Teaching Students with ADHD with Cathryn Friel

[Music] Welcome to Intentional Teaching, a podcast aimed at educators to help them develop foundational teaching skills and explore new ideas in teaching. I'm your host, Derek Brough. I hope this podcast helps you be more intentional in how you teach and in how you develop as a teacher over time. If you've taught in higher education for any length of time, you've probably had one or more students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, better known as ADHD. You might not have known it, however, since some students with ADHD haven't been diagnosed yet, and some students not to disclose it to their instructors. This type of neurodivergence can be a little invisible to instructors, which is why it's important we learn more about it and how we can design and teach courses that support these students. Catherine Friel knows a lot about teaching students with ADHD. Cat is a senior instructional designer at Missouri Online, and she completed her PhD last year with a qualitative study examining the experiences of students with ADHD and online courses. I found out about Cat and her work while looking over the program for UPSIA's Summer Conference. UPSIA is a professional association that focuses on continuing professional and online education, and they're hosting a conference in July for faculty, staff, and administrators who work in these areas. Full disclosure, UPSIA has provided me with a press pass to the virtual components of their Summer Conference. Cat will be sharing her study at the UPSIA conference, and I reached out to her to learn more about her work and her own experiences as a student with ADHD. I learned a lot from our conversation about how students with ADHD experience and cope with college courses, and about how instructors can make their courses, especially their online courses, more welcoming to neurodiverse students. [Music] Well, Cat, thank you for being on Intentional Teaching. I'm glad to have you on the podcast today and to get to know you and your work a little bit more. Thanks for joining us. Well, thank you for having me on there. I really appreciate it. This is a fun opportunity. Good, good. Before we talk about your project, I'm going to ask you my usual opening question. Can you tell us about a time when you realized you wanted to be an educator? It's interesting because way back in grade school, fourth, fifth grade that long ago, I had a teacher that she would let me and another friend stay in at recess and pretend to teach. So way back then, I had a roundabout trip to get here. I did a lot of things in between before I actually settled on being an educator and an instructional designer. But it was hit early. I ignored it, and here I am. But here you are. That's great. That's great. Well, we're going to talk about your project, which deals with students who have ADHD and how they experience online courses. And you've disclosed that you were diagnosed with ADHD as an adult, correct? Correct. So looking back, knowing that about yourself now, looking back on your time as a student, how do you think having ADHD affected your college experience? In a lot of ways. I was and still am a procrastinator. So one of the things about ADHD is we don't produce enough dopamine. And so there are, we have to find other ways to get that dopamine. And unfortunately procrastination and time crunches dumps a lot of dopamine. So, you know, papers and projects and stuff like that were always last minute. I do remember one semester in college where I thought I was going to be brilliant and just take Monday Wednesday Friday classes and have Tuesday Thursday for homework. That was a disaster because I could do the Monday Wednesday Friday classes, but I could never get motivated on the Tuesdays and Thursdays to sit down and do those long stretches of homework. You know, being late to class is not uncommon. And there is a lot of, there's impulse control issues. And you most often think of that with little kids in, as you know, bouncing off the walls, always moving and stuff like that. For someone in college, a lot of time that translate into speaking out of turn or talking over people because you've got an idea and you know that if you wait, it's going to be gone and you're not going to get it back. So, there was just a lot of things that I look back now. When I was in my master's program, I was in online. And I would always wait until the last minute for my paper. And I would always have what I call my pre paper breakdown. I would just sit in front of my computer and ball. And until I got that out of my system, I couldn't, I couldn't start on the paper. It was just facing that blank screen and the subject matter wasn't all that interesting. I just couldn't do it. But the dopamine kicked in and we sat down. I also never did drafts ever. So my, the first time that I wrote anything, that was what was getting submitted. And so when, you know, people say, well, do a draft and then come back later. I have a real hard time doing that because I was always editing and drafting at the same time because I didn't have time to do a complete draft step away from it and come back in and refine. Because you had procrastinated. Is that why? Yeah. Yeah. The other reason, even if I didn't procrastinate, I've done it once. Now I'm bored with it. Okay. So, you know, I can write it the first time. It's a struggle, but I can do it. But the idea of going back and editing something that I've already, I've been there, done that. I'm ready to move on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's fascinating. Did you, did you find yourself, I mean, you weren't diagnosed