+ Discussion Circles Provide “Restorative Justice” at Schools

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Sixteen schools in Milwaukee are taking part in a “restorative justice” program.  Students with issues sit in a circle where all sides present their views and then talk about how to work it out, according to Jack Orton’s article in the Journal Sentinel.

Around ten people, mostly other classmates, sit in a circle around an object such as electric candle.  You can’t talk unless you’re holding on to a ball which is passed around from one to another.

Everything that is said is confidential, and no one can speak without respecting everyone else.

The conversation starts with an icebreaker: what’s your favorite food, for example.  Then down to business, with one of the kids leading the discussion.  The leader follows a process in which everyone gets to present their side and talk about the impact  the problem had on them.

Finally, there’s a discussion of what ought to be done and how to get to a point of trust and respect.

Work it out, right?

According to kids as well as adults who are involved in this disciplinary approach, most of the time you do work it out.

Audubon Technology & Communication Center High School, as of last week, reported there had been only four suspensions so far this year, among about 100 ninth-graders at Audubon.

At Milwaukee Public Schools this year, there is a big push to reduce suspensions.  A national consulting team came in last year and determined that MPS had one of the highest suspension rates in the country.

“Restorative Justice”

The conversation circles are using principles of what is called restorative justice.  The goal is not to punish, but to get students onto a path of making better choices, understanding the impact of what they do, and dealing with other people in a more productive way. 

The hope is that kids will learn something, change their ways and not just miss classes for three days.

MPS is participating in a campaign called the Safe School/Healthy Student Initiative.  It has been funded by an $8.5 million  four-year federal grant, and is creating coalitions involving numerous community organizations including police and fire departments as well as juvenile justice and mental health officials. 

The goal is to promote more coordinated and effective ways to deal with aspects of children’s lives that don’t directly involve academics but indirectly affect learning in big ways. 

One student at Audubon says, “We’ve become more like a family and not just kids who go to school together.  We’ve grown up big time in the last few months.”

The new approach has resulted in kids giving more thought to the effect of what they do and say.  This year, there is much less of the he said/she said friction, says that ninth-grader.

Social studies teacher Marvin Williams feels, “It helps them think about the decisions they make, how they affect others.”

And Principal Barbara Goss says the big reason for success is the 100% buy-in from the staff.

Students Take the Lead

Last summer, about half dozen or so students took part in training in the program.  They are often the core figures in the discussion in the circles.  Teachers have said that often students speak more strongly to kids who caused problems than staff members themselves might. 

Hearing it from people their own age has great impact on the offenders.

It is true that sometimes the circles don’t work.  One teacher described a student who had had multiple violations and just wouldn’t accept responsibility for her actions.

But, says the teacher Lois Calloway, “I know she heard what we had to say.”  And if she had simply been suspended, there would never have been the conversation.

Overall the the effort has been hugely successful, says Goss, although there is still much work to do.

There has been improvement across MPS .  Kristi Cole heads the safety and health campaign.  She says the new approaches are really taking hold at schools like Audubon.

And is the climate in the schools improving?  “Without a doubt,” she says.

sole source: online article by Jack Orton in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel on 3/18/09.  www.jsonline.com

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards  614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Bad Behavior: Teach Lagging Thinking Skills

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In “Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges Are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them,”  Ross W Greene writes that kids with social, emotional and behavioral challenges lack important thinking skills.

From Chapter two: “Kids Do Well If They Can,” here are some thoughts.

Diagnoses may be called for, and medication may be useful.  But in every case a diagnosis is simply a name game.   It doesn’t really tell you what skills are lacking or what to do about that, says Greene.

According to Greene, the problem is lagging skills — skills that normally developing and maturing brains have mastered automatically.

Sometimes the demands being placed on a kid exceed his capacity to respond adaptively.  The result: he challenges the world around him.  We need to teach him the skills he lacks.

