Description
In today’s dynamic environments, students and educators are challenged to adapt, understand diverse perspectives, and maintain focus. However, students with neuropsychiatric disorders like ASD and ADHD often struggle with these essential coping skills, affecting their behavior and well-being in school and life.
Teachers and guardians play a vital role in supporting these students, but they need specialized knowledge and skills to do so effectively.
This course aims to deepen understanding of ADHD and ASD, providing comprehensive insights into neuropsychiatric disorders. By exploring neurodiversity and its strengths, participants will learn how to support students with ADHD and ASD effectively.
Ultimately, the course equips educators and guardians with practical tools to facilitate learning and well-being.
Participants will engage collaboratively, focusing on understanding and supporting students with ADHD and ASD.
They will explore neurodiversity to appreciate the strengths of individuals with ADHD and ASD and gain practical insights for supporting these students in academic and social settings.
They will also learn strategies for fostering home-school partnerships to enhance support for students with special needs, reflect on their well-being as educators, identify strengths and resources to support students and foster positive relationships, and develop actionable plans for implementing support strategies in their schools, receiving guidance throughout.
By the course’s end, participants will acquire knowledge and insights into practical strategies for supporting students with ADHD and ASD.
They will develop competence in innovating strategies tailored to students’ unique needs, fostering their development, building skills in establishing supportive home-school partnerships, enabling collaborative efforts to support students’ well-being, and enhancing their well-being as educators, improving their ability to support students effectively.
What is included
Learning outcomes
Through presentations, group discussions, and case study reflections participants will be able to:
- Understand how brain and nervous systems can work differently in ADHD and ASD and how it affects learning and behaviors;
- Be aware of how teachers can support and co-regulate ADHD and ASD students with their own emotional and behavioral outcomes in interaction;
- Support students’ positive behaviors by seeing the good and spotting their strengths with tools of positive pedagogy;
- Explore and recognize what skills are lacking or haven’t developed enough when students are reacting with certain behaviors;
- Apply teaching methods aimed at enhancing the following learning skills for both students with neuropsychiatric disorders and the entire student group: concentration, sustaining attention to tasks, coping with change, and behaving more flexibly in social situations;
- Use concrete tools to support students with different needs and create an action plan for future use;
- Strengthen positive home-school partnerships with students’ parents or guardians.
Tentative schedule
Day 1 – Course introduction
- Introduction to the course, the school, and the external week activities;
- Icebreaker activities;
- Presentations of the participants’ schools;
- How are you doing teacher? Teachers’ wellbeing promotes students’ wellbeing.
Intro to ADHD and ASD
- Neurodiversity is a human superpower- the positive outcomes of variation of brains and ways of seeing our common world;
- How the brain and nervous system can work differently in ADHD and ASD and how it impacts behaviors and learning.
Day 2 – Study-based knowledge of ADHD & ASD and positive pedagogy as a tool
- Facts and knowledge behind neuropsychiatric disorders;
- How to recognize symptoms and variations of ADHD and ASD;
- Positive pedagogy in supporting students: reinforcing the skills through seeing the good and spotting the strengths in learning and interaction.
Day 3 – Classroom and individual methods to support students
- How to develop skills of concentration and sustaining attention to tasks: strengthening emotional regulation and impulse control;
- Teaching methods to support motivation in learning;
- Strengthening communication and interaction skills to help to cope in social situations and to behave more flexibly in social situations.
Day 4 – Concrete tools and the power of collaboration
- Concrete tools in supporting students with different needs (e.g. visual materials, worksheets for promoting the skills, creative and functional methods);
- Positive pedagogy in home-school partnership: how to support parents with ADHD/ASD- children.
Day 5 – Action plan
- Action plan for own teaching and for enhancing teachers’ own well-being;
- Action plan for positive pedagogy in home-school partnership;
- Sharing participants’ ideas about action plans and experiences from their work;
- Group discussion.
Day 6 – Course closure and cultural activities
- Course evaluation: round-up of acquired competencies, feedback, and discussion;
- Awarding of the course certificate of attendance;
- Excursion and other external cultural activities.
