How My ADHD Shaped My Classroom

Like many adults with ADHD, I wasn’t diagnosed until later in life. I grew up believing my struggles in school were due to laziness rather than a brain that processes differently. As a math teacher, I now see that those struggles shaped not only me, but also the purposeful classroom systems I built, which concurrently support my students’ learning and my neurodivergence.

When I was a student, mathematics was the most accessible subject for me because it was visual, logical, and connected. That love led me to become a math teacher, but I wasn’t prepared for how my ADHD would impact me in this role: My first few years of teaching were exhausting and monotonous. Carrying the nuanced explanations I wanted to share across multiple class periods was cognitively draining. By third period, I often couldn’t remember every example or connection I’d made earlier, so each class received a slightly different lesson.

Plus, when it came to giving meaningful feedback on assignments, I knew that no matter how hard I tried, the feedback I provided on the last assignment (from a stack of 92) was nowhere near as thorough as what I gave on the first one. On top of that, I knew that most students wouldn’t review or put into practice the feedback I did provide. All of this led me to redesign my approach to instruction and assessment.

ADJUSTING MY APPROACH TO INSTRUCTION

Because repeating the same lesson multiple times not only was challenging for me, but often led me to be less effective in my later classes, I introduced premade instructional videos. I recorded short instructional videos ahead of time that captured the nuance I found was often missing when I had to repeat myself over and over throughout the day.

Before class, students would take notes on the assigned instructional video. This meant that every class received the same essential explanations, and students who were absent could revisit the videos without requiring me to repeat myself. As a bonus, students could pause, rewind, rewatch, slow down, or speed up the videos to support their own unique processing and retention.

If you don’t want to record your own videos, you can leverage the existing content online and find videos that meet your lesson’s needs fairly easily; however, I’ve found that students tend to engage more deeply with teacher-created content.

In addition to shifting how I introduced new content, I changed the kinds of mathematical tasks I asked students to complete. I started focusing on tasks that had multiple solution paths, representations, or ways of thinking. This meant that even when students arrived at the same answer, there was still a novelty in how they got there. This helped me stay more engaged with my students while also reinforcing for them the fact that there are many different ways to approach problems.

As students worked on these more interesting kinds of tasks, I also shifted how I asked them to work. I invited students to work collaboratively to solve problems on vertical whiteboards so that I could simultaneously see their mathematical thinking and hear their conversations.

The visual work reduced the demands on my working memory, while their dialogue helped me understand their reasoning in ways that written answers alone never could. What began as an accommodation for my own brain ultimately became an effective practice in formative instruction.

Finally, I introduced new ways for students to share their thinking with one another and with me. Through both in-class presentations and digital demonstrations of learning, my students could deepen their understanding of complex math content, and I could gauge their understanding more effectively, since I didn’t have to read the same written responses over and over again.

ADJUSTING MY APPROACH TO GRADING ASSESSMENTS

Where grading student assessments used to pose a huge obstacle, my new approach to grading allows me to meaningfully connect with students and provide feedback in a more effective way.

I now grade a student’s work only during an individual conference with that student. I use this approach for the daily lesson quizzes my students complete as a check for understanding. During each class period, my students have “student choice” work time, and when lesson quizzes are turned in by a student to be graded, the student remains next to me to conference as I grade their work so I can gain insights on their reasoning while providing immediate feedback.

This feedback is far more meaningful than what I would write on the side of their paper in the past. After the conference, students record both their feedback and grades in a progress tracker. This helps them retain the feedback and take ownership of their progress, and it also eliminates the time I once spent entering grades myself.

As a scaffolded progression to these individual conferences, earlier in the school year my students first learn how to evaluate their own work using a simple rubric that assigns zero to four points based on the accuracy of their answer and the work shown. Then, they learn how to evaluate peer work. Self-assessment allows students to understand the rationale for each numeric score in the rubric, and peer assessment generates student empathy for producing organized work in a way that others can understand. These progressions equip students to actively engage with me in conferences as I grade their work.

If students either are waiting to conference with me or have finished our conference, they are able to begin working on the next day’s lesson by engaging with the instructional videos. Alternatively, they can go back and rewatch any videos from previous lessons that they need a refresher on.

By front-loading instructional design, making student thinking visible, grading with students, and replacing repetitive work with meaningful learning, I created a classroom that reduced my cognitive load and enhanced student learning.

This approach to teaching contributed to my selection as a Distinguished Modern Classrooms Educator and 2025 Hawaiʻi State Finalist for the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching. Looking back, I see that neurodivergence is not something I had to overcome, but instead the constraint that allowed me to become a better designer and facilitator of learning.