Take a look at some of the judgements we like to make:

• He just wants attention. Greene says we all want attention.  If a kid is seeking attention in a maladaptive way, doesn’t that suggest that he lacks the skills to seek attention in an adaptive way?
• He just wants his own way.  Again, says Greene, we all want our own way, and most of us are able to accomplish it adaptively.  But that requires skills often found lacking in these kids.
• He’s manipulating us.  Greene feels this very popular response about behaviorally challenged kids is misguided.  Competent manipulation requires various skills — forethought, planning, impulse control and organization — which are typically lacking in these children.  Kids most often described as being manipulative are those least capable of pulling it off. 
• He’s not motivated.  Greene finds this to be a form of the old “kids do well if they want to,” which he contends ought to be reframed as “kids do well if they can.”  Why would a kid not want to do well; why would he choose not to do well if he has the skills to make that happen?
• He’s making bad choices.  Asks Greene: are you sure he has the skills and repertoire to consistently make good choices?
• His parents are incompetent disciplinarians.  This is also popular, admits Greene, but it fails to take into account the fact that most challenging kids have well-behaved siblings.  And this statement doesn’t help anyone at school deal effectively with the child while he’s in the building.
• He has a bad attitude.  But, says Greene, he probably didn’t start out with one, and “bad attitudes”  tend to be the by-product of countless years of being misunderstood and overpunished by adults who didn’t recognize a kid lacking crucial thinking skills.  Kids are resilient, he thinks; they come around if we start doing the right thing.
• He has a mental illness.  Even if the child meets diagnostic criteria and may even benefit from psychotropic medication, Greene feels this description is a nonstarter.  “Mentally ill” is a limiting way to describe people with social, emotional and behavioral challenges.  Call it “problems in living,” and assist in teaching adaptive thinking.
• His brother was the same way.   So it’s the gene pool.  But we can’t do anything about that, and chances are his brother lacked the same important thinking skills.

Determine Which Skills are Lagging

For example, a child might have difficulty handling transitions, shifting from one mind-set or task to another.

This lagging skill is called a “shifting cognitive set,”  and is required any time a person moves from one task to another — gathering supplies and books from his locker to getting down to work in class.  Some kids are more likely to be baffled and struggle when life demands that they shift cognitive set.  They need to learn how to shift gears efficiently, and it’s a skill many challenging kids do not yet have.

If we want to help a kid whose challenging behavior is precipitated by demands for shifting set, we have a skill to teach.  [See Chapter 4 and 5 of the book.]

Some children have so much difficulty mannaging emotional response to frustration that they can’t think rationally. This is called “separation of affect.”    It means he can’t separate his emotions about a problem from the thinking he has to do to resolve the problem. 

Kids skilled at separating affect tend to respond to problems or frustrations with more thought; but those who lack the skill respond with more emotion.  Those children need to learn how to put emotions on the shelf so they can think rationally.

Analyze the Situations Where Behavior Occurs

Besides identifying skills that need to be taught, a second piece of information is needed: when and where do problems occur?

A “situational analysis” can give you invaluable information about the triggers or antecedents of troubling behavior.  It may be circle time, or recess, or a certain other child, or just the word “no” (and what it is the adult is saying “no” to…).    These situations are setting the stage for maladaptive behavior.

New Lenses, New Tool

Greene’s mantra throughout the book is

Behind every challenging behavior is an unsolved problem or a lagging skill (or both).

Lagging skills are the WHY.  Unsolved problems are the WHO, WHAT, WHEN  and WHERE.

Greene offers his assessment tool called ALSUP (Assessment of Lagging Skills and Unsolved Problems).  The ALSUP is a list of the lagging skills a child needs, along with a section for listing unsolved problems or triggers.

He suggests bringing a copy of the ALSUP to meetings in which a child’s challenges are being discussed.  Why?  Greene contends all caregivers of a particular child must achieve consensus on and list the problems that seem to be precipitating the challenging behaviors. 

Why consensus?  Because if caregivers have disparate notions about what’s getting in this child’s way, there can be no coherent treatment.  The time devoted to hashing out and coming to a consensus about a kid’s lagging skills and unsolved problems is worth it in the end.

Once everyone has a handle on this child’s lagging skills and unsolved problems, they’ve taken a major step toward fixing things.  The kid’s challenging episodes are now going to be highly predictable.  Caregivers and teachers will be able to be proactive.

