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I picked this article because I eventually wanted to become certified in ESL. I think it was a great certification to have and a very useful one. The article talks about the mistakes that teachers make while working with ESL students.

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"Excited to Learn English" by Luke Mackin is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
"Teachers are so overwhelmed, they see an ELL kid as one more thing, rather than as someone who has something really powerful to contribute to the class." Listen now or read the transcript:
In Episode 1 of the Cult of Pedagogy Podcast, we meet Kim, a middle school ESL teacher. She talks about the complexities of teaching English-language learners, like the power imbalance that arises when the kids speak English but the parents don't, why ELL students won't look their teachers in the eye, and the well-intended mistake so many content area teachers make when working with a diverse population. She describes technology tools that improve language learning, instructional strategies that make a huge difference, and what she would do if she could design standardized testing for ELL students.

Language teachers, policymakers and anyone who serves an ELL population will learn a lot from this one. ♦

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Kim talks about the complexities of teaching English-language learners and the well-intended mistake so many teachers make when working with this population.

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This article held so much truth to it! It was a great read! The article talks about how 83% of teachers in the U.S. are white and nearly half the students are not.

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All links to this book are Amazon Affiliate links, which means I receive a small commission on any purchase you make during that Amazon visit at no extra cost to you.

A few years ago, when I worked with student teachers, there was one question on their Work Samples that stumped them every semester. It was in the Contextual Factors section, which asked them to describe the characteristics of their host school and discuss how these factors would influence their planning. Here was the question that almost always drew a blank: How will the ethnic/racial diversity of your students inform your instructional choices?

Some made a respectable attempt at this one - the language arts people talked about including multicultural texts, the social studies people said they would mention the historical contributions of people of color, and many said they would be sure to mix students up during group work or "look for tension" in classroom dynamics. They did try. But they hadn't received any formal training or done any reading on this topic. So even if they had a general sense that race and ethnicity might have an impact on their classroom, they had no idea what to do about it.

If I could go back now, I would give them Start Where You Are, But Don't Stay There. In this book, H. Richard Milner digs into the teacher-student dynamic through the lens of cultural diversity, identifying a set of best practices for teaching a culturally diverse population...even in schools that aren't very diverse.

It's not uncommon for people to believe that race is no longer an issue - in our country or in our classrooms. I mean, come on, the argument goes, We have a Black president now. To get this question off the table, let's consider these points:

A majority of respondents to a 2012 AP Poll expressed negative feelings toward both Black and Hispanic populations.

The achievement gap between White students and students of color has been well-documented.

Studies have shown that Black and Hispanic students are disproportionately given harsher discipline than their White counterparts for the same infractions.

In 2012, the National Center for Education Statistics reported that in 2010, students of color made up more than 45 percent of public school students, but 83 percent of public school teachers are White. While our student population grows more diverse, our teachers stay about the same.

If you're committed to the belief that race is irrelevant in 2014, you could probably argue around the significance of all these studies. If you're not - if personal experience or a nagging feeling or just being human tells you that race and other forms of diversity make a difference in the classroom - then this book will help you reach all of your students more effectively. Supported by research, using fascinating case studies of ten teachers working in culturally diverse settings, Milner has identified the mindsets and practices that are most often found in teachers who reach more students more effectively .

Those who work well with culturally diverse* populations tend to share certain mind-sets, or ways of viewing their students and the world. Among these mind-sets are:

A rejection of color-blindness. For some people, being "not a racist" means being "color-blind," claiming to not notice color or race in any situation, just "seeing people." There is a persistent belief that not noticing color means you only care about who the person is on the inside. Unfortunately, what color-blindness ultimately does is ignore the reality that people of other ethnicities experience the world differently. Teachers who do well in culturally diverse settings acknowledge that race does matter, that it is important to learn about the ways race has impacted their students, and that ignoring this reality can actually contribute to making it worse.

Taking the idea of meritocracy with a big grain of salt. The belief in a meritocracy - the idea that people's success is based solely on hard work and ability (in other words, merit) - can make teachers treat students who don't succeed as if their failures are purely the result of lack of hard work and ability. Teachers who reject this idea - who recognize that student success depends on a complex array of factors, many beyond their control - are better able to take more effective approaches with their students.

Recognizing cultural conflicts. Sometimes what teachers perceive as misbehavior is actually the result of a cultural misunderstanding. In many other countries, for example, students are trained to never look a teacher in the eye. When a teacher in a more Eurocentric classroom demands that a student look at her while she's reprimanding him, and that student resists, she may interpret this as defiance. Teachers who are mindful that their backgrounds are different from those of their students - even when they both come from the same country - are better able to avoid these kinds of problems.

As teachers develop the mind-sets that help them take a healthy approach to their culturally diverse students, they can also implement practices that produce the best results, such as:

Working with power structures among students. In all classrooms, certain students are natural leaders, whether or not they are academically successful. In schools where academic success is not a strong part of many students' identities, teachers can leverage powerful students to move things in a different direction: Rather than struggle against the leaders, successful teachers get these students "on their side," helping them realize the value of learning, which will then influence the others.

Bringing students' real lives into the classroom. "Many students are forced to sit in classrooms without any real meaning or connection to what they care about," Milner writes. He points to several approaches that make school more relevant to students: incorporating elements of pop culture into lessons, staying informed about students' out-of-class events and extracurricular activities, and examining instructional materials for opportunities to include stories, contexts, and content that reflects students' experiences.

Building relationships with students. If there is one idea that's repeated most often in this book, it's this: To teach our students effectively, it's crucial that we get to know them, earn their trust, build relationships. Some teachers believe their only job is to teach their content. But building relationships with students - especially in urban contexts - is "essential for both educator and student success." One way to make this happen is to help students get to know you by sharing personal stories, especially those that highlight things you have in common. Milner illustrates this by profiling Mr. Hall, a white teacher in a school with a large population of low-income minority students. Although Mr. Hall's background was rural, he was able to connect with students by talking about his struggles growing up poor. With enough self-reflection, any teacher should be able to find the places where their experiences converge with those of their students. Sharing these will help students come to see teachers as real people, to trust them, and ultimately, to learn from them.

One of the most interesting issues Milner tackles in the book is the notion that many White teachers have when they teach a mostly White population: They believe diversity isn't an issue for them. This was certainly true with my student teachers. For those who taught in all-White classrooms, their discussion of implications usually read like this: "Because my class is all Caucasian, ethnicity will not be a problem." I saw this sentiment over and over again, and every time, I suggested that these students might be more in need than others of exposure to different cultures and perspectives. Milner recommends the same: "Students live in a multicultural society, which requires them to be able to understand their own and others' privileges, or lack thereof, and the many ways in which people experience the world."

In his profile of Dr. Johnson, a Black teacher in a mostly White school, Milner shows us one way that this kind of exposure can be accomplished. "Many of these kids don't have any idea about how other people around the world live," she says. "They are sheltered. They are good kids, but they just don't see it...[so] I try and plan and develop a set of experiences for my students that will make them better human beings when they leave." Although it sometimes caused tension, Dr. Johnson regularly exposed her students to texts that made them think about lives that were different from their own.

Milner, who currently serves as the Dr. Helen S. Faison Chair in Urban Education at the University of Pittsburgh and the Director of its Center for Urban Education, talked with me via e-mail about the experiences that influenced his work on this book.

"I had some wonderful teachers in school, and most of them worked hard to meet the needs of all their students," he wrote. "But I grew up on the "south side" of my city and a common ethos of that neighborhood was that students did not succeed far beyond their current situations.

"I recall being called a 'nigger' in elementary school by one of my classmates, and my teacher told me to stop 'making up stories' when I shared it with her. I recall how one of my teachers literally turned her back to the 'black-side' of the classroom as she taught her classes, and this was hurtful because it did not make sense to me or my colleagues as high school students. But I grew up in a safe, affirming, loving environment with both my hard working, spiritually-grounded parents. B ecause my parents were so involved in my growth and development, they talked explicitly with me about how culture and cultural differences and similarities. These interactions with my parents were difference makers for me."

Throughout the book, Milner works hard to make it clear that he has no interest in attacking White teachers. "I tried to make it overt that the teachers in this book are all different in terms of their race, ethnicity, teaching styles and philosophies, yet they are successful teachers of a diverse range of students. The idea is that teachers from any racial or ethnic background can be successful with any group of students if they have the knowledge and skills to be effective. Still, some teachers will read the book and believe I am arguing for same-race teachers to teach same-race students."

There's no way to fully convey all the ideas in this book here; to get the most out of it, you really need to read it. Even better: Read it with others. Start a book study group in your school or district, with others who share the same desire to better meet the needs of your students. To better facilitate this work, Harvard Education Press offers free downloadable discussion questions for Elementary Teachers and Middle and High School Teachers.

In order to start where you are, you have to know where you are, and that requires a lot of honest self-reflection, a belief that there is room for improvement, and an understanding that the skills of effectively teaching students from diverse backgrounds can be learned. "I rarely meet teachers who do not care about their students or who are not committed to them in a general sense," Milner says. "However, they may fall short of engaging in the difficult work of teaching students whose needs are not met in classrooms. Good intentions are not enough."

* In the book, Milner uses "culturally diverse" as a general term that includes racial and ethnic minorities, English-language learners, and those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. His research focuses primarily on those populations, although he acknowledges that "diversity" includes aspects of gender, religion, ability, and sexual orientation, and that many of the principles outlined in the book would also apply to those populations.
Also by Richard Milner:

Learn something new every week.
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Race in the Classroom: There's a Manual for That

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All links to this book are Amazon Affiliate links, which means I receive a small commission on any purchase you make during that Amazon visit at no extra cost to you. A few years ago, when I worked with student teachers, there was one question on their Work Samples that stumped them every semester.