at that time, but were there kind of work around you had figured out in your life to, to kind of manage things? Yes. I need to be early morning. I have to get up and I have to have some place or something to do. Without that impetus, it's kind of like I will, even before all the multimedia and stuff. That's like, oh, I just, that book looks interesting or I know I need to write this paper, but my closet, which I haven't cleaned out in six years, just all of a sudden is desperately calling to me. So you, you, you find stuff that interests you in the moment to avoid what you're doing. I like to call it productive avoidance. I'm really good at production avoidance. Right. Not just daydreaming, but doing something else that's maybe less time sensitive, but still useful. Yes, exactly. And having my classes basically back to back, because if I had time between classes, I would waste, I wouldn't get anything done. Neurotypical students will have an 8 a.m. class and they maybe not have one until 10 and then they'll spend that hour in between either prepping for the next class or doing homework for the previous class or something. Not me. I have to have it all and then sit down in a block and get it done. And that was another thing is, you know, they always say, work for half an hour, 45 minutes, take a break, come back, you're refreshed. I can't do that because once I take a break, the focus and the motivation has gone and it is virtually impossible for me to get back into it. Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Well, let's let's talk about your project. Give us the big picture. What were the questions that you were pursuing and kind of what methods did you use to try to answer those questions? If you don't mind, I'm in a back yet, just a little bit as to why I was very interested in this project. I have right now a teenage son who was diagnosed with ADHD when he was in the third grade and that's about the time that I got my diagnosis because ADHD tends to run in families. And they are seeing this a lot more that if one member is diagnosed with ADHD, especially a child, there's probably a parent in there that has it. I knew that I struggled with my online classes with my ADHD and that is a trend where higher education is going. So, I was really concerned about my son, who will be going to college in a few years. And I wanted to be able to advise instructors on things that they can do within a course site that would support students with ADHD. A lot of times, you don't know that you have a student with ADHD. They don't go to disability services and they don't disclose it to an instructor. And so, if you can put in support systems that are going to help neurodiverse students like students with ADHD, you're actually going to end up helping everybody. So I wanted to see what those things were. My goal has always been to do an application dissertation, not a theoretical one. So that's where, that's how I got into this in the first place. So I wanted to know how the students with ADHD experience online courses. What challenges do they have? Do they see any benefits in it? What types of things do they think would support them? And what strategies are they currently using in their online courses to get them through? So, so that's how this got started and that's what I was interested in. Going through high school and grade school, if you're diagnosed with ADHD, you have a lot of support systems. Even if you're not diagnosed, there are a lot of students with ADHD that have parents that are very supportive. They're on them. Did you get your homework done? Don't forget you've got this paper, do next week. Where are you on the paper? We got to get you to school. You got to get up. You have to eat. So there's people there that are guiding and supporting them. When they hit college is when quite a few people are getting official diagnosis is because those support systems are gone. They now have to get up on their own. They have to get to class on their own. They have to know they have to sit down because that papers do tomorrow. So then they start getting stress and anxiety. That takes them to the health services on campus and then that starts the ball rolling for ADHD. Diagnosis. Right. Yeah. So that makes sense. So it's maybe students who were not diagnosed in high school but had that support structure to do well, then they get to college. And the ADHD starts to cause this kind of snowball effect. Yeah. Right. And years ago there was a common perception that you out grew your ADHD. That as you got older, you out grew it. You don't outgrow ADHD. Your symptomology changes in over the years whether you realize that whether it's conscious or not, you have started establishing coping mechanisms and strategies and put them in place. So you know by the time that you're 16, 17 and in high school, you can't jump out of your seat and run over and look at the squirrels that are playing in the courtyard. Right. So you sit there. You might do other things but it shifts the symptoms shift because you have grown and you've been forced to find mechanisms and strategies to help you through the day. That makes sense. Yeah. And so your approach was to talk with students who were taking online courses, students who had ADHD, right? So yeah, I wanted to talk to students. So I decided on a multi-case study. So I had four individual students that I looked at or talked to and each one of those students was my case. And then once I got talked to all of them and I coded and analyzed their data then I pulled all the data together and did it across all of the cases. So I have experiences of four different students. We talked for