Giving our Brain Space for Educational Follow-through

When I think about all the work that children and teens have to navigate in their day-to-day school endeavors, it makes me feel overwhelmed these days!

From our work together, these are a few key areas I’ve noticed that have often needed more support:

• Studying material with a lot of content

• Organizing writing assignments

• Remembering details from lectures or conversations

Each of these include sieving through a lot of information, which is overwhelming for the brain’s processing capacity at times. When motivation feels low, here are some tricks to help move forward intentionally to support task completion.

Tip #1: Identify key ideas, then add details

When tuning into conversations or content, it’s best to focus on key ideas first. Then, get into specifics, like details, as our minds sometimes have a hard time sorting out what's important. This is especially the case with attentional challenges like in ADHD, but also when taxed emotionally by school or emotional triggers. Key ideas function as an anchor for which additional information can tack on, making it easier to remember and organize information in the memory system.

These can include grounding with:

• Topic

• Perspective

• Characters

• Events

• Any other main idea or concept

It’s important to talk about this first to get the mind ready to focus and make sense of new information presented.

Tip #2: Create a simple outline first for longer tasks

A simple outline or overview to start organizing how you would like to proceed makes all the difference in motivation and educational success. Knowing what to expect and what you need to do next sets students up for success and allows their brain space for processing the others aspects that are required for writing, completing the assignment or task at hand.

This could look like:

• Circle key words

• Make a checklist of all that the assignment requires for completion (instructions)

• Check off as you complete each part

If you’d like to explore more, stay tuned as we update our blogs with more information systematically. You can always contact us for more information.

To your educational well-being and success,