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This article was great on working on the perfect rubric that can be used within a classroom. As a future educator, we will have to often come up and create our own rubrics. This article had great tips.

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Whether you're new to rubrics, or you just don't know their formal names, it may be time for a primer on rubric terminology.
So let's talk about rubrics for a few minutes. What we're going to do here is describe two frequently used kinds of rubrics, holistic and analytic, plus a less common one called the single-point rubric (my favorite, for the record). For each one, we'll look at an example and explore its pros and cons.

Off we go!

A holistic rubric is the most general kind. It lists three to five levels of performance, along with a broad description of the characteristics that define each level. The levels can be labeled with numbers (such as 1 through 4), letters (such as A through F) or words (such as Beginning through Exemplary). What each level is called isn't what makes the rubric holistic - it's the way the characteristics are all lumped together.

Suppose you're an unusually demanding person. You want your loved ones to know what you expect if they should ever make you breakfast in bed. So you give them this holistic rubric:

When your breakfast is done, you simply gather your loved ones and say, "I'm sorry my darlings, but that breakfast was just a 2. Try harder next time."

The main advantage of a holistic rubric is that it's easy on the teacher - in the short run, anyway. Creating a holistic rubric takes less time than the others, and grading with one is faster, too. You just look over an assignment and give one holistic score to the whole thing.

The main disadvantage of a holistic rubric is that it doesn't provide targeted feedback to students, which means they're unlikely to learn much from the assignment. Although many holistic rubrics list specific characteristics for each level, the teacher gives only one score, without breaking it down into separate qualities. This often leads the student to approach the teacher and ask, "Why did you give me a 2?" If the teacher is the explaining kind, he will spend a few minutes breaking down the score. If not, he'll say something like, "Read the rubric." Then the student has to guess which factors had the biggest influence on her score. For a student who really tries hard, it can be heartbreaking to have no idea what she's doing wrong.

Holistic rubrics are most useful in cases when there's no time (or need, though that's hard to imagine) for specific feedback. You see them in standardized testing - the essay portion of the SAT is scored with a 0-6 holistic rubric. When hundreds of thousands of essays have to be graded quickly, and by total strangers who have no time to provide feedback, a holistic rubric comes in handy.

An analytic rubric breaks down the characteristics of an assignment into parts, allowing the scorer to itemize and define exactly what aspects are strong, and which ones need improvement.

So for the breakfast in bed example, an analytic rubric would look like this:

In this case, you'd give your loved ones a separate score for each category. They might get a 3 on Presentation, but a 2 on Food and just a 1 on Comfort. To make feedback even more targeted, you could also highlight specific phrases in the rubric, like, "the recipient is crowded during the meal" to indicate exactly what went wrong.

This is where we see the main advantage of the analytic rubric: It gives students a clearer picture of why they got the score they got. It is also good for the teacher, because it gives her the ability to justify a score on paper, without having to explain everything in a later conversation.

Analytic rubrics have two significant disadvantages, however: (1) Creating them takes a lot of time. Writing up descriptors of satisfactory work - completing the "3" column in this rubric, for example - is enough of a challenge on its own. But to have to define all the ways the work could go wrong, and all the ways it could exceed expectations, is a big, big task. And once all that work is done, (2) students won't necessarily read the whole thing. Facing a 36-cell table crammed with 8-point font is enough to send most students straight into a nap. And that means they won't clearly understand what's expected of them.

Still, analytic rubrics are useful when you want to cover all your bases, and you're willing to put in the time to really get clear on exactly what every level of performance looks like.

A single-point rubric is a lot like an analytic rubric, because it breaks down the components of an assignment into different criteria. What makes it different is that it only describes the criteria for proficiency; it does not attempt to list all the ways a student could fall short, nor does it specify how a student could exceed expectations.

A single-point rubric for breakfast in bed would look like this:

Notice that the language in the "Criteria" column is exactly the same as the "3" column in the analytic rubric. When your loved ones receive this rubric, it will include your written comments on one or both sides of each category, telling them exactly how they fell short ("runny eggs," for example) and how they excelled ("vase of flowers"). Just like with the analytic rubric, if a target was simply met, you can just highlight the appropriate phrase in the center column.

If you've never used a single-point rubric, it's worth a try. In 2010, Jarene Fluckiger studied a collection of teacher action research studies on the use of single-point rubrics. She found that student achievement increased with the use of these rubrics, especially when students helped create them and used them to self-assess their work.

The single-point rubric has several advantages: (1) It contains far less language than the analytic rubric, which means students are more likely to read it and it will take less time to create, while still providing rich detail about what's expected. (2) Areas of concern and excellence are open-ended. When using full analytic rubrics, I often find that students do things that are not described on the rubric, but still depart from expectations. Because I can't find the right language to highlight, I find myself hand-writing justifications for a score in whatever space I can find. This is frustrating, time-consuming and messy. With a single-point rubric, there's no attempt to predict all the ways a student might go wrong. Similarly, the undefined "Advanced" column places no limits on how students might stretch themselves. "If the highest level is already prescribed then creativity may be limited to that pre-determined level," says Fluckiger. "Students may surprise us if we leave quality open-ended."

The main disadvantage of single-point rubrics is that using them requires more writing on the teacher's part. If a student has fallen short in many areas, completing that left-hand column will take more time than simply highlighting a pre-written analytic rubric.

Need Ready-Made Rubrics?

My Rubric Pack gives you four different designs in Microsoft Word and Google Docs formats. It also comes with video tutorials to show you how to customize them for any need, plus a Teacher's Manual to help you understand the pros and cons of each style. Check it out here:

Sources:

Fluckiger, J. (2010). Single point rubric: A tool for responsible student self-assessment. Teacher Education Faculty Publications. Paper 5. Retrieved April 25, 2014 from http://digitalcommons.unomaha.edu/tedfacpub/5.

Mertler, C. A. (2001). Designing scoring rubrics for your classroom. Practical Assessment, Research & Evaluation, 7(25). Retrieved April 30, 2014 from http://PAREonline.net/getvn.asp?v=7&n=25.
Know Your Terms is my effort to build a user-friendly knowledge base of terms every educator should know. New items will be added on an ongoing basis. If you heard some term at a PD and didn't want to admit you didn't know what it meant, send it to me via the contact form and I'll research it for you.

Keep in touch.
Join the Cult of Pedagogy mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and fun. You'll get access to my members-only library of free downloadable resources, including my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half, which has helped thousands of teachers spend less time grading!

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Know Your Terms: Holistic, Analytic, and Single-Point Rubrics

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Whether you're new to rubrics, or you've used them for years without knowing their formal names, it may be time for a primer on rubric terminology.

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This was a great article about the the book, The Reason I jump. Which is about a thirteen year old boy with autism. He talks about topics that people think but are afraid to ask him. It was very informative.

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The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism
by Naoki Higashida, translated by KA Yoshida & David Mitchell
135 pages, Random House, August 2013
Buy Now

[Note: All links to this book are Amazon Affiliate links. The link at the end of the article is a National Autism Resources affiliate link. If you click any of these and make a purchase from Amazon or National Autism Resources, we will receive a small commission at no extra cost to you. Thanks for your support!]

This probably won't come out right, but here goes: I have always been uncomfortable around autistic kids. Although I don't often have opportunities to spend time with them, when I do, I don't know how to be. I have no idea how to talk with an autistic child. Or how to respond if he repeats the same phrase over and over. Or if he begins to rock. Or to wail. The whole notion of teaching autistic children is a big mystery to me.

So I avoid. Not completely - if you saw me in a room with an autistic child, I wouldn't be hiding in a corner with a blanket over my head. I would be polite, making awkward efforts at conversation. From the outside it might look okay. But inside I'd be anxious, worried that I was doing or saying the wrong thing. And I would be praying that someone else with more knowledge and experience was going to come along very soon.

Now that I have read The Reason I Jump, I feel differently. The book took my discomfort and replaced it with curiosity and affection. It got me thinking about autism in ways I never could before. And most importantly, it made me want to know the autistic kids in my life better.

In the book, Naoki Higoshida, a 13-year-old boy with autism, explains things we wonder about but don't know how to ask, questions like Why don't you make eye contact when you're talking?, Why do you ask the same questions over and over?, and Why do you flap your fingers and hands in front of your face? It's one thing to have a doctor or researcher explain these things; it's quite another for the answers to come directly from someone with autism. Naoki writes from lived experience, shedding light on the emotions behind the behaviors: being comforted and calmed by some things, worried and frightened by others. Moments of lightness and joy, of irresistible curiosity, of envy and despair.

As I read, I had to keep reminding myself that the book was written by someone whose autism was so severe he was considered non-communicative - unable to communicate verbally or non-verbally. Naoki learned to write by using a chart containing the letters of the alphabet. With the help of a transcriber, he pointed to the characters one at a time, building the words and paragraphs that eventually formed this book. I imagined another autistic boy I know, Trey, whose communication is very hard to understand, and who is around the same age. Naoki must be like Trey, I thought. The idea that Trey could be writing and thinking all the stuff in this book was nothing short of mind-blowing.

Some of Naoki's answers fit with my limited understanding of autism. Like this explanation for why he sometimes covers his ears when things get noisy: "Cupping our ears is a measure we take to protect ourselves and get back our grip on where we are."