You may discover that this child has a long list of lagging skills and unsolved problems.  Prioritize the skills you’re going to start teaching and the problems you’re going to start helping him to solve.  You can’t do everything at once.

Greene feels that children who haven’t responded to natural consequences don’t need more consequences.  They need adults who are knowledgeable about how challenging kids come to be challenging; who can determine which skills are lacking and which problems are setting the stage for maladaptive behavior; and who know how to teach those skills to solve the problems.

Contents

The nine chapters are titled “School of Hard Knocks,” “Kids Do Well If They Can,” Lesson Plans,” “Let’s Get It Started,” “Bumps in the Road,” “Filling in the Gaps,” “Meeting of the Minds,” “School of Thought,” and “Lives in the Balance.”

In addition, the book includes the Assessment of Lagging Skills and Unsolved Problems (ALSUP), a Collaborative Problem Solving (CPS) Plan, Sources, Books Cited and Other Recommended Reading, and an Index.

“Lost at School: Why Our Kids with Behavioral Challenges are Falling Through the Cracks and How We Can Help Them,” by Ross W Greene, PhD, is published by Scribner, 2008.  ISBN 13: 978-1-4165-7226-8.  The price (hardcover) is $25.00.

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email   aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Web Sites to Stop Violence and Bullying

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This week’s offerings from EduHound’s “Classroom Tools and Tips”  deal with violence prevention:

• National Youth Violence Prevention Resource Center  –  A Federal resource for professionals, parents and youth working to prevent violence committed by and against young people.  www.safeyouth.org
• Stop Bullying Now!  –  Practical research-based strategies to reduce bullying in schools.   www.stopbullyingnow.com
• Kidscape:  Dealing With Bullies  –  Helping to prevent bullying and child abuse.  www.kidscape.org.uk
• NEA: National Bullying Awareness Campaign (NBAC)  – Its goal is to reduce, and eventually eradicate, bullying in America’s public schools.  www.nea.org/schoolsafety/bullying.html
• Maine Project Against Bullying  –  A survey of bullying behavior among Maine third graders.  http://lincoln.midcoast.com/~wps/against/bullying.html
• STOP cyberbullying – Information about cyberbullying, how it works, and how to deal with cyberbullies.  www.stopcyberbullying.org

source: www.eduhound.com Eduhound Weekly is a magazine for teachers offering valuable edtech resources to incorporate into K-12 classrooms.

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Bullying in Fayetteville and Somewhere Near You

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In the NY Times, Dan Barry writes:

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark.

All lank and bone, the boy stands at the corner with his younger sister, waiting for the yellow bus that takes them to their respective schools. He is Billy Wolfe, high school sophomore, struggling.

Moments earlier he left the sanctuary that is his home, passing those framed photographs of himself as a carefree child, back when he was 5. And now he is at the bus stop, wearing a baseball cap, vulnerable at 15.

A car the color of a school bus pulls up with a boy who tells his brother beside him that he’s going to beat up Billy Wolfe. While one records the assault with a cellphone camera, the other walks up to the oblivious Billy and punches him hard enough to leave a fist-size welt on his forehead.

The video shows Billy staggering, then dropping his book bag to fight back, lanky arms flailing. But the screams of his sister stop things cold.

The aggressor heads to school, to show friends the video of his Billy moment, while Billy heads home, again. It’s not yet 8 in the morning.

Bullying is everywhere, including here in Fayetteville, a city of 60,000 with one of the country’s better school systems. A decade ago a Fayetteville student was mercilessly harassed and beaten for being gay. After a complaint was filed with the Office of Civil Rights, the district adopted procedures to promote tolerance and respect — none of which seems to have been of much comfort to Billy Wolfe.

It remains unclear why Billy became a target at age 12; schoolyard anthropology can be so nuanced. Maybe because he was so tall, or wore glasses then, or has a learning disability that affects his reading comprehension. Or maybe some kids were just bored. Or angry.