between 60 and 90 minutes a interview and I had three interviews per participant. So we spent a lot of time together talking and you know really got to know them and what they're doing. So let's talk about what you found in your study. What were some of the challenges that the students you talked to experienced particularly in the online course setting? Well, this is a no surprise but there were a lot more challenges than there were benefits. So some of the challenges that they had had to do with the instructors themselves. So the relationship with the instructor, the design of the course and then quite a few of the challenges were more personal. They were challenges. There wasn't an outside intervention that could help. Let's sort it that way. So yeah, okay. So all students need a connection with their instructors but for students with ADHD it's super important. They establish a relationship in a connection with that instructor. They are more likely to want disclose because they feel safe and comfortable with them. To ask for help and you know get the support that they actually need. So that's one of the things that instructors can do. The other thing that a lot of students with ADHD find is that they hear a lot of negative. They have other whole life. You're lazy. Just focus. You just, all you need to do is concentrate. Why can't you get here on time? And all of these things while they seem that they're in control, that the student with ADHD has control of. They don't. And so they start feeling really bad about themselves. And so you know, it's really smart. I know you are. Why are you getting these? I can't get the homework in and stuff like that. So having an instructor who will reach out to a student with ADHD and say, "Hey, I noticed that you've got a bee in a bud on the last three assignments. That's really good. You're doing great." And that's really an improvement. That small little motivation is huge. And they don't get that very often. As far as the course design itself goes, the fewer links that they have to navigate and have to make decisions on, the better off they are. I mean, everything that they need for a particular unit, module, chapter, whatever you want to call it within that course site so that they don't have to go looking around for it is crucial. One of my participants actually mentioned his frustration several times that it's ridiculous for me to have to search around in the web, the course site, to find what I need to do the resources that I need to do it and get the instructions. I need to spend that time on the assignment, not finding it in the resources. So they were all very. They all mentioned that the way that the course is set up and where stuff is located was key. So let me follow up on that. So like, I'm thinking of the podcast assignment that I gave my students. And I would have a handout, both print and digital, and it had the assignment description, the assignment expectations, it had links to resources, things that they would need. So if they're focused on that assignment, all of the things that they might need can be found from that document. I'm imagining another model where I have a very cleverly designed course where I have resources over here, I have examples over here, I have lecture slides over here, and I might. To do the podcast assignment, I might need stuff from all of those buckets. But if I have to go kind of clicking around all over the course to find that, that's going to be a lot harder for me. Is that kind of what you're saying? That's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah. The learning management system that I'm most familiar with is Canvas. So within Canvas, you can have like a quizzes link on the side, and you can click on that. And there's a list of all of the quizzes. So as an ADHD student, if I click in those quizzes, and I look at all the quizzes I have to do for this semester, I start getting overwhelmed. Also, you're depending on me to be focused enough on the details of something that a [BLANK_AUDIO] not be very interested in and finding the right quiz to take at the right time. Gotcha. Whereas if you hide that and you put that quiz with the rest of the materials for that unit together, then there's no question on my part. I go to the unit, I know that we're working on. I know these are my readings. I know this is the video that relates to it. This is my homework and this is the quiz I have to take. Gotcha. Yeah. So for this week, this is my starting point. Everything I'm going to need for this week can be found right here. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Well, yeah, what were some of the other challenges that you saw? A lot of the challenges, another one of the challenges was that when they have a question, they can't ask it immediately. And so if they have to remember like I'm watching a lecture video and I have a question but because I don't quite understand this, if I have to stop the video and write the question down or send the email to my instructor at that point, the chances of me coming back to the video have just diminished. If I wait until the video is over, I might not even remember the question. And so, or I'll send a question, I think it's really important because I've waited until the last minute to start my project and I have to, and the instructor doesn't get back to me in what I consider a timely manner. So a couple of things that instructors can do in that case is, you know, outline expectations and stuff like that for when they're going to get feedback back. So if I know I'm going to have to wait at least 24 hours when I send that email six hours before the due date, you know, I