But other things he wrote were a big surprise. What struck me most was how sad he feels about the stress he causes others. "The hardest ordeal for us is the idea that we are causing grief for other people. We can put up with our own hardships okay, but the thought that our lives are the source of other people's unhappiness, that's plain unbearable."

This is where the big shift happened for me. Until I read this book, I knew autism caused people to behave in ways that made it hard for them to fit in socially, but I guess I assumed they were unaware of it, that autism simply led them around and they followed, lacking any kind of consciousness about it, any kind of metacognition. That was a big underestimation: The awareness is there, it's strong, it hurts, and it extends to the people around them. Naoki is painfully aware of how exasperating an autistic kid can be for other people, and he asks us, over and over again, to be patient: "We know we're making you sad and upset, but it's as if we don't have any say in it, I'm afraid, and that's the way it is. But please, whatever you do, don't give up on us. We need your help."

What makes The Reason I Jump so special, so different from other books on the subject is that it was written by a child. David Mitchell, who translated the book with his wife after they received the original Japanese version, describes how it impacted his relationship with his three-year-old autistic son. "Reading it felt as if, for the first time, our own son was talking to us about what was happening inside his head, through Naoki's words. When you know that your kid wants to speak with you, that he's taking in his surroundings every bit as attentively as your nonautistic daughter, ...then you can be ten times more patient, willing, understanding and communicative." He contrasts this with other autobiographical books on autism, like Temple Grandin's Thinking in Pictures : "(These books) tend to be written by adults who have already worked things out, and they couldn't help me where I needed help most," namely, to understand the behaviors of his young son.

All teachers, regardless of specialty, should read this book. The most recent figures from the CDC estimate that 1 in 68 children has an autism spectrum disorder. And because schools are required by law to place children in the least restrictive environment for their needs, there's a good chance that teachers of all subjects will eventually find autistic children in their classes. The Reason I Jump won't provide you with specific instructional or behavioral strategies, but it will make you want to learn them.

We fear what we don't know; this was certainly true for me. But now that I've heard one voice that was once muted, I know this: Inside every person with autism is someone with thoughts and feelings as complex and interesting as everyone else's. They want desperately to be understood. And though I still don't exactly know how to communicate with autistic kids, I now have a much stronger desire to figure it out. ♦

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If you found this article useful, I'd love to have you come back for more. Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration - in quick, bite-sized packages - all geared toward making your teaching more effective and joyful. To thank you, I'll send you a free copy of my new e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

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The Reason I Jump: The Inner Voice of a Thirteen-Year-Old Boy with Autism

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Until I read this book, I knew autism caused people to behave in ways that made it hard for them to fit in socially, but I guess I assumed they were unaware of it. That was a big underestimation: The awareness is there, it's strong, it hurts, and it extends to the people around them.

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This article explains how to make lesson plans more culturally responsive for students. It also included videos to help as well which the students would appreciate the more cultural response within the lessons.

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Last month, I reviewed Zaretta Hammond's fantastic book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and the Brain. Now I'm proud to have Zaretta here as a guest writer to share some specific strategies with us.

Culturally responsive teaching. Everybody is talking about it. The big question is: How do you actually make lessons culturally responsive? That comes up regularly when I am working with groups of teachers to improve outcomes for diverse students who are struggling. I remember working with a group of sixth grade teachers on improving learning for their at-risk students. These teachers were frustrated that their students, 95 percent of them students of color and English language learners, were not applying themselves to learning.

I suggested that we explore making lessons more culturally relevant in order to accelerate student learning. I remember the reaction of Janice, the science teacher. "I am not going to be rappin' about the periodic table," she said defiantly as she crossed her arms and sat back in her chair.

I couldn't blame her. Google "culturally responsive teaching" and you can find a dozen videos of well-meaning teachers leading some call-and-response chant about exponents or rapping about the Boston Tea Party while students sit back and giggle. That's because we usually talk about culturally responsive teaching only as an engagement strategy designed to motivate at-risk students to take learning seriously. Or we try to find a race-based connection to the content to make it "relevant" to minority students.

One of the biggest misconceptions about culturally responsive teaching is thinking you have to tie the lesson's content to African American or Latino students' racial background. The common belief is if you mention Africa, Mexico, or famous black and brown high achievers, it will spark students' attention. Then they will be motivated to participate.

In reality, culturally responsive teaching is less about using racial pride as a motivator and more about mimicking students' cultural learning styles and tools. These are the strategies their moms, dads, grandmas, and other community folks use to teach them life skills and basic concepts long before they come to school and during out-of-school time.

Culturally responsive teaching leverages the brain's memory systems and information processing structures. Why? Many diverse students come from oral cultural traditions. This means their primary ways of knowledge transfer and meaning-making are oral and active. It's a common cultural tradition that cuts across racial groups: African American, Latino, Southeast Asian, and Pacific Islander communities all have strong oral cultures. Each of these cultural groups uses the brain's memory systems for turning inert information into useable knowledge. They use memory strategies to make learning sticky, like connecting what needs to be remembered to a rhythm or music (that's why we still know the ABC song) or by reciting it in fun ways like a poem, riddle, or limerick.

I asked Janice what area of learning she wanted to help her kids improve. She said science vocabulary; they weren't learning the weekly words and it was getting in the way of their understanding of key concepts. She was frustrated and at the end of her rope. I asked how she was teaching it. She used the typical approach: On Monday, she listed the words on the board. Students copied them down and were required to look each word up and use it in a sentence. On Wednesday, there was a vocabulary test.

I suggested that we design word study to be more culturally responsive by making it more like the students' own cultural learning process. She was open for trying something different.

I offered her these three tips for transforming any lesson into something that looked and felt more culturally responsive to diverse students, something that would allow them to engage more and process the content effectively.

Games are the power strategy for culturally-grounded learning because they get the brain's attention and require active processing. Attention is the first step in learning. We cannot learn, remember, or understand what we don't first pay attention to. Call and response is just a way to get the brain's attention. Most games employ a lot of the cultural tools you'd find in oral traditions - repetition, solving a puzzle, making connections between things that don't seem to be related (Ever play Taboo or Apples to Apples?).

Organizing learning so that students rely on each other will build on diverse students' communal orientation. This communal orientation can be summed up in the African proverb, "I am because we are." Even making learning slightly competitive in a good-natured way increases students' level of attention and engagement. It's why the T.V. show Survivor has been around for so many years; it's a social-based game.

The brain is wired to remember stories and to use the story structure to make sense of the world. That's why every culture has creation stories. In oral traditions, stories play a bigger role in teaching lessons about manners, morality, or simply what plants to eat or not eat in the wilderness because it's the way content is remembered. Diverse students (and all students, really) learn content more effectively if they can create a coherent narrative about the topic or process presented. That's the brain's way of weaving it all together. (Bonus: It also offers a great way to check for understanding and correct misconceptions.)

So Janice took her weekly list of science vocabulary and created a variety of sorting and matching games for students. She built a set of simple card games based on Go Fish or Old Maid. In addition she created some team games. Each week students had different active ways to learn the vocabulary. For 10-15 minutes a couple of times during the week, students got to play these learning games rather than look up words in a dictionary. She gave them instructions for making the games at home if they wanted to.

Instead of the traditional weekly vocab test, she asked them to "storify" their understanding of key concept words like metamorphosis, using vocabulary from past weeks.

When I checked in with the group a few weeks later, she was the first one to share. She said student engagement was like night and day. Now all students were participating. She said she knew they were learning the vocabulary at a deeper level because they were actually using the new science terms during discussions and in their writing with no prompting from her.

The big A-ha's for the group that day were that (1) Culturally responsive teaching doesn't have to be some performance the teacher does to entertain students and (2) It doesn't have to mention race or reference culture at all. Instead, what makes a practice culturally responsive is that it mimics students' own cultural learning tools. They all realized that these practices are helpful for all students, not targeted at minority students.

The real trick is to use these strategies regularly as part of your instructional routine rather than doing them randomly every now and then. Consistency is the key. ♦

Learn more about how to improve diverse students' information processing skills and actually grow their brains in Zaretta Hammond's book, Culturally Responsive Teaching and The Brain: Promoting Authentic Engagement and Rigor Among Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Students .

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3 Tips to Make Any Lesson More Culturally Responsive

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Google "culturally responsive teaching" and you can find a dozen videos of well-meaning teachers leading some call-and-response chant about exponents or rapping about the Boston Tea Party while students sit back and giggle.

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I loved this article because it talks about mnemonics help you remember things. It discusses memory palaces and how you can use it within a classroom

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memory palace

( noun) A mnemonic device that helps people remember items by visualizing those items in specific, familiar locations, often in a specific, familiar sequence. Also known as the method of loci.

You may call upon the mnemonic Every Good Boy Does Fine and FACE to remember the notes of a treble clef. You might use Roy G. Biv to recall the colors of a rainbow. These and other mnemonic devices help us remember things we have trouble keeping in long-term memory. One mnemonic you may not have heard of is called a memory palace. I learned this term over the summer while reading Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, and was utterly delighted by it. A memory palace! It makes learning sound fancy, like it comes with its own butler and scullery maid.

Here's how a memory palace works: You start with some collection of facts, a list of items, or a sequence of things you want to remember. Next, you choose a location you're very familiar with: your bedroom, your childhood home, a restaurant you go to frequently. Mentally walking through that place, in the order you'd typically travel through it, you begin placing the objects on your list in specific spots. It's important to tie these in with familiar items in your location, make the placement as specific as possible, and make the connection a little strange, if you can. Once all the items have been placed, imagine yourself walking through your "palace," encountering each item as you progress. By visualizing this path with each item in a sequence, you strengthen your ability to recall each item and the order in which it comes.