Whatever the reason, addressing the bullying of Billy has become a second job for his parents: Curt, a senior data analyst, and Penney, the owner of an office-supply company. They have binders of school records and police reports, along with photos documenting the bruises and black eyes. They are well known to school officials, perhaps even too well known, but they make no apologies for being vigilant. They also reject any suggestion that they should move out of the district because of this.

The many incidents seem to blur together into one protracted assault. When Billy attaches a bully’s name to one beating, his mother corrects him. “That was Benny, sweetie,” she says. “That was in the eighth grade.”

It began years ago when a boy called the house and asked Billy if he wanted to buy a certain sex toy, heh-heh. Billy told his mother, who informed the boy’s mother. The next day the boy showed Billy a list with the names of 20 boys who wanted to beat Billy up.

Ms. Wolfe says she and her husband knew it was coming. She says they tried to warn school officials — and then bam: the prank caller beat up Billy in the bathroom of McNair Middle School.

Not long after, a boy on the school bus pummeled Billy, but somehow Billy was the one suspended, despite his pleas that the bus’s security camera would prove his innocence. Days later, Ms. Wolfe recalls, the principal summoned her, presented a box of tissues, and played the bus video that clearly showed Billy was telling the truth.

Things got worse. At Woodland Junior High School, some boys in a wood shop class goaded a bigger boy into believing that Billy had been talking trash about his mother. Billy, busy building a miniature house, didn’t see it coming: the boy hit him so hard in the left cheek that he briefly lost consciousness.

Ms. Wolfe remembers the family dentist sewing up the inside of Billy’s cheek, and a school official refusing to call the police, saying it looked like Billy got what he deserved. Most of all, she remembers the sight of her son.

“He kept spitting blood out,” she says, the memory strong enough still to break her voice.

By now Billy feared school. Sometimes he was doubled over with stress, asking his parents why. But it kept on coming.

In ninth grade, a couple of the same boys started a Facebook page called “Every One That Hates Billy Wolfe.” It featured a photograph of Billy’s face superimposed over a likeness of Peter Pan, and provided this description of its purpose: “There is no reason anyone should like billy he’s a little bitch. And a homosexual that NO ONE LIKES.”

Heh-heh.

According to Alan Wilbourn, a spokesman for the school district, the principal notified the parents of the students involved after Ms. Wolfe complained, and the parents — whom he described as “horrified” — took steps to have the page taken down.

Not long afterward, a student in Spanish class punched Billy so hard that when he came to, his braces were caught on the inside of his cheek.

So who is Billy Wolfe? Now 16, he likes the outdoors, racquetball and girls. For whatever reason — bullying, learning disabilities or lack of interest — his grades are poor. Some teachers think he’s a sweet kid; others think he is easily distracted, occasionally disruptive, even disrespectful. He has received a few suspensions for misbehavior, though none for bullying.

Judging by school records, at least one official seems to think Billy contributes to the trouble that swirls around him. For example, Billy and the boy who punched him at the bus stop had exchanged words and shoves a few days earlier.

But Ms. Wolfe scoffs at the notion that her son causes or deserves the beatings he receives. She wonders why Billy is the only one getting beaten up, and why school officials are so reluctant to punish bullies and report assaults to the police.

Mr. Wilbourn said federal law protected the privacy of students, so parents of a bullied child should not assume that disciplinary action had not been taken. He also said it was left to the discretion of staff members to determine if an incident required police notification.

The Wolfes are not satisfied. This month they sued one of the bullies “and other John Does,” and are considering another lawsuit against the Fayetteville School District. Their lawyer, D. Westbrook Doss Jr., said there was neither glee nor much monetary reward in suing teenagers, but a point had to be made: schoolchildren deserve to feel safe.

Billy Wolfe, for example, deserves to open his American history textbook and not find anti-Billy sentiments scrawled across the pages. But there they were, words so hurtful and foul.

The boy did what he could. “I’d put white-out on them,” he says. “And if the page didn’t have stuff to learn, I’d rip it out.”

source: this is the article written by Dan Barry, in the NY Times on 3/24/08.  www.nytimes.com

Also online: A slide show of Billy Wolfe at www.nytimes.com/danbarry.