know it's probably not going to be very effective. Some of the other things is just detailed instructions. Students with ADHD have trouble extrapolating information and if you've given too much information that isn't strongly connected, they have a hard time organizing that information, prioritizing it and then moving forward. So they descriptions or expectations for assignments and stuff are really paralyzing for students with ADHD. Or it sounds like maybe even including too much information can be problematic or if the information is not organized well. Correct. Yes. Yeah. The extraneous information. I'm thinking of a paper I read. I think it came out last year. I'll have to find the citation and put it in the show notes. Looking at the experiences of students with ADHD in physical classrooms during kind of active learning activities, right, group work and polling questions and things like that. And I found it pretty fascinating because for instance, one of the recommendations was if you're going to do a polling question with your students, a multiple choice format is a lot easier for someone with ADHD to both answer and then to look at the bar graph and kind of parse the results. Whereas if you have a free response question where students can just put a whole bunch of different answers up on the screen, that's a lot of very different information to make sense of and it would take someone with ADHD more time to kind of process and parse that. So it sounds like there's something similar happening there. If I've got like pages of information about this assignment that's not kind of differentiated or organized in a way, it's going to be hard to kind of pull that into something actionable. Exactly. The TLDR, too long, didn't read. Those little synopsis. Those were made for students with ADHD because it's true. You give someone with ADHD a long block of text and they're going to bulk against reading that. And a lot of white space is your friend as an instructor on your pages. I know that if I was formally writing this, this paragraph is just single paragraph. I shouldn't break it out. But go ahead and put in extra spaces and extra breaks in the paragraph when you're changing slightly topics. Okay, you know, this project is we're going to be looking at the effective water on plants. It will be important that you get native plants. So put that in a separate or bullet points. Bullet points are great. Because yeah, it's really hard to let too much information. They don't know what to focus on. You can't prioritize. You can't organize. And so when a student with ADHD comes up to you and says, "Hey, I'm having a hard time prioritizing what I need to be doing or where I'm responding to your oncology and you need to figure it out, it is not helpful." And that same person with ADHD is going to go to their boss and say the exact same thing. So you're not teaching them to be a professional or getting them ready for the workforce if you're sitting there saying, "Hey, you're an adult now, you're in college, you need to figure it out, I gave you all the information." Yeah, yeah. And what that does is, you know, if you're taking a chemistry class, that student is then struggling with that assignment not because of the chemistry, but because of the instructions for the assignment. Like you said, they're spinning all this time, figuring out what they need to be doing. They're not spinning that time, doing the things that are actually on topic and relevant for the course. Correct. Yeah. But they expend a lot of energy. And let's not forget that they're expending a lot of energy in this class, whether it's an online class or a face-to-face class. That's just one small pocket of their life that they are expending extra energy to get basic things done. You know, so take it outside of the classroom. They're still running. It's not just in the classroom that they struggle with these things. And so, you know, we can't get the dish is done. We can't get the laundry done. You know, there's all of those things. I'm always late for doctor's appointments. There's a phrase that a lot of people with ADHD use and that's called the ADHD tax because it's very expensive having ADHD from both a financial position and emotional and energy. You know, forgot to feed the meter. Okay, there's another $15 fine. I locked my keys in the car again. I got to call the locksmith. There's another ADHD tax of $75 to have them come and get my keys out of the car. So it's a constant struggle all day long from the time they wake up until the time they go to bed. Are there things that instructors might do from a kind of well-meaning standpoint that are actually not as helpful as they think they might be? Some of them are the ideas that I am preparing you for the jobs. One of the things that I struggle with getting some instructors to relax on is a no-late work policy. Okay. And they're saying, "Well, when you're in the business world, you can't be late with that report." It's like, "Hmm, but really? Really?" So you work on this report for your manager and you've got it three-quarters of the way done and you're not going to make the deadline. Typically your manager doesn't say, "No, not going to accept it now." You put all that work, "No, not going to do it." You negotiate with your manager a new due date or, you know, there will be consequences. I'm not saying no consequence. But so negotiating due dates is a life skill that is handy to have. Not your ADHD students, well, any students, but students with ADHD let them negotiate, accept late work. Again, penalties are fine, but accept the late work. Because if you don't accept late work and it's the start of the