Suppose I have to give a speech. I want to do it without using index cards. Like a TED Talk, I want to be able to just get up and deliver this beautiful, well-rehearsed talk with finesse. My presentation will start with an Elvis joke, followed by a story about a lesson I learned while watching my son play basketball. Next, I will talk about my main topic-happiness turning up when you least expect it. Finally, I will finish by talking about how we need to use our natural-born gifts to find more of these joys. (By the way, this is a totally fictional speech. I have not written it or given it anywhere. It doesn't sound half bad, though.)

To construct my memory palace for this speech, I might picture the front porch of my house, and imagine Elvis standing there to greet me. That's the joke at the beginning. Next, there's a basketball waiting on the doormat, a cue to remember to tell the basketball story. As I enter the house, I see a piece of cheesecake sitting on an armchair-happiness turning up when I least expect it. Finally, I picture a giraffe hanging out in the back of the room. Giraffes have long necks that enable them to access high-growing food that can't be reached by other animals; that's using your natural-born gifts to find joy, the end of my presentation. Now, all I have to do to remember the key elements of my talk is picture myself walking through the house, encountering each of these things.

How Teachers Can Use Memory Palaces

Include memory palaces in your instruction.
When you want students to remember a specific sequence or list of items, use your own classroom, another part of your school, or even a familiar location in your town as a memory palace. Go to this place-either mentally or physically-and work with students to associate items on your list with specific locations in your chosen palace. Doing this as a group will further reinforce the associations, because students will be able to help each other remember.

Teach students how to construct their own memory palaces.
As a general study technique, the memory palace is a great one to have in your repertoire. So teach students how to create their own and let them know when you're studying something that would be a good fit for a memory palace. Learning how to do in-depth analytical writing isn't the kind of material that lends itself to a memory palace, but remembering the steps of the scientific method would be perfect.

Use memory palaces to deliver more polished presentations.
When you have the opportunity to present at a professional conference, have to give a workshop to your colleagues, or if you just want to deliver a memorable lecture to your students, use memory palaces to secure more of your content in long-term memory.

Watch a Memory Palace in Action

Other Resources

Learn to Remember Everything: The Memory Palace Technique, by Ruben Berenguel at Mostly Maths

Develop Perfect Memory with the Memory Palace Technique, by Luciano Passuello at Litemind

Ancient Imagery Mnemonics, by Nigel J.T. Thomas in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Like what you've seen so far?
I would love to have you come back for more. Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and joyful. To thank you, you'll get a free copy of my e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to getting to know you better!

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( noun) A mnemonic device that helps people remember items by visualizing those items in specific, familiar locations, often in a specific, familiar sequence. Also known as the method of loci. You may call upon the mnemonic Every Good Boy Does Fine and FACE to remember the notes of a treble clef.

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I loved how this article incorporates CrossFit and working out and the classroom. The article helps you try to be constructed and to keep trying. It was a very interesting article.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:

This past summer, my husband asked me to go to a CrossFit gym with him. He was looking for something different, something that would motivate him to exercise more. He'd heard about CrossFit and thought it sounded promising, so he asked me to go with him to a "newbie night" to try a sample workout. Knowing full well that this would be a one-time favor, I went along.

When we approached the gym (or box, as they call it in CrossFit), my skepticism only grew stronger. The building looked like a garage and the black rubber floor filled the room with the smell of tires. There appeared to be a few pieces of workout equipment around, hanging on the walls mostly, and a few people were lifting these huge barbells, but mostly everyone was just hanging out, talking. And drinking coffee, for some odd reason. My plan was to politely tolerate whatever the next hour brought, but I was positive this would never be a place I'd call home.

Fast-forward three months, and I am completely in love with this place. I have cancelled my other gym membership, I'm thrilled by how strong I feel, and I'm more motivated to exercise than I have ever been.

This is ironic, because I kind of suck at it. If you compare what I can do to what the more experienced people can do, there's no contest. I am absolutely in the lower tier of students: I use lighter weights, I do fewer reps, I need more breaks, and I take longer to do just about everything. For the first time, I understand what it feels like to be a struggling student. I understand what it's like to feel totally lost, confused, and unskilled, surrounded by others who seem to know exactly what they're doing. But because of the way CrossFit is structured, I keep trying. And I have no plans to stop.

Why is that? Why am I, a struggling student, still motivated? I've done some thinking about it, and I believe it comes down to four principles, four aspects of the CrossFit approach that are really working for me. I think we can apply these same principles to our classroom teaching and get better results, especially from students who don't naturally perform to their potential. Here they are:

1: Student choice + well-crafted options = powerful differentiation.

Every time I show up to the gym, I look to a huge blackboard for the Workout of the Day, known by CrossFitters as the WOD. The WOD is a list of whatever exercises we're going to do that day, how many reps, for how long, and so on. But on most days, the WOD is not alone: Beside it, there's usually some extra information titled "JV." This is a list of the modifications we can make if the prescribed WOD is too difficult. (In almost every case, it is way too hard for me). Usually, these modifications involve scaling down the weight we use or reducing the number of reps we have to do. If the JV version is too hard, they often offer a "Frosh" version that's scaled down even further.

Suppose the WOD includes a series of overhead presses with a barbell. The prescribed weight for women might be 90 pounds. The scaled weight might be 70 pounds. But when I first tried it, all I could lift for any length of time was the 25 lb barbell, alone, with no weights added.

Here's the most important thing about these modifications: We are never assigned to use them. Modifying our workout is our decision, every time. So on some days, I'll look at the WOD and know for sure that I'll need to make a lot of modifications. On other days I look at the WOD and think, I'm going for it. Sometimes I get partway through and think NEVER MIND. But other times I nearly get there. Those days are golden.

Also: No one ever, EVER makes you feel crappy about scaling down. People were cheering me on with those little barbell presses. It didn't feel condescending, either. Just supportive. I knew they had all been beginners once, too.

Classroom application: Whenever possible, we should tier our assignments, but let students choose which tier to work on. Students should be able to change course if the tier they've chosen turns out to be too hard or too easy: Spend time helping them understand how both of those situations feel. Make sure that in your classroom, scaling down is looked upon as a smart, self-aware move, not a sad option for the weak or the slow. And keep raising the bar: As soon as they show signs of readiness, encourage students to attempt the next level.

2: Variety matters.

One foundation of CrossFit is that the workouts are constantly varied, sometimes not repeating themselves for months at a time. This allows participants to learn and develop a wide range of skills and prevents us from hitting plateaus. I like it because I'm never bored. In every other fitness regimen I've tried, I could eventually predict the routine-even Zumba got boring-and dragging myself to the gym became a chore. With CrossFit, I never know exactly what we're going to do, and because certain exercises aren't repeated for long periods of time, I'm excited when they come up.

Classroom application: Find new ways to add variety to your class routine. This sounds obvious, but so many of us get into a rut without realizing it. Yes, students thrive on predictability, but if you can chunk your content and skills into shorter, more intense activities, then mix them up, the energy level in your class will go up and you'll keep students wanting to come back. For an English language arts class, this might mean one day includes a grammar review game, then a quick write, followed by two student read-alouds of pieces they are working on. The next day could start with a 15-minute session of Philosophical Chairs to practice speaking skills, followed by 15 minutes of self-selected silent reading, and finishing up with a fast proofreading exercise. In a math class, students could start with a Reciprocal Learning activity to review learning from the day before, followed by a Number Talk, and finally a team competition with Kahoot. The next day could include some work with manipulatives, then a Gallery Walk where groups solve problems together, finishing with a few minutes singing a song that helps students remember an important math concept.

3: Gamification works.

Our gym encourages us to use an app called SugarWOD to record our stats for each workout. Earlier this week, for example, we had to do 5 rounds of "Thrusters," where we lift weight up over our heads, and in each round are supposed to increase the weight a little bit. Once I was done, I went into SugarWOD and entered my information:

Just the act of entering my numbers is satisfying. It's motivating. It makes me want to finish the workout just so I can put my numbers into the app. Then I can check out the leaderboard to see what other people have done. I can give them virtual "Fist Bumps" and they can give some to me as well.

As a rookie, I don't know much about what lies beyond this, but when I look around my gym, I see a lot of numbers and charts all over the place; people keeping track of all kinds of stats. A quick search on Google shows me that CrossFit coaches and gyms everywhere are developing systems of levels for athletes to work toward. And for me, this is motivating. Just doing "whatever I can" probably won't sustain me, but knowing that reaching a certain max weight in a certain exercise means I've reached a new level of fitness? That will push me to get there faster.

Classroom application: Whenever possible, find ways to let students track their progress. In education we have trended lately toward focusing too much on data, but I'm not talking about anything that gets reported to the state or turns into a grade. I'm talking about recording your own growth over time, for your own personal satisfaction. To add more motivation, look for ways to add game mechanics-like leveling up and badges -to your classroom. In cases where a skill isn't easily quantifiable, consider a more descriptive way to measure growth, or have students self-assess their progress based on identifiable characteristics of their work, rather than a score.

4: Personal best is most important, but a little competition helps.