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ ADHD and Bad Behavior Don’t Mean Bad Grades

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This is from the NY Times, 11/13/07

by Benedict Carey

Educators and psychologists have long feared that children entering school with behavior problems were doomed to fall behind in the upper grades. But two new studies suggest that those fears are exaggerated.  One concluded that kindergartners who are identified as troubled do as well academically as their peers in elementary school. The other found that children with attention deficit disorders suffer primarily from a delay in brain development, not from a deficit or flaw.  

Experts say the findings of the two studies, being published today in separate journals, could change the way scientists, teachers and parents understand and manage children who are disruptive or emotionally withdrawn in the early years of school. The studies might even prompt a reassessment of the possible causes of disruptive behavior in some children.  

“I think these may become landmark findings, forcing us to ask whether these acting-out kinds of problems are secondary to the inappropriate maturity expectations that some educators place on young children as soon as they enter classrooms,” said Sharon Landesman Ramey, director of the Georgetown University Center on Health and Education, who was not connected with either study.  

In one study, an international team of researchers analyzed measures of social and intellectual development from over 16,000 children and found that disruptive or antisocial behaviors in kindergarten did not correlate with academic results at the end of elementary school.  

Kindergartners who interrupted the teacher, defied instructions and even picked fights were performing as well in reading and math as well-behaved children of the same abilities when they both reached fifth grade, the study found.  

Other researchers cautioned that the findings, being reported in the journal Developmental Psychology, did not imply that emotional problems were trivial or could not derail academic success in the years before or after elementary school.  

In the other study, researchers from the National Institute of Mental Health and McGill University, using imaging techniques, found that the brains of children with attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder developed normally but more slowly in some areas than the brains of children without the disorder.  

The disorder, also known as A.D.H.D., is by far the most common psychiatric diagnosis given to disruptive young children; 3 percent to 5 percent of school-age children are thought to be affected. Researchers have long debated whether it was due to a brain deficit or to a delay in development.  Doctors said that the report, being published in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, helps to explain why so many children grow out of the diagnosis in middle school or later, often after taking stimulant medications to improve concentration in earlier grades. 

The findings in the first study grew out of a collaboration among a dozen leading researchers to reassess data from six large child-development studies performed since 1970. Each of these six studies tracked hundreds of children from an early age through elementary school on a number of measures, including reading and math skills, emotional stability and concentration, or attention.

Most of the studies used teacher reports to gauge students’ emotional and social progress and their ability to pay attention when asked. The researchers adjusted the findings to eliminate the influence of factors like family income and family structure. While there was little correlation between behavior problems in kindergarten and later academic success, the researchers did find that scores on math tests at ages 5 or 6 were highly correlated with academic success in fifth grade.

Kindergarten reading skills and scores on attention measures — where youngsters with A.D.H.D. falter — also predicted later academic success, but less strongly than math scores did. The pattern was about the same in girls as in boys, and for children from affluent families as well as those from lower-income groups. 

The authors of the study suggested that preschool programs might consider developing more effective math training. The findings should also put to rest concerns that boys and girls who are restless, disruptive or withdrawn in kindergarten are bound to suffer academically.  

“For kindergarten, it appears teachers are able to work around these behavior problems in a way that enables kids to learn just as much as other kids with equal levels of ability,” said the lead author, Greg J. Duncan, a professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University.  The findings, Dr. Duncan said, have been “very controversial among developmental psychologists who have seen the paper.” 

One who is concerned, Ross Thompson, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis, said it would be a mistake to conclude from the results that programs to guide preschoolers’ emotional development were not helpful. “That would be a double whammy for really difficult kids,” Dr. Thompson said, “to have no help managing their behavior and then — wham! — to get labeled as problem kids as soon as they enter school.”  

In the second study, government psychiatric researchers compared brain scans from two groups of children: one with attention deficit disorder, the other without. The scientists had tracked the children — 223 in each group — from ages 6 to 16, taking multiple scans on each child.  In a normally developing brain, the cerebral cortex — the outer wrapping, where circuits involved in conscious thought are concentrated — thickens during early childhood. It then reverses course and thins out, losing neurons as the brain matures through adolescence.

