YouTube?
Inbox Serotonin: Principal Prank
We have reached that point in the school year when everyone is tired and Thanksgiving is still more than a week away. What would you do if you were the principal and all the teachers texted in an absence on the same morning? Well, here’s what happened when teachers pranked their “very supportive” principal. I don’t know who wrote the excuses, but they sure were creative! Thanks to washington.elemen8 for this one.
Field Notes: You’ve been waiting for this one
I know there was something I needed to do today. What was it? Oh wait, let me check my Socrait Dashboard …
Since the beginning of Socrait, one of the top features teachers have asked for is a to-do list of all the things they remind themselves about in class. We are delighted to announce a new feature: Reminders!
Like all of our features, you don’t have to say or do anything special to activate a reminder. We’ve built the agents to look for anything you might want to be reminded about – from assignment changes to random tasks. Certainly, if there is something you DO want to go on a task list, just say something like:
“I need to remember to separate Nathan and Liam on the seating chart.”
“I’ll move the assignment deadline to Friday”
“I can’t forget to bring in gravel for the lab tomorrow”
We’ll turn your teacher’s voice into a nice list of to-dos – each associated with the proper class.
Socrait Tip: Loud classrooms? No Problem
Socrait is your classroom companion. It listens to you while you teach and gives you back your data after class, allowing your brain time to breathe during the day. After class, Socrait will draft your parent emails, create class summaries for absent students, help you remember where that class left off, and remember your spoken aloud to-dos.
On days when you know that the classroom will be noisy – days like simulations, labs, or project work, – make sure that you’ve got your phone pouch or a microphone on. As long as the mic is close to your mouth, Socrait will catch your teacher’s voice as you walk around the classroom and talk to students. Need a phone pouch?
About the author:
Dr. Maria Andersen has been an educator for 30 years in both Higher Ed and K-12 teaching a variety of subjects (math, chemistry, business, ELL, technology, pre-service teachers). She has given hundreds of workshops and keynotes about active learning, curriculum redesign, remote and online learning, effective use of technology, and using AI for teaching & learning. Andersen teaches middle schoolers at a charter school in Utah. She was also the CEO of Coursetune and is currently the CEO of Socrait.