Beating my own personal record is satisfying, yes. But one of the reasons CrossFit works so well for me is the fact that they have us do our workouts in groups. In a lot of cases, we are timed. This is a huge motivator for me. If someone told me I had to run one mile by myself and record my time, I would want to beat my previous time, sure. But have me run with a group of people? Now there's peer pressure, and that pushes me harder. Because so many people at my gym are so far ahead of me, I don't kid myself into thinking I'm going to beat their time, but I sure as heck don't want to be crossing the finish line way, waaaaay behind them. Ultimately, doing the work with people who are better than me makes me work harder. Here's the thing, though: If every single other person could run laps around me, and if there was no chance I was going to come anywhere close to anyone else's time? My motivation would probably fall apart. Knowing that I was completely out of my league would make me cut myself way more slack than I should.

Classroom application: Build opportunities into your instruction for healthy competition. Team challenges, individual challenges, competitions for time or number of items completed can all boost student motivation. But because timed tests can cause unhealthy anxiety in some kids, and competition in general isn't for everyone, consider making these kinds of competitions strictly voluntary.

It's easy to draw parallels between fitness and education: Achieving either one is a complex task, especially if we're trying to help lots of people from different backgrounds get great results. You only have to watch late-night TV or open your spam folder to find proof that plenty of us still haven't figured out how to maintain a healthy body, and no one has fully answered the question of how to effectively educate all students. CrossFit's explosive growth in popularity is a good enough reason to look more closely at its methods and see what we might be able to apply to the classroom. As an average-to-low-level student of fitness myself, all I can say is that it's definitely working for me. ♦

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I would love to have you come back for more.Join my mailing list and get weekly tips, tools, and inspiration-in quick, bite-sized packages-all geared toward making your teaching more effective and joyful. To welcome you, I'll be sending a free copy of my new e-booklet, 20 Ways to Cut Your Grading Time in Half. I look forward to having you join me.

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4 Things I've Learned About Teaching from CrossFit

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Listen to this post as a podcast: This past summer, my husband asked me to go to a CrossFit gym with him. He was looking for something different, something that would motivate him to exercise more. He'd heard about CrossFit and thought it sounded promising, so he asked me to go with him to a "newbie night" to try a sample workout.

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This article mentions 7 different ways to help students by thinking outside of the box. Sometimes we have to reach students differently and these had some great points.

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Listen to my interview with Seth Perler, executive function coach (transcript):
It seems every teacher in every school struggles with what they might call unmotivated, lazy, or disorganized learners. These students seem to have a ton of potential, their test scores might even be pretty high, but they can't ever seem to get it together school-wise.

In my own teaching experience, I spent an inordinate amount of time on these students, giving them lists of make-up assignments to do, meeting with them at lunch or after school to help get them caught up, contacting parents, helping them go through their binders and backpacks and lockers to find missing work, and coming up with lots of different ways to basically say the same thing: You just need to stay organized.

It's not motivation; it's executive function.

It turns out this set of skills actually has a name: executive function. The first time I heard this term in Paul Tough's 2012 book, How Children Succeed, it was like a light bulb going off: Kids who struggle with executive function often have perfectly good academic abilities, but they don't have the same ability as most students to stay on top of the little details that make life run smoothly. So when we try to get them to manage those details like most other kids do, our efforts fail.

If I had known that, and if I'd had someone like Seth Perler to show me what to do differently, I would have been able to help these kids have a much more rewarding school experience.

Seth Perler is an Executive Function coach who works with these students he refers to as "outside the box learners." Because Perler was an outside-the-box learner himself, when he became a teacher, he knew how to reach this type of student. During his years in the classroom and then as an education coach, he has developed seven systems that he teaches these kids to help them meet deadlines, keep track of materials, and manage their time.

What's interesting about these systems is that although some of them may seem obvious at first, it's the little tweaks Perler gives them that actually make them work. What most of us have tried with these students turns out to be counterproductive; we've approached them in the same way that we approach our other students. For most kids, our standard methods for keeping them organized work just fine, but these kids need something different. Once you learn about these little tweaks-like why folders are far better than 3-ring binders-you'll be able to change your approach, share these insights with parents, and start to see some real differences in how these kids do in school.

Implementing the Systems

For these systems to work, Perler says, parents and teachers have to help students build them into habits. This takes patience, compassion, and more time than is typical for most students.

"It takes two good solid months of continuous effort with these kids to really build a habit," he says. "It's not easy. The brain is literally changing. The neurons in the brain are changing. They are building new networks that are helping them to execute, to use executive function to manage what are really an overwhelming amount of details we expect these kids to manage."

What does that "time" look like? Perler recommends a weekly overhaul, done on Sunday nights, to hit the reset button on all of these systems and prepare the student for the week ahead. Done consistently, this will eventually make habits out of all of these systems, and the student should start to see big improvements.

1. Paper Management
Use a separate folder for every class.
"Organized adults will often recommend that kids use three-ring binders," Perler says. "Their idea is, 'Well if it helps me stay organized, obviously it would help a disorganized kid become more organized.' But for kids who struggle with executive function, three-ring binders are horrible. There are so many details in terms of opening a big binder, finding the right place for the paper, unclicking it, putting it in with the three holes, re-clicking it, closing it carefully. These are kids who really just want to get it done."

What works better? "Cheap paper folders," Perler says. He recommends the following:

Use a separate folder for every class, with a different color for each folder.

Choose paper folders, not plastic, because plastic is too slick and can cause papers to slide out too easily.

Write the subject name directly on the folder in big letters, so it's easy to find. Then turn the folder over and write it on the back.

2. Backpack Management
Everything out, once a week.
Most kids are what Perler calls maintainers, because they are able to maintain a semi-organized backpack, taking out unnecessary items as they go and keeping things more or less organized. But students who struggle with executive function tend to be overhaulers, waiting until things get totally out of control and then doing a complete overhaul.

"Let's say you have a really disorganized kid," he says. "One day you come home, they've completely rearranged their bedroom, put all their furniture in different places, and completely cleaned out the whole bedroom. That's an overhauler. They like to overhaul."

When it comes to backpacks, however, this overhaul doesn't come frequently enough, and that results in backpacks where papers are lost or damaged. Perler recommends students do a weekly backpack overhaul:

Once a week, pull everything out of the backpack.

Throw out things you don't need, reorganize the things you do.

3. Planner
Keep it plain and simple.
"A lot of schools will buy planners for the entire school," Perler says. "They'll have the hall pass in the back, the school handbook in the front. They have the periodic table in the back, commonly misspelled words, famous quotes on the papers, and a bunch of colors often on the pages. It turns out that these planners are awful for the kids that I work with, for kids who struggle with executive function. It's too much. These are kids who really want to get at the heart of the matter within seconds. They don't want to have to flip pages and find things."

Perler recommends a much simpler planner for these students:

Get a month-at-a-glance planner, rip out every single page that isn't the calendar of the months they will be in school. 10 pages max. "These kids tend to be very global thinkers, so seeing the entire month is a lot easier for their brain to learn to conceptualize time," Perler says.

To make the most of the smaller spaces on the planner, develop a shorthand system for recording important deadlines and other information.

Do regular check-ins with a parent or teacher make sure the planner is being maintained.

4. Grade Monitoring
Check once a week at minimum.
Although we have discussed on this site about the danger of parents monitoring their child's grades too closely, with students who struggle with executive function, it's helpful to work with the student to develop a habit of monitoring their own grades.

Once a week (at least), go into your school's online grading portal and check all grades.

Look at the details: Are there incomplete grades? Missing grades?

If the teacher hasn't been inputting grades on a regular basis, recent grades may not be available. Check with the teacher if you need more recent grades.

5. Self Advocacy
Make an actual appointment to see the teacher in person.
Although teachers make themselves available to students for help, and struggling students may intend to see them for it, in reality they often forget or put it off. For that reason, Perler recommends students agree on a time to meet with the teacher, rather than just intending to talk with them.

"Usually I'll have them write a short email to the teacher that says, 'Hey, I'd love to see you at office hours. When's the best time for me to come in?' The teacher can then say, 'Come in at 3 o'clock tomorrow,' and it puts accountability on the situation that they didn't have before. Most of the time the student will show up, and I will tell you that I have so many kids come back to me and say, 'Wow, that was so helpful. That was so easy.'"

Perler says self-advocacy is one of the easiest habits to develop. "Once they ask for help from their teacher two or three or four times, they have crossed a magical threshold that changes their whole academic experience. They realize that teachers are not mad at them. That teachers are there to support them. That teachers will give them the time they need. And that teachers will even give them secret tips and tricks for how to pass their classes or how to do well in their classes."

6. Sacred Study Space
Establish a distraction-free space at home just for school work.
This is a classic, but it may be an overlooked factor in a student's poor performance. "We really need to help kids learn to create a space that has the supplies we need that is decluttered, that is free of distraction. And that's very hard for families, by the way. Because real life is happening."

Rather than prescribe a specific type of space, Perler recommends building sharper awareness about the choices that will work for the specific student and the kind of school work they need to do at a given time. "The couch might actually be an effective place for some students some of the time to study. But I want them to make conscious choices: 'Sitting on the couch is going to help me relax into this book, so that I can really get in the mode,' or 'Sitting on the couch, especially with the TV on, is a ridiculous idea for me to be studying this biology stuff right now.'

7. Weekly Overhaul
Choose a time once a week to overhaul all systems.
Rather than "intending" to do the weekly overhaul, Perler recommends setting a specific time to do it every week, and post that time somewhere visible. "If you miss a time or two, that's fine," he says. "It's going to happen. But print up when it is and what time, so that you don't have the argument with your child about it, and it's concrete, and it's on the wall."

Here's what the overhaul should include:

Empty out and tidy the backpack

Update the planner, tear out old pages, cross everything out that is no longer relevant. Look forward to the upcoming week.

