How to Help ADHD Hunters Thrive in a Classroom
With innovative teaching methods like Jigsaw - everybody — Hunter or Farmer — can thrive and the classroom becomes an exciting learning environment. Pass it on!
Last week, a caller into my radio/TV show mentioned a teaching technique pioneered in the 1970s by Professor Elliot Aronson called the Jigsaw Classroom.
Aronson developed it when the Austin, Texas schools were first racially integrated during that era as a way of reducing competitive pressures and bringing kids together who came from diverse backgrounds that had, in many cases, historically been in conflict with each other.
With this technique, students in the classroom are broken up into five or six groups of a half-dozen or so students each and a large topic (like “World War II”) is broken into five or six sub-topics (“Rise of Hitler,” “Treaty of Versailles,” “Invasion of Poland,” “Pearl Harbor,” “D-Day”).
Each one of those sub-topics is assigned to each one of the kids in the group, and their job is to collaborate with students from other groups who have the same sub-topic assignment to develop a report to bring back to the group. At the end of the exercise, each student presents his or her sub-topic to the group, so the entire group is filled in on the larger topic.
This is a rather clumsy description of the Jigsaw system — I encourage you to check out the Jigsaw Classroom website for a deeper explanation — but the bottom line is to encourage, or even require through the structure of the system, collaboration between the kids to break down the walls of distrust and miscommunication.
But, for Hunter kids, it would also raise the classroom from a boring, dreary, dreadful place into one filled with stimulation, movement, and talk!
Back in 1996 when I was traveling around the world speaking on ADHD, following TIME magazine publishing a major review of my Hunter in a Farmer’s World hypothesis, I came across an article in The Independent on June 6, 1996 by Fran Abrams that described Taiwan’s public schools as “anarchic.” I already knew their teachers are among the most high-paid and highly-regarded in the world: being a teacher in Taiwan is a super-high-status job and getting into teaching schools is very competitive.
A parents’ group in Taiwan had contacted me when that article came out, as well as one in Singapore, so Louise and I booked a flight to visit both countries to speak to these groups.
Our experience in Singapore was rough: I told the parents they should engage in the political process to demand better educational outcomes, and the police ransacked my hotel room in apparent retaliation. Political activism is largely forbidden in that country, as I wrote about in my book The Hidden History of Big Brother.
But Taiwan was a whole different thing. We were invited to visit a classroom, fourth or fifth grade equivalent, as I recall, and watched a truly brilliant teacher teach a class in a way that any Hunter child would love.
First, the teacher stood in front of the class and laid out the day’s lesson on the chalkboard. It was a math equation, as I recall. Then she asked the students to raise their hands if they fully understood it. Out of the 30 or so kids in the class, six or seven raised their hands.
The teacher then had those kids who understood the lesson stand up, and the rest of the class broke into little circular groups around each of the standing kids, so each standing child had their own little circle of students. The standing kids then taught their peers, and as the sitting (in the circles) kids figured out the lesson, they’d stand up and participate in the instruction. (The teacher floated around the class to help out.)
By the end of the hour every kid in the class knew the lesson and, most important from my point of view, nobody was bored.
Back when Horace Mann was designing our modern school systems, in the 1890s, the model he used was the factory. Each kid was an item on the assembly line, and each had to absorb a “standardized” lesson at the same time in the same way. With such a system, it just makes sense that Hunter kids would get lost and left behind, as most ADHD Hunters can testify from their school experience.
With innovative teaching methods like Jigsaw and what I saw in Taiwan, everybody — Hunter or Farmer — can thrive and the classroom becomes an exciting learning environment. Pass it on!