When I set about trying to zero in with absolute precision on what I, as a learner with ADHD, have been unable to access–and have witnessed my own children with ADHD being likewise unable to access–my discovery amused me.

Because as I zoomed in and in and in–bringing into crisp focus the–as I said, precise–deficit, I realized that I was in fact, seeing precision itself. Much of communication and most of instructional communication, leaves much left unsaid.

This is understandable. When a learner with ADHD looks around and sees that peers are cruising through the task at hand unhindered, they can easily surmise, as does many a learning facilitator, that any steps left unspoken, any silent steps*, were left unspoken because there seemed to be no need. The majority of learners, operating with average or above average executive functioning at their disposal, intuit actions like obtaining, preparing, packing, bringing, and unpacking what the task requires. Whether the need is for a full pen, a full battery, or a full briefing — they have it. They have it because at some prior moment their brains automatically imagined them being in this situation before it came and accurately projected their future needs.

Thus equipped, this learner’s peers are already leagues ahead, swiftly transported by the stream of information on which their learning materials are carrying them. Meanwhile the ADHD learner, having failed to independently consider the silent steps they needed to take to travel likewise, is drowning, caught in a current for which they were utterly ill-prepared to navigate.

It is in this circumstance that ADHD learners find themselves over and over again. It is in this circumstance that learning facilitators could avoid ever losing a contingent of those they seek to lead.

Silent steps, a coinage my ADHD brain authored as it tried to articulate precisely where it gets lost, are simply the steps not acknowledged or accounted for when developing, timing, and communicating instruction to learners with ADHD.

*trademark pending