Go through each folder and get rid of everything you no longer need.

Check grades online.

Overhaul the desk or home study area.

You can learn more from Seth Perler by going to his website, sethperler.com, and subscribing to his email updates & Student Success Toolkit. Seth has created a special Student Systems Assessment to help students determine which of these seven areas they need the most work on. You can download that here.

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7 Systems that Work for Outside-the-Box Learners

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Listen to my interview with Seth Perler, executive function coach (transcript): It seems every teacher in every school struggles with what they might call unmotivated, lazy, or disorganized learners. These students seem to have a ton of potential, their test scores might even be pretty high, but they can't ever seem to get it together school-wise.

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Great article on how to properly take notes. The article was based on research and I believe could really help my future students on how to take notes effectively.

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Listen to this post as a podcast:
Sponsored by Peergrade and 3Doodler

Let's talk about note-taking. Every day, in classrooms all over the world, students are taking notes. I have my own half-baked ideas about what makes one approach better than another, and I'm sure you do too. But if we're going to call ourselves professionals, we need to know what the research says, yes?

So I've combed through about three decades' worth of research, and I'm going to tell you what it says about best practices in note-taking. Although this is not an exhaustive summary, it hits on some of the most frequently debated questions on the subject.

This information is going to be useful for any subject area-I found some really good stuff that would be especially useful for STEM teachers or anyone who does heavy work with calculations, diagrams, and other technical illustrations. Of course, there's plenty here for teachers of social studies, English, and the humanities as well, so everyone sit tight because you'll probably come away with something you can apply to your classroom.

First, Let's Talk About Lectures

When we think about note-taking, it's natural to assume a context of lecture-based lessons. And yes, that is one common scenario when a student is likely to take notes. But other learning experiences also lend themselves to note-taking: Watching videos in a flipped or blended environment, reading assigned textbook chapters or handouts, doing research for a project, and going on field trips can all be opportunities for taking notes.

So instead of referring to lectures in this overview, I'll just talk about learning experiences or intake sessions-times when students are absorbing content or skills through some sort of medium, as opposed to purely applying that content or synthesizing it into some kind of product. Even in student-centered, project-driven classrooms where students pursue their own authentic tasks like the Apollo School, or in more traditional classrooms that set aside time for Genius Hour projects, students need to gather, encode, and store information, so note-taking would still be a fit.

What the Research Says About Note-Taking

1. Note-taking matters.

Whether it's taking notes from lectures (Kiewra, 2002) or from reading (Rahmani & Sadeghi, 2011; Chang & Ku, 2014), note-taking has been shown to improve student learning. In other words, if we want our students to remember more of what they learn in our classes, it's better to have them take notes than it is to not have them take notes.

The thinking behind this is that note-taking requires effort. Rather than passively taking information in, the act of encoding the information into words or pictures forms new pathways in the brain, which stores it more firmly in long-term memory. On top of that, having the information stored in a new place gives students the opportunity to revisit it later and reinforce the learning that happened the first time around.

So if you're not currently having students take notes in your class, consider adding note-taking to your regular classroom routine. With that said, a number of other factors can influence the potency of a student's note-taking, and that is what these other points will address.

2. More is better.

Although students are often encouraged to keep notes brief, it turns out that in general, the more notes students take, the more information they tend to remember later. The quantity of notes is directly related to how much information students retain (Nye, Crooks, Powley, & Tripp, 1984).

This would be useful to share with students. If they know that more complete notes will result in better learning, they may be more likely to record additional information in their notes, rather than striving for brevity.

Obviously, some students are going to be faster note-takers than others, and this will allow them to take more complete notes. But you can do quite a bit to help all students get more information into their notes, regardless of their natural speed, and that's what we'll talk about next.

3. Explicitly teaching note-taking strategies can make a difference.

Although some students seem to have an intuitive sense for what notes to record, for everyone else, getting trained in specific note-taking strategies can significantly improve the quality of notes and the amount of material they remember later. (Boyle, 2013; Rahmani & Sadeghi, 2011; Robin, Foxx, Martello, & Archable, 1977). This is especially true for students with learning disabilities.

One frequently used note-taking system is Cornell Notes. This approach has been around for decades, and the format provides a simple way to take "live" notes in class and condense and review them later.

4. Adding visuals boosts the power of notes.

Compared with writing alone, adding drawings to notes to represent concepts, terms, and relationships has a significant effect on memory and learning (Wammes, Meade, & Fernandes, 2016).

The growing popularity of sketchnoting in recent years suggests that teachers are well on their way to taking advantage of this research.

This video combines sketchnoting with Cornell Notes, and it's an approach I think is definitely worth considering.

To explore sketchnoting more deeply, check out this list of sketchnoting resources compiled by celebrated education sketchnote artist Sylvia Duckworth.

5. Revision, collaboration, and pausing boosts the power of notes.

When students are given the opportunity to revise, add to, or rewrite their notes, they tend to retain more information. And when that revision happens during deliberate pauses in a lecture or other learning experience, students remember the information better and take better notes than if the revision happens after the learning experience is over. Finally, if students collaborate on this revision with partners, they record even more complete notes and score higher on post-tests (Luo, Kiewra, & Samuelson, 2016).

With this in mind, it would be a good idea to plan breaks in lectures, videos, or independent reading periods to allow students to look over, add to, and revise their notes, ideally with a partner or small group. This partner work could happen after students have had time to revise their notes alone, or students might be given access to classmates for the duration of the pause.

6. Scaffolding increases retention.

Teachers can build scaffolds into their instruction to ensure that students take better notes. One very effective type of scaffold is guided notes (also called skeleton or skeletal notes). With guided notes, the instructor provides some type of outline of the material to be covered, but with space left for students to complete key information. This strategy has been shown to substantially increase student achievement across all grade levels (elementary through college) and with students who present with various disabilities (Haydon, Mancil, Kroeger, McLeskey, & Lin, 2011).

As instructors experiment with guided notes, certain features show a lot of promise. One that I found incredibly interesting was a style developed by engineering professor Susan Reynolds to accompany her lectures: The notes combine typed information, handwritten content, and graphics, but still leave room for student notes and working out example problems.

Diagrams are pre-drawn, but some key numbers are left out for students to fill in during the lecture. These notes consolidate all the technical material for a lecture into a single document, and the information is organized to align with the lecture. The more I study these notes, the more I see how useful they are, and how well they balance the efficiency offered by guided notes with the need for students to actively participate in the encoding process.

Guided notes created by engineering professor Susan Reynolds. These have not been completed yet.

The same pages of guided notes completed by the instructor during the lecture.

Reynolds' students have had strong positive reactions to this style of notes and consistently attribute the notes as a key factor in their engagement and learning in the course (Reynolds & Tackie, 2016).

While teachers should experiment with different styles, the take-away here is that if you want students to get the most out of a learning experience, provide them with some form of partially completed notes.

In the meantime, you can add another layer of scaffolding by simply adding more verbal cues to your learning experiences (Kiewra, 2002). Research shows that simply saying things like, "This is an important point," or "Be sure to add this to your notes," instructors can ensure that students include key ideas in their notes. Providing written cues on the board or a slideshow can also help students structure their notes and decide what information to include.

7. Providing instructor notes improves learning.

In an article I wrote a few years ago, I denounced instructor-prepared notes as an ineffective method for teaching, primarily because encoding this information required no effort from students and therefore made the learning too passive.

Although I stand by the assertion that we should avoid simply supplying students with notes, I need to refine the message: Research has shown that when we give students complete, well-written, instructor-prepared notes to review after they take their own notes, they learn significantly more than with their own notes alone (Kiewra, 1985).

If we combine this strategy with student revision, collaboration, and pausing to improve note-taking and learning-in other words, having students pause during an intake session to collaboratively revise their notes, then let them review instructor notes at the end-we can give our students an incredibly powerful learning experience.

One concern is that providing notes might make students more passive about taking their own notes during the learning experience. Here are some suggestions for addressing that:

Assigning a small grade for student notes would likely compel most students to do them, but this could distort the validity of a grade, as we discussed in another post.

It would probably be more effective to simply build note-taking into the class activities. For example, if students are encouraged to take notes, and then they are given a pause every few minutes to compare and revise notes, it would be pretty awkward for them to turn to a partner and have nothing to contribute.

Sharing the research with students that those taking notes then revising them with instructor notes has greater impact than instructor notes alone might push students to take more notes.

Allowing students to choose a note-taking format that works best for them would also boost student motivation for taking the notes.

8. Handwritten notes may be more powerful than digital notes, but digital note-taking can be fine-tuned.

Studies have shown that students who take notes by hand learn more than those who take notes on a laptop (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014; Carter, Greenberg, & Walker, 2017).

This research confirms what a number of educators suspect about the negative effects of digital devices in the classroom, and some have taken it to mean they should definitely ban laptops from their lectures (Dynarski, 2017). Others argue that prohibiting laptop use robs students of the opportunity to develop metacognitive awareness of their own levels of distraction and make the appropriate adjustments (Holland, 2017).

Because technology is always changing, and because as a species, we are still adjusting to these new formats, I would hesitate to ban laptops from the classroom. Here's why:

Research on this topic is still pretty young: Some researchers have found no significant difference in performance between paper-based and digital note-takers (Artz, Johnson, Robson, & Taengnoi, 2017). My guess is that more research will pile up and get more refined, so we should take a measured approach for the time being.

Other researchers are looking at ways to reduce some of the problems associated with digital note-taking, like distraction: One study found that while doing online research, students who used matrix-style notes and were given time limits were much less likely to become distracted by other online material than students without those conditions (Wu, & Xie, 2018).

