The Nueva School's Innovative Learning Conference

Most students with ADHD are able to focus and sustain effort quite well for some specific tasks and activities, but they have great difficulty in engaging in most other areas. ADHD is now understood as developmental impairment of the brain's self-management system, its executive functions. This presentation will describe these impairments and how these executive functions impact the learning and performance of students in the school setting. It will focus on how teachers can adapt their work with those students to provide direction and support for them and for their parents. The presentation will also describe how and why some students who are quite intelligent are quite awkward socially — they are chronically unable to understand or care about how their words and actions are likely to affect others, and they consequently make trouble for themselves.