ADHD Allies: Communicating with Teachers for Classroom Success

In this episode, host Miriam Brown, a seasoned public school teacher with a background in psychology and curriculum, teams up with Erin Coppin to discuss effective strategies for creating a supportive classroom environment for children with ADHD. Learn how to navigate 504 plans, advocate for your child's needs, and foster strong, empathetic relationships with teachers.

Erin shares her experiences as a parent, highlighting the importance of communication, empathy, and collaboration with educators. Miriam offers insights from the teacher's perspective, emphasizing the challenges and rewards of accommodating students with ADHD. Together, they provide practical advice for parents and teachers alike, aiming to ensure that every child receives the support they need to thrive in school.

Episode Transcript

(00:00):
We put in their 504 plans that they have extra time for assignments.
And then sometimes they're nervous to turn in something late.
She's going to be mad at me or she doesn't accept late assignments.
And I'm like, well, you have a 504 plan for a reason and you need to go and
turn that in and tell them.
And if you turn it in and the teacher still tells you no, then come talk to
me and I will try to help advocate for you.

(00:26):
Hello, I'm your host, Miriam Brown. In addition to my teaching certificate,
I have a bachelor's degree in psychology and a master's in curriculum and instruction.
I spent the last decade as a public school teacher, and I want to give you insider
tips on how to help your child do well in a system that might otherwise fail them.
In this episode of our ADHD series, Erin Koppen and I talk about how to interact

(00:48):
with teachers to create a classroom environment that will be most helpful for your child with ADHD.
Music.
PhD. Erin Coppin and I first got to know each other when I was teaching her children.
I taught several of them, and I thought that she did a fantastic job of advocating
for her children in a way that helped me feel supported as a teacher as well.

(01:11):
I think that's a hard tightrope to walk because sometimes we get all mama bear
and we want to get our child's needs met, but when you do it in a way that helps
support the teacher as well, you just have a better outcome.
Erin, Parent, I always told you that I thought you should teach parenting classes for ADHD.
Yeah. So even though I'm around ADHD a lot and I treat it, I feel inadequate
because I struggle and my kids aren't always thriving and I feel a little bit like a failure.

(01:37):
I think that's completely normal. Thank you for being open with us about that.
I think it's just really stressful to parent a child who is impulsive and has a hard time listening.
I read a study that compared moms moms of neurotypical children to moms of children
with ADHD, and they experience a lot more anxiety.
Yeah, I think parenting kids with ADHD is stressful.

(01:59):
It is stressful. And having an ADHD child in your classroom can also be pretty
stressful, because most of the time, you'll have more than one student in the
classroom that has ADHD.
And then you've got others that have issues that are just as difficult, sometimes even more.
So when you're trying to teach all of the kids the lessons that you're required
to teach, It's just impossible to meet everybody's needs.

(02:20):
I'm the daughter of two teachers. And so when I was growing up,
if something was wrong, if the teacher reached out to my parents,
my parents were on the side of the teachers.
And I've tried to a little bit have that mentality with my kids.
Not that I'm trying to have an adversarial relationship with my kids either.
But when my kids tell me a teacher has done something, I try to be a little

(02:42):
bit skeptical and see it from the teacher's point of view.
That was pretty evident to me every time I talked to you about one of your kids.
And I think that being able to look at things from the teacher's point of view
is really helpful, not just if you're having a problem, but also when you're
meeting together with a school to set up a formal plan.
The school can help you make a plan called a 504 that can ask the teacher to

(03:05):
make special adjustments to their teaching for your child. These are called accommodations.
But it's really common for teachers, for whatever reason, to not implement those
changes in the classroom, even though they're in a meeting and agree to the plan.
I think that happens because sometimes it's hard for a teacher to speak up and
say, I realistically don't see how I can do that.
When we've had meetings talking about the things that would be helpful to my

(03:29):
kids, I definitely talk about how it would be helpful for me to help them be successful.
But I also try to keep in mind, how will this affect a teacher?
Because when you're trying to create an accommodation, really,
you want it to actually be helpful.
And if it's something that just is not going to happen, then I'm constantly
telling the teacher they're not
doing this thing that is really creating a difficulty in their classroom.

(03:51):
So I try to keep some of those things in perspective. And then when I reach
out to teachers, I also always try to express gratitude for all that they're
doing for my child and then leave space for the teacher to explain what's going on.
And I think that's helped me to have a lot better conversations,
have a lot more progress and good relationships with teachers that are more helpful to my kids.

(04:13):
I think that's really important to have empathy because when you're a parent,
you're focused on your one, maybe two, maybe three, four, five kids, right?
And they're your world. When you're a teacher, you've got 25 kids in the class.
And so it can be really difficult to meet everybody's needs because there's too many of them at once.
And it was always very helpful to feel like the accommodations were always something

(04:35):
that I could do fairly easily if it was during class or if not after class,
like allowing them to turn in late work or things like that.
One thing I appreciated was you would send me emails and communicate with me.
You would ask, hey, we're concerned about this assignment.
I know you put the instructions here and there, but she's confused.

(04:56):
She thinks she's supposed to do this, but it looks like from what I'm reading
that she's supposed to do that.
Could you clarify? And it was nice as a teacher because I felt like you were
not just excusing them from the work.
I even remember one email you sent that she was having a hard day.
It might take a little bit of extra time, but I was completely willing to give extra time to her.

(05:18):
But it was nice that at home you were helping them to get their work done.
Yeah, definitely. I think communicating with the teachers is the most helpful
and trying to balance that.
I'm trying not to be the bulldozer parent that's like mowing down all the obstacles.
I keep telling my kids if they don't know what they're doing,
OK, go talk to your teacher.
Or we did put in their 504 plans that they have extra time for assignments.

(05:42):
And then sometimes they're nervous to turn in something late.
She's going to be mad at me or she doesn't accept late assignments.
And I'm like, well, you have a 504 plan for a reason and you need to go and
turn that in and tell them.
And if you turn it in and the teacher still tells you no, then come talk to
me and I will try to help advocate for you.
But I've really tried to get my kids to work on advocating for themselves.

(06:04):
And over time, teachers have been commenting like they're doing a really good
job of advocating for themselves.
Most of my kids' teachers, I have their email come up immediately as I start
typing them because I've emailed them so many times just to make sure that we're
on the same page and we're all working together to help my kids to be successful
without mowing down and removing obstacles.

(06:25):
You know, as a teacher, sometimes it would be frustrating, especially in middle
school when you have 180 to 200 students to remember everybody's 504 can be
kind of difficult because if you've got a quarter of your kids that have some type of 504,
sometimes it's hard to remember all of the accommodations.
And so sometimes I would get frustrated with the whole 504 thing because I just

(06:50):
felt like there was so much paperwork and so much to keep in mind as a teacher.
So I always appreciated when parents would remind me, but in a polite way,
could you help me with this without making me feel bad that I had maybe missed
something on the 504 or something like that.
So if there's one piece of advice I could give, it would be to be like Aaron

(07:12):
and to have empathy for the teacher.
Imagine what it would be like if you were trying to teach a classroom of 25
students and meet everybody's needs.
And when you do that, it really allows you to communicate with the teacher in
a way that makes them want to help your child.
Music.