How do you Teach Children with ADHD if you have ADHD yourself, Accompanied by Difficulties with Executive Function?

Some of the graduate and undergraduate students whom I have taught over the years have had ADHD themselves and consequently, have been very nervous about how they were going to manage a class of students with all of the multitasking that goes along with being a successful teacher.


What can they do to help themselves? I tell them that one area, among others, that they should work on improving is their executive function, which is basically like being their own CEO.


Like a CEO-Chief Executive Officer, a teacher must always remember her goals and plans and see the needs and the benefits of projects from end to end. She should work on facilitating the following:

• To see and to maintain goals
• To plan and to organize
• To inhibit competitive processes
• To monitor these communications and functions

I do not mean to be redundant, BUT it is vital for anyone with difficulties with executive function to plan, to inhibit and to execute, which is oftentimes not as easy as it sounds to do. I often tell my students that when I am working on their lesson plans, I find myself on the Banana Republic website, so I quickly say to myself, “Inhibit this behavior that is interfering with your goals. Stop looking at those clothes and get back to work.” (Truly!)


What kind of difficulties can you expect to experience if you have problems with executive function?


• You may have difficulty with tracking your position through the passage of time and planning accordingly, so you often get burned


• Time is fluid for adults with ADHD: Boring tasks take forever and interesting tasks take no time


• You get lost in the moment: Lost time


• You do not do the right thing at the right time


• You miss transition times (This difficulty may impact how you help you students to manage transitions!)


• You miss deadlines when things take longer than you anticipated


• You run late when you do not plan ahead enough


What are some methods that you can try in order to ameliorate some of your executive function difficulties, such as what many researchers call, sense of time solutions?


 Put up clocks everywhere to keep you aware of the time


 Wear a watch that beeps (in class, you may want to use your cell phone, with your principal’s permission, of course) and keep the vibrate mode on in the alarm mode to keep you aware of time passing


 When doing work on your lesson plans, set alarms on kitchen timers or on PDAs, so that you restrict yourself to completing your work within a specific time frame


 Work backwards in time when you have a specific time that you have to arrive somewhere


 In order to prevent yourself from spending “lost time” on the computer, set a timer so that the you are aware when one hour has expired


Try these methods and let me know how they worked.