I remember the end of the year project for the final semester of English class I was student teaching in. It was designed to last six weeks. It was an awesome project – linking Victorian literature with some of the key Victorian events or concepts. For a minute I wanted to be a student so I could do the project. BUT – the packet on how to do the project was SIX PAGES LONG!!! It threw my little ADHD brain into total panic mode just looking at it. HOW could a person be expected to do all this???
The lead teacher recognized that this would be intimidating and did try to break it down into parts, but this teacher was very organized and logical. Organized and logical students had no problem with the packet, but some needed it to be in even smaller bits, otherwise known as chunking.
For ADHD or organizationally challenged students, chunking is terrific. Basically, it means taking a project with a lot of steps and details and breaking it down into bite-sized bits – chunks. For example, the first part of the Victorian project was research. There had to be at least five sources. If I had been doing this project, I could have easily gotten lost in the research for two days and emerged not knowing what information I got from where. I’d have gotten out 5 large index cards, one for each source. The citation information for each line would’ve gone on the first line, then the information with page number. THEN research would’ve been declared done…for the moment…and I would have gone onto the next step.
Chunking is all about doing a little at a time, about not letting the size of the forest scare you away from taking in the trees. Big projects can be terrifying for the ADHD student, and sometimes the best solution seems to be to just put it off til the last minute, do it the night before, and just settle for turning something in. Chunking, once learned, can take some of the terror out, can give the student a sense of accomplishment as each part is finished, and can end the last minute panic.