I believe we serve our students better by helping them find a note-taking system that works best for them. With that in mind, I would be more likely to have students experiment with hand-written and digital notes, share the research with them, and give them opportunities to reflect on and measure their results.

See What Other Teachers are Doing

To learn more about what other teachers have found to be most effective note-taking methods, I put the call out on Twitter, asking teachers to share what works for them. You can browse that conversation here.

References

Artz, B., Johnson, M., Robson, D., & Taengnoi, S. (2017). Note-taking in the digital age: Evidence from classroom random control trials. http://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3036455

Boyle, J. R. (2013). Strategic note-taking for inclusive middle school science classrooms. Remedial and Special Education, 34(2), 78-90. https://doi.org/10.1177%2F0741932511410862

Carter, S. P., Greenberg, K., & Walker, M. S. (2017). The impact of computer usage on academic performance: Evidence from a randomized trial at the United States Military Academy. Economics of Education Review, 56, 118-132. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2016.12.005

Chang, W., & Ku, Y. (2014). The effects of note-taking skills instruction on elementary students' reading. The Journal of Educational Research, 108(4), 278-291. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2014.886175

Dynarski, S. (2017). For Note Taking, Low-Tech is Often Best. Retrieved from https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/17/08/note-taking-low-tech-often-best

Haydon, T., Mancil, G.R., Kroeger, S.D., McLeskey, J., & Lin, W.J. (2011). A review of the effectiveness of guided notes for students who struggle learning academic content. Preventing School Failure: Alternative Education for Children and Youth, 55(4), 226-231. http://doi.org/10.1080/1045988X.2010.548415

Holland, B. (2017). Note taking editorials - groundhog day all over again. Retrieved from http://brholland.com/note-taking-editorials-groundhog-day-all-over-again/

Kiewra, K.A. (1985). Providing the instructor's notes: an effective addition to student notetaking. Educational Psychologist, 20(1), 33-39. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15326985ep2001_5

Kiewra, K.A. (2002). How classroom teachers can help students learn and teach them how to learn. Theory into Practice, 41(2), 71-80. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15430421tip4102_3

Luo, L., Kiewra, K.A. & Samuelson, L. (2016). Revising lecture notes: how revision, pauses, and partners affect note taking and achievement. Instructional Science, 44(1). 45-67. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11251-016-9370-4

Mueller, P.A., & Oppenheimer, D.M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159-1168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581

Nye, P.A., Crooks, T.J., Powley, M., & Tripp, G. (1984). Student note-taking related to university examination performance. Higher Education, 13(1), 85-97. https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00136532

Rahmani, M., & Sadeghi, K. (2011). Effects of note-taking training on reading comprehension and recall. The Reading Matrix, 11(2). Retrieved from https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/85a8/f016516e61de663ac9413d9bec58fa07bccd.pdf

Reynolds, S.M., & Tackie, R.N. (2016). A novel approach to skeleton-note instruction in large engineering courses: Unified and concise handouts that are fun and colorful. American Society for Engineering Education Annual Conference & Exposition, New Orleans, LA, June 26-29, 2016. Retrieved from https://www.asee.org/public/conferences/64/papers/15115/view

Robin, A., Foxx, R. M., Martello, J., & Archable, C. (1977). Teaching note-taking skills to underachieving college students. The Journal of Educational Research, 71(2), 81-85. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.1977.10885042

Wammes, J.D., Meade, M.E., & Fernandes, M.A. (2016). The drawing effect: Evidence for reliable and robust memory benefits in free recall. The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 69(9). http://doi.org/10.1080/17470218.2015.1094494

Wu, J. Y., & Xie, C. (2018). Using time pressure and note-taking to prevent digital distraction behavior and enhance online search performance: Perspectives from the load theory of attention and cognitive control. Computers in Human Behavior, 88, 244-254. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2018.07.008

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A summary of 8 best practices in note-taking, straight from the research.

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Great article on how to support students with ADHD

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I still remember the feeling I used to get when looking at the paperwork for my students who had ADHD, the forms listing the accommodations I would need to make for them-usually extended time on tests and maybe preferential seating.

The feeling could be best described as uncertain. I understood what these small changes looked like in practice-seat this student near the front of the room and give him more time to work on tests. But I knew almost nothing about the mechanics behind why the changes were supposed to make a difference. I signed the papers, returned them to the office, and made a mental note that if any of these students ever showed signs of struggle, it was probably because of the ADHD.

And they did struggle. The preferential seating and extra time wasn't often enough to help them turn in completed work on time, keep track of their things, and stay focused on class activities. Knowing as little as I did about ADHD, I figured that was the best we were going to get.

As uncomfortable as it makes me to say this, I will also admit that part of me wondered why these students couldn't just power through, find the motivation, try harder. Disorganization got the better of me sometimes too, and when that happened, I would just tidy things up, declutter, reset my priorities, and get back on track. It wasn't that hard. I also wondered whether parents were to blame, if a lack of structure, too much TV or video games, or some other oversight at home might be the true cause of students' difficulties.

Suffice it to say I really, REALLY didn't understand ADHD.

It turns out my lack of knowledge wasn't unique. A number of studies have shown that many teachers don't know enough to effectively meet the needs of students with ADHD (Alkahtani, 2013, Poznanski et al., 2018). While a growing number of teachers can recognize behaviors that might suggest ADHD in a child, knowledge drops off significantly when it comes to treatments and interventions that can help-the less training and knowledge a teacher has about ADHD, the less confident they feel about working with students who have it (Flanigan & Climie, 2018). This may explain the heartbreaking statistic that teachers tend to form fewer close relationships with students who have ADHD (Ewe, 2019).

Regardless of the subject area or age you teach, you're likely to have at least a few students with ADHD in your classroom every school year, so a good working knowledge of it should be part of any teacher's professional training. In the nine years I have been sharing resources on this website, I have only ever done one piece on ADHD, a 2017 interview with Seth Perler, who shared a great set of systems that help students who struggle with executive function. But that's it, so it's time to dig a little deeper.

A Solid Place to Start: Russell Barkley

Setting out to find good resources, I kept landing on the name Russell Barkley, an ADHD researcher who has been called a pioneer, a leading expert, and the gold standard in ADHD research. In all the places where his work appears-speaking on YouTube, as a guest on multiple podcasts, and as the author of many articles and books on ADHD-what is most striking are the number of comments from adults with ADHD who are relieved to finally find some validation, to hear clear explanations for why their brains work the way they do.

Although Barkley has been criticized for sounding negative and bleak when he speaks about the condition, using language that many would characterize as deficit thinking, his work has helped many people understand the workings of ADHD, how it affects those who have it, and how to best manage it. With that in mind, he seems like a good place to start; for suggestions on where to keep learning, I'll provide a list of resources at the end of this post.

Most of Barkley's work is directed at parents of children with ADHD and adults who also carry the diagnosis, but he has also written the highest-rated book for teachers on the subject, Managing ADHD in School: The Best Evidence-Based Methods for Teachers ( Bookshop.org | Amazon).

This slim book is not meant to be comprehensive or in-depth. Barkley states outright that he's not going to spend time on narrative prose and extensive research citations; his goal is to simply explain ADHD so that busy teachers can understand it, and tell them what they can do to help students who have it. His message is "Trust me, I know this stuff. Do this, not that." And while this obviously leaves him open to criticism, the book certainly delivers on its promises, and it's a great starting point for any teacher who wants a crash course on ADHD.

As Barkley is fully retired now, he declined to be interviewed here, so this is basically my own personal book report: I learned so many things from the book that would have helped immensely in my own work with students with ADHD, so I'm going to summarize what I think are the most important takeaways here. I strongly suggest you get a copy for yourself.

Although I'm doing my best to share this information accurately, there's a chance I'll get something wrong; if you see something that needs correcting, please let us know in the comments.

What do teachers need to understand about ADHD?

Before we get into classroom practices, I'm going to summarize a few key facts about ADHD that every teacher should know. Most of these happen to be things I personally didn't know-in fact, some are the exact opposite of beliefs I held-so I can only assume other teachers might also need this overview.

ADHD is a neurodevelopmental condition that impacts a person's executive function. This shows up as a difficulty with persisting toward goals and resisting distractions, holding information in working memory, and planning and problem solving. It also increases impulsivity, making immediate consequences more valuable than long-term ones, and interferes with inhibition, which results in quicker displays of emotion and other conduct that is generally discouraged in social settings. Unfortunately, all of these are often categorized as misbehavior or "poor choices" in the classroom, and if teachers don't understand how ADHD works, they can spend years responding in ways that will do little to address the underlying causes.

The cause of ADHD is largely genetic. In the book, Barkley asserts that "no compelling evidence indicates that social factors, such as parenting or educational environment, have been found to cause ADHD." Research has also ruled out diet, TV or media consumption, or videogame play as contributing factors (p. 15-16). With this information in mind, we can stop looking for outside factors to blame and get down to the business of helping these students do better in school. Knowing this should also put an end to attempts to "motivate" students with ADHD by giving them pep talks, angry reprimands, or guilt trips.

Roughly ten percent of your students are likely to have ADHD. Numbers for this are hard to pin down exactly: The National Institute of Mental Health puts the total number of children and adolescents diagnosed with ADHD at about 11%, the CDC at 9.4%, and Barkley at 5 to 8%. Regardless of the source, the numbers continue to rise every year, and boys have a higher rate of diagnosis than girls. More important than an exact number is this: Every year, you should expect to have at least a few students in your classroom who have ADHD.