The study found that, on average, the brains of children with A.D.H.D. began this “pruning” process at age 10 ½, about three years later than their peers.  About 80 percent of those with attention problems were taking or had taken stimulant drugs, and the researchers did not know the effect of the medications on brain development.

Doctors consider stimulant drugs a reliable way to improve attention in the short term; the new study is not likely to change that attitude. 

But the greatest delays in brain maturation were found in precisely those areas of the cortex most involved in attention and motor control, said the lead author of the study, Dr. Philip Shaw, a psychiatrist at the National Institute of Mental Health. “Those are exactly the areas where we would expect to find differences,” Dr. Shaw said. Doctors cannot diagnose attention deficit or any other psychiatric disorder with imaging technology, in part because brains vary so much that a single series of images can seldom reveal who has a disorder.

The new findings suggest that searching for a clear abnormality or flaw is the wrong approach, at least for attention problems.  “The basic sequence of development in the brains of these kids with A.D.H.D. was intact, absolutely normal,” Dr. Shaw said. “I think this is pretty strong evidence we’re talking about a delay, and not an abnormal brain.” 

About three in four children do grow out of the problem by early adulthood, he said.

source: NY Times Nov 13 2007

 

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or email  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Executive Function: Its Impact on School Performance

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An absolutely indispensible book, “Teaching Teens With ADD and ADHD”, by Chris A Zeigler Dendy, has a chapter on the impact of executive function on school work.

Executive function  actions are “actions we perform to ourselves and direct at ourselves so as to accomplish self-control, goal-directed behavior, and the maximization of future outcomes” (Dr Russell Barkley).  And since these actions are cognitive, they are “done in our heads”, and thus not observable.

One expert uses the metaphor of an orchestra conductor: this function organizes various “instruments” to begin playing singly or in combination, integrates the “music” by bringing in and fading certain actions, and controls their pace and intensity.

Students with ADD and ADHD may have difficulty with some, but not all, of the following characteristics of executive function (teachers and parents:  think about how you might scaffold, prompt and support a child in these situations):

Working memory and recall

1.   Affects the here and now because of limited working memory capacity, weak short-term memory.  It also causes forgetfulness and the inability to keep several things in mind. 

As a result, students have difficulty performing mental analyses usch as math computations in their head, remembering a “to-do” list, remembering multiple requests.  They forget assignments, books, chores.

2.  Affects their sense of past events, causing difficulty recalling the past. 

As a result, students do not study past actions, and don’t learn easily from past behavior.  They act without a sense of hindsight, and repeat misbehavior.

3.  Affects their sense of time, causing difficulty holding events in mind (necessary to develop a sense of time and its passage).  They have difficulty using a sense of time to prepare for upcoming events and the future, and difficulty holding events in mind in the order they occurred (this is a basic building block for a sense of time). 

As a result, students can’t judge the passage of time accurately, or estimate how much time it will take to finish a task.  They may perceive time as passing slowly when tasks are boring, or become impatient when asked to wait (time drags).  They may occasionally hyperfocus on high-interest tasks and lose all track of time.  Their sense of time is like that of a much younger, non-ADD child.

4.  Affects their sense of self awareness, in a diminished sense of self-control. 

As a result, students don’t easily examine their own behavior, don’t easily change their own behavior.  They don’t see how their behavior affects others.

5.  Affects their sense of the future, limiting foresight: they live in the present and focus on the here and now.  They are less likely to talk about time or the future. 

As a result students have difficulty projecting lessons learned in the past into the future.  They have difficulty preparing for the future, and are less likely to do so. 

Activation, arousal and effort

1.  Affects their ability to start and complete a task, so that they appear unmotivated.  They have difficulty getting started, and difficulty maintaining effort. 

As a result, students procrastinate, don’t follow through and fail to finish school work.

2.  Affects their level of alertness and ability to pay attention, causing difficulty becoming alert enough to pay attention, as well as difficulty maintaining attention.  They may have sleep problems.  Students with ADD only (not hyperactive) can have low energy levels. 

As a result, students are easily distracted and don’t pay attention consistently; they don’t seem to have enough energy to get started or complete tasks (ADD).  They may be irritable because of sleep deprivation, and sleep in class.

