On 7 July 2026, ACAMH will host a webinar ADHD in the Classroom: Accommodations and Behavioural Supports.
We caught up with the presenter – Associate Professor Erin Schoenfelder Gonzalez, a clinical psychologist at Seattle Children’s Hospital – about the topic itself and her hopes for the event.
Looking back at your career, what first got you interested in ADHD, and how did you then come to specialise in it?
I’m a third-generation psychologist, following my grandfather and my mother, so I grew up with a lot of family conversations around how people work.
But I wasn’t really focused on child mental health until the later phases of my training, when I realised that working with children and adolescents is a great opportunity to get upstream of the difficulties we sometimes later see in adults.
Many teachers have students with both diagnosed and undiagnosed ADHD in their classrooms – is this webinar relevant for both situations?
Absolutely, and in fact there are all kinds of reasons why off-task behaviour or distractibility can happen. It could be ADHD or another diagnosis, anxiety, or a child testing boundaries, but actually for the purposes of this talk, it doesn’t really matter why it’s happening.
This talk is about finding the best ways to set a student up to be successful. A diagnosis is definitely not required to use behavioural strategies to improve focus in class.
Your webinar promises a ‘brain-based framework’ for understanding ADHD. What does that mean in practice?
It starts with understanding what’s going on in the brain. A lot of the behaviours we see with ADHD stem from the brain’s craving for dopamine – the reward chemical. The brain needs a certain level of stimulation, and it’s going to be drawn to wherever it gets the most stimulation in any given moment, which is often not the schoolwork sitting in front of the child.
This links to the ABC model: Antecedent, Behaviour, Consequence. Behaviours are triggered by antecedent factors in the environment, and both children and adults are motivated by trying to gain something or achieve a certain consequence.
Alongside that, there’s what I call the ‘window on time’. As adults, we’re constantly using information from the past and projecting ourselves into the future. But that window is much narrower for children, and for a child with ADHD it can be very, very narrow. If an expectation or goal is outside that window, it simply won’t factor into their decision-making.
I want people to leave the webinar understanding that most of the behaviours they see in the classroom really are a child doing the best they can with the brain they have. Once you understand that, you can start working with the brain rather than against it.
What then does ‘working with the brain’ look like in practical terms? What can a teacher actually do?
It starts with the physical environment: where a child is seated, minimising distractions, making sure they have the materials they need. It also means being very specific about goals. ‘Get all your work done’ is actually about 20 separate behaviours – you need to identify where the glitch is happening for that particular child. Crucially, students should be part of identifying and prioritising their own goals for class. This isn’t something you do to a child; the more they’re involved in naming what they’re working on, the more investment they have in it.
Another great tool is a Daily Report Card – two or three behavioural goals for that child, checked at points during the school day, not just at the end. You ask the child to score themselves on each goal and give feedback, in a purely positive way, focused on encouraging them to keep trying in the next chunk of the day. The aim is to give feedback within the child’s window of attention, rather than a thumbs up or thumbs down at 3pm that’s completely disconnected from what happened at 9am.
The webinar also looks at parent-educator collaboration. Why is that piece so important?
It’s crucial to remember that everyone is on the same team. We all want the same outcome: we want the student to be engaged and successful in class, and we want their challenges to be as manageable as possible. When we think of each other as allies working towards the same goal, we can really leverage what each party brings.
The teacher knows the specific behaviours that are happening in class, the triggers, and what the consequences are. But parents have many years and many more hours of observing what helps and what backfires for that particular child. If we bring that together so everybody, including the student, knows what to expect and what the goals are, we’re going to have a much stronger plan than either party could create alone.
Who do you hope will attend, and what’s your key takeaway for them?
This session is designed for educators, school professionals, parents, and clinicians, or anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of ADHD and strengthen their ability to support students.
If there’s one thing I’d like people to take away, it’s this: kids are always doing the best they’re capable of at that moment. That’s not a reason to lower expectations, it’s a reason to set them up properly. When we tell a child they’re making poor choices in class and need to make better ones, but we haven’t given them the structure and support to know what that means, we’re setting them up to fail.
My goal is to send people away with practical tools and a compassionate, science-informed perspective that helps them do that differently.
Find more ADHD content from Erin and other experts on ACAMH Learn, our completely free, online learning resource.