Rates of diagnosis do not necessarily reflect the actual number of students with ADHD. Barkley says diagnoses tend to occur more in communities with more resources, and overdiagnosis is more frequent "in upper income neighborhoods where a premium is placed on academic excellence or acceleration" (p. 8). By contrast, students may be underdiagnosed in communities with fewer resources for diagnosis and treatment. Apart from just being good general knowledge to have, this may inform the research and action you take depending on the community where you teach: Perhaps more of your students actually need to be referred for diagnosis and treatment; by contrast, you may be working with students who are receiving treatment for a misdiagnosis.

ADHD is linked to a host of serious problems. People with ADHD have a greater risk of relationship problems (including social problems in school and both personal and professional adult relationships), employment issues, depression, anxiety, eating disorders, addiction, auto accidents, and suicide. These statistics shocked me, and they underscore how important it is for educators, who work with these students for hours every day, to learn as much as we can about how to better support them in school.

Medication can help. Although public opinion on medication is mixed, much of the research shows that ADHD medication, when combined with interventions and supports like the ones listed below, has a high rate of success for improving academic performance. It has also been shown to lower other risk factors, like suicide (Liang et al., 2018), addiction (Sherman, 2022), and auto accidents (Chang et al., 2017).

Research continues to evolve. What was known about ADHD twenty or even ten years ago has been enriched by a growing body of research on diagnosis, causes, interventions, and medication. So when you come across information that doesn't quite fit with your current understanding of ADHD, keep an open mind.

8 Principles for Helping Students with ADHD Succeed in the Classroom

Barkley packs tons of strategies and advice into his book; here I've attempted to condense them into eight general principles. Just like with so many strategies designed to help specific populations, these are also likely to help many of your students be more successful, regardless of whether they have identified difficulties with executive function.

1. Be proactive (rather than reactive).

Throughout the book, Barkley urges teachers to plan ahead with systems and strategies that can solve common ADHD-related challenges. Instead of waiting for problems to arise and then dealing with them, which is more likely to be done under duress, it's far more effective to anticipate challenges and set up a plan for preventing them.

For example, students with ADHD often struggle with transitions, so one strategy is to always pause a few minutes before a transition to verbally remind students of the procedures and rules around the upcoming transition.

2. Make the internal external.

Because ADHD affects working memory, a person with ADHD has a harder time keeping things like instructions for a task in their mind. "Even if they try to hold such information in mind ... any distractions will disrupt and degrade this special type of memory. The mental chalkboard of working memory is wiped clean by the distraction. ...having gone 'off-task,' the child is far less likely to reengage the original and now uncompleted goal or task" (p. 3-4).

Working memory can be boosted when we make the internal external: taking information that might typically be a mental process (like remembering the steps for turning in an assignment) and making it visible. Here are some examples:

Color-coded folders help students keep materials organized and find what they need more easily.

Visual timers that students can easily see keep them aware of how much time is left for a task.

Written rules and instructions posted close to where a task is going to be completed (Barkley calls this the "point of performance") offer support right when students need it.

Daily behavior report cards can work well to remind students of expectations and get immediate feedback on how well they are meeting them.

Notetaking helps students record what they are learning to make it more concrete.

3. Break large tasks into smaller ones.

Because ADHD makes it harder for students to manage long, complex tasks, it helps if teachers can guide students in breaking these tasks into smaller steps.

4. Maximize the effectiveness of incentives.

Author's note: If you listen to the podcast version of this post, you'll notice that this item is somewhat different from that version. The original primarily used the term "consequences" and came across very punishment-heavy; this did not accurately represent Barkley's recommendations. The written version is the more updated one and is the best representation of this principle.

Internal motivation is harder to sustain for students with ADHD due to reduced working memory and increased impulsivity, so external incentives are a powerful tool for sustaining motivation. He recommends these guidelines:

Positive reinforcements must significantly outweigh negative ones. In fact, Barkley recommends that any program of reinforcements have only powerful, positive incentives for 1 to 2 weeks before ever introducing negative ones.

Incentives need to be delivered with more immediacy and frequency than for students without ADHD.

Incentives may need to be "richer" than what you might typically use for other students. If a consequence (positive or negative) doesn't seem to be motivating a student with ADHD, it's probably because it doesn't mean much to the student and should be replaced with something the student values more.

With the above in mind, incentives also need to be varied or rotated more often for students with ADHD, as they lose their potency more quickly over time.

In the book, Barkley regularly uses the word "punishment" to describe negative consequences for undesirable behavior. Although he doesn't advocate for anything harsh, the term is still troubling to me after the book so clearly establishes that the behavior of someone with ADHD is caused by the way their brain is wired, not bad choices. So I would advise teachers reading his book to extract the valuable information he shares about consequences, while keeping in mind that we are not trying to cause shame or pain to students for their behavior; the goal is to create a system of incentives and reinforcements that prompt students to refocus and make adjustments.

5. Prepare for restlessness.

To work with-rather than against-these students' greater need for movement, keep a supply of stress balls, fidget toys, balance balls, or wobble chairs for them to use. You can also provide standing desks and other seating options so that student can to choose what works best for them, and plan frequent physical exercise breaks to give all students a chance to stretch and burn off some energy between activities that require more stillness.

6. Alternate low-appeal with high-appeal activities.

"Too many boring topics or activities back to back can lead a child with ADHD to lose focus," Barkley says (p. 37). This loss of focus can lead to the student becoming distracted and possibly disruptive to the class, so mix the more engaging, high-interest activities in between those that require more effort to maintain focus.

7. Use technology as a support.

Technology has been shown to be especially effective for students who have ADHD. Barkley cites research showing that students with ADHD "pay more attention to computer software learning programs and learn more from the practice with them than they do when working on worksheets" (p. 36).

He also recommends teaching these students keyboarding skills as early as possible. "Students with ADHD have a high occurrence of fine motor coordination problems...give them alternative means of expressing themselves in print" (p. 38).

8. Monitor and modify interventions regularly.

"One common scenario," Barkley writes, "is that a student responds initially to a well-tailored program, but then over time, the response deteriorates" (p. 28). This doesn't mean the interventions didn't work; it might mean they need to be modified or the implementation needs to be checked for fidelity.

A Lingering Question: Public Accountability?

As much as I want to wholeheartedly recommend the book, one repeated suggestion concerned me. In a few places, Barkley advocates for "public accountability" for student behavior (p. 28, p. 61), but at other times offers more discreet methods of accountability for older students (p. 62).

Public behavior charts and systems have gotten a lot of pushback in the teaching world over the past 5 to 10 years, and I agree with the criticism: The shame these can cause is not worth any benefit they may offer. I worry that some readers will come away from this book thinking that public shaming is an effective strategy for supporting students with ADHD, even though Barkley doesn't necessarily advocate for this. My best guess is that the recommendation should be interpreted to mean that the accountability system should be visible to the student, but not necessarily on display for the whole class to see.

With this in mind, a good rule of thumb for any time you see a recommendation in an education book, or on a website like mine, that feels off in some way or seems to go against your better judgment, listen to your gut.

I'll end this piece as I began it, with an admission of bare minimum knowledge on the subject of ADHD. As much as I have tried to accurately represent the recommendations and knowledge Barkley shares, there's a very good chance I got some stuff wrong, and this book is just a starting point, but it would have been incredibly helpful to me as a teacher, so I hope it helps you as well. If you have personal experience with ADHD, professional expertise, or links to other good resources, I urge you to share these in the comments below so we can build on what's here.

Learn More

This piece only scratches the surface of what the medical and educational communities are learning about ADHD. It is meant to serve as a jumping-off point so that teachers can be equipped with strategies that will be the most helpful to students with ADHD. To continue learning, try the resources listed below:

CHADD.org, or Children and Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, is an organization dedicated to improving the lives of people affected by ADHD. Their website houses loads of fantastic resources, plus an online teacher training course if you want to go in depth.

How to ADHD is a website and YouTube channel run by Jessica McCabe, full of high-energy, educational videos about ADHD. (Thank you for the recommendation, Charlotte!)

Want more from Russell Barkley? Listen to this recent interview from the Ologies podcast, where he provides an in-depth overview of ADHD and how it impacts those who have it.

The work of Edward Hallowell is worth considering for a more asset-based view of ADHD. Learn about his advocacy for replacing the term ADHD with the more neutral term VAST and this summary of his public "debate" with Russell Barkley. And for short bursts of learning, follow him on TikTok.

While you're on TikTok, also check out Sasha Hamdani, a psychiatrist and ADHD specialist whose following has grown exponentially in the last year for her helpful and humorous videos. You can also find her on Instagram.

One other resource, ADDitude magazine, was previously on this list, but a reader brought to our attention that it has received criticism in some ADHD forums and was given mixed reviews by the Media Bias/Fact Check website. Although readers can probably still find lots of value on the site, it would be wise to go in knowing what the criticisms are.

References

Barkley, R. (2016). Managing ADHD in School: The Best Evidence-Based Methods for Teachers . Pesi Publishing & Media.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2021, September 23). . Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Data and statistics about ADHD https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/adhd/data.html

National Institute of Mental Health. (n.d.). . Retrieved April 14, 2022, from NIMH" Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/statistics/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-adhd

Sherman, C. (2022, March 31). . ADDitude. The Truth About ADHD and Addiction https://www.additudemag.com/the-truth-about-adhd-and-addiction/

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8 Principles for Supporting Students with ADHD

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There is so much to learn about ADHD. These broad guidelines from a leading expert are a good place to start.