  Impulsivity

1.  Affects their ability to inhibit their speech and behavior.  It causes difficulty with stopping to think before acting or speaking, as well as stopping behavior that’s getting them into trouble. 

As a result, students blurt out in class, talk back to teachers before they think, get into yelling matches or fights.  They act impulsively, get into trouble, and then — sometimes — get suspended.

Controlling emotions

1.  Affects the ability to control feelings, causing difficulty putting emotions on hold, or separating emotions from actions: they are one.  They have difficulty splitting facts from feelings (a skill needed to be objective). 

As a result, students are more emotionally reactive, more sensitive to criticism, are mainly concerned with their own feeling.  They have difficulty seeing another person’s perspective.  They may seem self-centered or immature; they may truly be selfish.

2.  Affects their ability to direct behavior toward goals, causing difficulty delaying gratification.  Students have difficulty regulating emotions to achieve goals.  They have a hard time putting up with tedious or boring activities.  They can’t focus on future goals; immediate feelings are most important.  They have trouble motivating themselves; rewards in school (grades) are too far in the future to be effective. 

As a result, students want to quit if they become bored with a task, or college, or a job.  They don’t stick with things and give up more easily than their peers.  Rewards must be received immediately.  They have difficulty generating their own intrinsic rewards (feeling good simply because the work is done). 

Internalizing language

1.  Affects internalization of speech or self-talk (it is delayed), causing difficulty using language to control oneself or directing behavior with one’s own voice. 

As a result students have trouble reflecting on, or thinking through, their actions beforehand.  They are less likely to use their past experiences, are less likely to follow rules.  They have difficulty managing their own behavior.

Taking an issue apart, analyzing the pieces, reconstituting and organizing it into new ideas 

1.  Affects their ability to to complex problem solving. 

As a result, students have a hard time analyzing and breaking down a problem.  They can’t determine what caused a problem or develop a plan to correct it.  They have trouble knowing how and where to start to solve a problem.

2.  Affects their spoken and written communication, causing weak verbal fluency, especially when they are trying to respond to a question or give a concise answer.  They have difficulty communicating with others. 

As a result, students have difficulty writing essays or reports, as well as sequencing and organizing ideas.  They have a hard time rapidly stringing words together, describing an issue in words, or expressing themselves rapidly and effectively.

When teachers and parents begin observing these problems, they need to begin devising ways to help the student, using prompts and scaffolding techniques, as well as explicitly modeling behaviors for the student.

sole source:”Teaching Teens With ADD and ADHD”, by Chris Zeigler Dendy.  Published by Woodbine House, 2000.  ISBN 1-890627-20-8.  Zeigler Dendy has a website at www.chrisdendy.com , and invites you to “visit me and my family” there.

tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or  aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com

+ Seminars for Parents by Love and Logic Institute

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Love and Logic,  an institute that provides trainings around the country for parents and educators, is located in Golden Colorado.  Love and Logic also trains trainers.  It  offers dozens of helpful books and DVDs.  Their tag line is “Helping Parents and Professionals Create Responsible Kids Since 1977″.

Open a brochure and you find: “The Two Rules of Love and Logic”:

Rule #1     Adults set limits without anger, lectures, threats or repeated warnings.  When we describe what we will do or allow, that’s setting a limit.  When we tell a child what he should or shouldn’t do, that’s a possible fight.

Rule #2     When children cause problems, adults hand these problems back in loving ways.  We hand the problem back by replacing anger and lectures with a strong dose of empathy followed by the logical consequence.

Presentations have been held in

• Rochester Hills MI 
• San Jose CA  
• Lenoxa KS 
• Asheville NC 
• Chicago
• Denver 
• Phoenix 
• Atlanta 
• Omaha 
• Livonia MI 

Check for a location near you.  If you phone 800-338-4065 between 7am and 5pm (MT)  Monday through Friday, a live person will answer, they promise.

Love and Logic is on the web at www.loveandlogic.com

 tutoring in Columbus OH:   Adrienne Edwards   614-579-6021   or            aedwardstutor@columbus.rr.com