Teaching the Distractible Student Effectively Part 1 of a Series: Teaching the Distractible Student Effectively Introduction What do you need for teaching the distractible student effectively? Fred, a fifth-grade student at Quinte Learning Centre, was a restless student. He often turned around in his seat, made numerous trips to get things and was off task a great deal of the time. Needless to say, he did not get much work done and it showed in his results. We made a simple rule with him. He could work on our time or he could work on his time after school. We knew that he had holes in his skills that you could drive a Mack truck through, so we added a tutor to help him during classes so that he did not need to stay late. The extra help was the solution. Within the first year, Fred caught up on his work. Some children are easy to teach. Others present all kinds of behavioral challenges. Sometimes children are inattentive and do not stay on task for more than a few minutes at a time. Often times, these children disrupt our ability to teach others who are working hard. When this disruption becomes significant and the child is not learning, teachers and parents often turn to doctors, psychometrists or psychologists. Such visits and referrals may result in testing and in a diagnosis of Attention Deficit Disorder or Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. Any such diagnosis represents a serious situation for the learner and his or her family. Such diagnoses tend to take the problem and insert it somewhere into the brain of the child as if it were a neurological issue over which we have little or no control. In numerous instances, the proposed remedy turns out to be of a chemical nature- usually medication, most likely Ritalin. Are there other options? We would propose several that might be tried before any other steps are taken. Instructional Control for Teaching the Distractible Student Effectively It is clear that the teacher/parent must have instructional control in the learning environment in order to teach effectively. You cannot teach or learn in chaos. Ultimately the situation boils down to the fact that there is something that the student needs to know and that the teacher has the skills to teach, but it will only be successful if the student pays attention. When the student is learning well, there tend to be few behavior or attentional issues. It is when the student is ânot getting itâ that attention flags and distraction and disruption begins. Behavior Problems / Skill Problems Often times, behavior or attentional problems are overlaid on top of skill deficits. The child cannot do the task well or easily. They are smart enough to know that there is little likelihood of success, so they donât want to do it. They get little satisfaction and much frustration for their efforts and become discouraged, easily distracted or even disruptive. The very best defense against behavior problems is to make the student successful. That means that the teaching must be effective and the learning must be held to high standards. Perhaps the behavior problem is the result of the fact that some skill that is required for this task needs to be retaught in whole or in part and needs to be much better practiced so that the student can do the task quickly and easily and has no need to be off-task. For example, a child doesn’t like to write stories or do written assignments because his spelling skills are inadequate. Each effort results in much editing and correction and not much satisfaction. If the parent /teacher were to teach spelling more effectively, the task would suddenly be much more manageable and less challenging. Careful attention to the order in which skills are taught makes the teaching much more effective, the likelihood of failure far less and the chances for inappropriate behavior decreased. Student’s problems can generally be divided into two types, behavior problems or skill problems. Behavior problems occur when the child may or may not be able to do the task, but chooses not to work diligently. Skill problems are those which no amount of effort on the childâs part will change things until someone teaches him the necessary skill(s) to be able to succeed at that task. Skill problems are corrected by better teaching, more practice, and by holding students to high standards of performance on specific easily measured tasks. Behavior problems are resolved by managing the learning environment so that the student wants to attend and is rewarded for work hard. They are quite different processes. Bonus: Check out the FREE lessons of the Maloney Method Digital Reading Program. If you can read, you can teach a child to read. CLICK HERE TO LEARN MORE ABOUT OUR DIGITAL LEARNING WITH VIDEO LESSONS AND THE MALONEY METHOD
