Head U Gator News
March 19, 2017
A grateful heart...
My heart is grateful for....
...Johnna and Julia, who worked with students during Gatorville to help them prepare for World Friendship Day. What a success and how much more powerful it was with our students presenting! Thank you both for your hard work and patience helping students prepare!
...Lauri House, who brought her class out to help revitalize the school garden the Friday before Spring Break. She and her students put some real muscle into pulling weeds, turning dirt and planting cabbages. If anyone else is interested in planting or maintaining a plot, please let me know!
...Maria, who makes our cafeteria a warm and welcoming place. She has a real heart for students and does a lot behind the scenes to make sure they are taken care of.
ADHD classroom strategies- Russell Barkley
Cindy found this great article by Russell Barkley, who did the videos we watched earlier this year. Some of it is just reminders, but I thought you would find the information helpful. There may be things you read that you say, "I knew that, but I'd forgotten it!" which is exactly why it's a good read. Also, we're entering that time of that year when we it's easy to feel that students are sitting on your last nerve. If you catch yourself feeling that way, read through these pointers and see what can be done to address the behavior. Don't forget, Marnie is a great resource for helping to address these behaviors!
1. Rules and instructions provided to children with ADHD must be clear, brief,
and often delivered through more visible and external modes of presentation
than are required for the management of children without ADHD. Stating directions clearly, having the child repeat them out loud, having the child utter them softly to themselves while following through on the instruction, and displaying sets of rules or rule–prompts (e.g., stop signs; big eyes, big ears for “stop, look, and listen” reminders) prominently throughout the classroom are essential to proper management of ADHD children. Relying on the child’s recollection of the rules as well as upon purely verbal reminders is often ineffective.
2. Consequences used to manage the behavior of ADHD children must be delivered
swiftly and more immediately than is needed for children without ADHD.
Delays in consequences greatly degrade their efficacy for ADHD children. The timing and strategic application of consequences with children with ADHD must be more sys-tematic and is far more crucial to their management than in normal children. This is not just true for rewards, but is especially so for punishment, which can be kept mild and still effective by delivering it as quickly after the misbehavior as possible—Swift, not harsh, justice is the essence of effective punishment.
3. Consequences must be delivered more frequently, not just more immediately, to children with ADHD in view of their motivational deficits. Behavioral tracking, or the ongoing adherence to rules after the rule has been stated and compliance initiated, appears to be problematic for children with ADHD. Frequent feedback or consequences for rule adherence seem helpful in maintaining appropriate degrees of tracking to rules over time.
4. The type of consequences used with children with ADHD must often be of a
higher magnitude, or more powerful, than that needed to manage the behavior of other children. The relative insensitivity of them to response consequences dictates that those chosen for inclusion in a behavior management program must have sufficient reinforcement value or magnitude to motivate children with ADHD to perform the desired behaviors. Suffice to say, then, that mere occasional praise or reprimands are simply not enough to effectively manage children with ADHD.
5. An appropriate and often richer degree of incentive must be provided within a setting or task to reinforce appropriate behavior before punishment can be implemented.
This means that punishment must remain within a relative balance with rewards or it is unlikely to succeed. It is therefore imperative that powerful reinforcement programs be established first and instituted over 1 to 2 weeks before implementing punishment in order for the punishment, sparingly used, to be maximally effective. Often children with ADHD will not improve with the use of response cost or time out if the availability of reinforcement is low in the classroom, and hence removal from it is unlikely to be punitive.
“Positives before negatives” is the order of the day for children with ADHD. When punishment fails, this is the first area which clinicians, consultants, or educators should explore for problems before instituting higher magnitude or more frequent punishment programs.
6. Those reinforcers or particular rewards that are employed must be changed or rotated more frequently for ADHD children than for those without ADHD, given the penchant of the former for more rapid habituation or satiation to response consequences, apparently rewards in particular. This means that even though a particular reinforcer seems to be effective for the moment in motivating child compliance, it is likely that it will lose its reinforcement value more rapidly than normal over time. Reward menus in classes, such as those used to back up token systems, must therefore be changed periodically, say every 2 to 3 weeks, to maintain the power or efficacy of the program in motivating appropriate child behavior. Failure to do so is likely to result in the loss of power of the reward program and the premature abandonment of token technologies based on the false assumption that they simply will not work any longer. Token systems can be maintained over an entire school year with minimal loss of power in the program provided that the reinforcers are changed frequently to accommodate to this problem of habituation. Such rewards can be returned later to the program once they have been set aside for awhile, often with the result that their reinforcement value appears to have been
improved by their absence or unavailability.
7. Anticipation is the key with ADHD children. This means that teachers must be more mindful of planning ahead in managing children with this disorder, particularly during phases of transition across activities or classes, to insure that the children are cognizant of the shift in rules (and consequences) that is about to occur. It is useful for teachers to take a moment to prompt a child to recall the rules of conduct in the upcoming situation, repeat them orally, and recall what the rewards and punishments will be in the impending situation before entering that activity or situation. Think aloud, think ahead is the important message to educators here. As noted later, by themselves such cognitive self–instructions are unlikely to be of lasting benefit, but when combined with contingency
management procedures, they can be of considerable aid to the classroom management of ADHD children.
8. Children with ADHD must be held more publicly accountable for their behavior and goal attainment than other children. The weaknesses in executive functioning associated with ADHD result in a child whose behavior is less regulated by internal information (mental representations) and less monitored via self–awareness than is the case in normal children. Addressing such weaknesses requires that the ADHD child be provided with more external cues about performance demands at key points of performance in school, be monitored more closely by teachers, and be provided with consequences more often across the school day for behavioral control and goal attainment than would be the case with other
children.
9. Behavioral interventions, while successful, only work while they are being implemented and, even then, require continued monitoring and modification over time for maximal effectiveness. One common scenario is that a student responds initially to a well–tailored
program, but then over time, the response deteriorates; in other cases, a behavioral program may fail to modify the behavior at all. This does not mean behavioral programs do not work. Instead, such difficulties signal that the program needs to be modified. It is likely that one of a number of common problems (e.g., rewards lost their value,
program not implemented consistently, program not based on a functional analysis of the factors related to the problem behavior) occurred.
Calendar
Monday, March 20
CEC meeting
Tuesday, March 21
Spanish 2:55-4:00
Wednesday, March 22
Special Olympics Track meet- parade before
2:55-4:00 3rd grade choir
Thursday,March 23
2:55-4:00 Good News
2:55-4:00 Marimba Band practice
3:15- Champions Meeting in the library (district)
Friday, March 24
Running Club 2:55-3:45
Bowman Sports 2:55- 4:00
Spanish 2:55-4:00
End of 9 weeks