How can I get my students to attend better in the classroom?
How can I get my ADD/ADHD students to stop being distracted by other things in the classroom?
How can I get my students to follow directions more consistently in the classroom?
How can I better help the Learning Disabled children in my classroom?
Those of us in the field of education know that you cannot teach a child who is not attending. A student’s ability to attend to auditory input, the sound of the teacher’s voice, is key to the child being a successful learner. We have all experienced the frustration of attempting to teach children who are inattentive or occasionally attentive but easily auditorily distracted. As you know, this is not only a problem with children who are diagnosed with attention deficits, but also a problem with many of the typical students as well.
In our classrooms it is often impossible to prevent distracting sound, whether it be traffic sounds from outside, sounds from the hallway, or sounds produced by other students. A teacher’s voice has a lot of sound competition. Inattention of students wastes enormous amounts of classroom time and results in poor outcomes and the need to move more slowly through material.
Poor attention is an epidemic problem in our schools. Every teacher knows it.
However good your learning outcomes were for this school year, we know that they could have been better. What could you do differently next year to improve your students learning outcomes?
The National Association for Child Development, an organization known world-wide for providing innovative services to improve the learning and development of children, has developed a new product that is designed to improve attention to auditory input even in the midst of competing sound.
TSI: Focused Attention is a ground-breaking program, easy to implement, taking just minutes a day, designed to improve a student’s ability to track sound in a competing sound environment. Field tests have shown that this sound program can rapidly improve a student’s ability to remain attentive to a target sound in the midst of a variety of competing sound environments. By listening for just three minutes, twice a day to this program, a student can improve their attention to sound. This six CD set of ten tracks each may be the key to helping students attend better. This tool may be the key to better learning outcomes at your school, in your classrooms.
TSI: Focused Attention can help students who are diagnosed with Attention Deficits as well as those who are not diagnosed but are functionally demonstrating attention inconsistency.
Can you afford another year of poor attention from your students?
NACD’s TSI: Focused Attention Program
- Helps children diagnosed with or showing symptoms of ADD and ADHD attend more consistently to verbal instructions.
- Increases attention to important verbal instruction and directions given in the classroom setting by teaching the child to tune out ambient sounds.
- Helps children learn to tune out visual distractions while tuning in to what is being taught.
- Expands the child’s ability to pay attention to what is most important in the classroom.
And the Next Step: FA2
- Takes Focused Attention to the next level, adding a language processing component.
- Language-based, requiring attention to and processing of speech in noise.
- Different levels of content available for individuals at different cognitive levels.
- Varied content keeps interest high.
How Does It Work?
After decades of working with thousands of children both in the United States and other countries, and having worked with an extensive array of sound therapies, including Fast ForWord, Tomatis, AIT, Samonas, and The Listening Program, NACD has developed a new and unique method to train children to attend to sound meant as foreground sound and to disregard irrelevant sound and visual distractions. This program takes just minutes a day, and through practice sessions, changes how the children attend to key information presented auditorily. As these skills are acquired, the children are able to generalize this to their classroom experiences, resulting in a better understanding of what is being presented, better compliance with procedures and expectations in the classroom, and better retention of what is verbally presented to them.
Focused Attention is a two-part program, first training auditory attention and then training attention and processing in noise with FA2.
Therapists
While the TSI: Focused Attention and FA2 programs can easily be used by individuals at home, they are also appropriately used in clinical settings by professionals who work with the target population of children and adults who have auditory processing and/or attention deficits. At only three minutes per track, the program takes very little of your valuable therapy time. Since it is unlikely that most professionals see their clients five days per week, the listening schedule can be modified to accommodate each individual situation. For example, you may extend the number of weeks an individual spends on a CD if he/she only has access to it 2-3 days per week.