fall semester, ADHD students with ADHD typically take about a month or so to start getting back into the groove of being and. the academic setting after being out for all summer. So they're really going to struggle that first six weeks or so. There's going to be late assignments just because they haven't gotten things figured out yet. And if you start the semester with three zeros, depending on the course, there's no coming back from it. So you start those with a 75, right, instead of a zero because you turned it in and you took a penalty and it wasn't perfect, but it's a 75 and not a zero. That's a big difference. Huge difference. Huge. You had said earlier that the challenges in the online environment outweigh the benefits, but are there some benefits? Are there some benefits of kind of taking online courses that students with ADHD can experience? Yes, there are, but there's also caveats with those benefits. It's not a straight up, it's a bit fit. Some of the biggest benefits that they had were one online lectures, not synchronous lectures, but recorded lectures. Half of the participants really liked it because they could pause it. They could write notes. They could listen to it at their speed. One of the participants, the only way that he could get through online lectures or recorded lectures was by doing it at double speed because he really had to focus to catch everything and he wanted it to get going because he thought that his instructors talked way too slow on their recorded lectures. So that was a benefit. If it was a synchronous class and the instructor allowed cameras off, I had one participant who would have the lecture going but be clean in the room or brush in the dog or doing something like that. That was a focus mechanism for her. So she was actually paying attention and focusing more than if she was sitting there sitting in front of a camera. They liked it because they could sit and draw and doodle and they wouldn't get in trouble for it because they got used to teachers walking around and they saw that they were doodling or they were drawing something and not taking notes. But a student with ADHD, that was the way that they could focus on what was being said. Students with ADHD are notoriously horrendous note takers. So that student was getting more information by doodling and focusing and listening than they would have if they were trying to take notes because their brain isn't going to allow them to listen, pick out the important things for notes and put it on the paper. If you give them guided notes, it helps tremendously. But having a student with ADHD trying to turn from your 50 minute lecture, the important parts that need to be written down is difficult. It's a stressor. Yeah. And that's, and again, that's challenging for a lot of students to kind of pick out what's important, what's not important. This is something that novices in any field encounter is like, there's just so many things, what things are important. But because of the ADHD, it might be more challenging for some students than for others. That makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. Well, Kat, thank you so much. I appreciate you sharing your work here and giving us a little insight into some of our students who might not, as you said, might not identify themselves as in this category. But I know we have a lot of thoughtful instructors who listen to the podcast and who want to do right by their students. I had on the podcast a little while ago, Robert Eaton and Bonnie Moon, who've written a book about kind of teaching for mental health of students. And I remember Rob saying, you know, not all difficulties are desirable. There are desirable difficulties that we want our students to encounter and grow from. But sometimes we build our courses or teach in ways where we have undesirable difficulties. And if we can make a few small steps to kind of move those out of a way, we can have more students shine. So thanks for giving us some great ideas for doing that with our online courses. Thank you. And again, it is a pleasure talking to you. I love talking about this topic and to talk about it all day long. So I appreciate the opportunity. That was Catherine Friel, Senior Instructional Designer and Missouri Online. Sharing results from her doctoral study of students with ADHD and how they experience online courses. In the show notes, we'll find a link to Kat's full study, as well as that article I mentioned about the experiences of students with ADHD and active learning classes. Thanks so much to Kat for taking the time to come on the podcast and share her experiences and her research. As I noted at the top, Kat is presenting an UPSIAS summer conference, which is actually two conferences combined, the Summit for Online Leadership and Administration and Roundtable, Solar is intended for leaders of online education initiatives. While the distance, teaching and learning conference DTNL is aimed at practitioners, including online instructors, instructional technologists, and educational technology researchers. The conferences will be held July 25th through 27th, 2023, and Madison, Wisconsin, and also online. See the show notes for a link for more information. This episode of Intentional Teaching was produced and edited by me, Derek Brough. See the show notes for links to my website, the Sign Up form for the Intentional Teaching Newsletter, and my Patreon, which helps support the show. For just a few bucks a month, you get access to the occasional bonus episode, Patreon only teaching resources, the archive of past newsletters, and the community of intentional educators. As always, thanks for listening. [Music]