Technolandy

Day 49 (of 2025/26) went live with “Body Doubling with the Principal” and it was not well attended… can’t wait to do it again! Inspired by @adhd_love

I am uncomfortably comfortable with the concept of ‘body doubling’ – an adhd strategy that I have seen, and heard, be very effective for people to help them focus and be accountable to a task… or multiple tasks…

Not without some challenges… as one of the @ADHD_Love short videos highlighted: sometimes you can only focus on the task (eg meal prep) while the timeframe is on… and stop doing it when the time is up irregardless of how complete the task is – in the video case, dinner is almost ready, but don’t worry – there is another session going live in a couple hours… admittedly after the dinner hour and when the family traditionally eats! It is tricky to set up specific targets… especially when it is new.

To be honest, I expected my first “Body Doubling with the Principal” to have nobody show up… so my expectations were surpassed… though not by much. I know how introducing things works… horrible the first time, until some of the story gets further shared… as it is today… and the next one will have a couple more pop in… and more and more… 

I do anticipate our school needing to branch off this support strategy to be more than just a “…with the principal” and involve some others. Sometimes it takes some time to build momentum – as I am reminded of ‘the first follower’ video: First Follower: Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy

Here is what I like (based on what I have experienced) about Body Doubling…

• the accountability is by far more on the ‘self’. I am not asking what students/families are working on or why they are joining in.
• The work focus is real – even for myself, I found myself, as facilitator, more focused on doing the work I assigned for myself during the hour… and time actually went quick, even as I shared (modelled) my inside thinkings to the cohort online (small as it was)
• I like that there is no need to have cameras ‘on’… I know that some like to add a layer of accountability, but I don’t care about cameras in online environments… I have reasons for allowing and enabling others to mute the images – though mine stays on so that people can confirm that I am still guiding by example!
• I like that there is a chat feature so that an informal “Ask Landy Anything” can occur but not be as public… though I will share the q&a… just without identifying who asked it (unless they make it public)

I trust my instincts when it comes to what works (early adopter of Mindfulness and SEL; Project Based Learning; Descriptive Feedback and Portfolios in lieu of ‘report cards’; laptops and iPads for portable technology – the great equalizer within education…;  and skipper of other fads… platooning math… ugh. And I’ve heard from some working with ADHD that they are familiar with this support strategy and it works for them!

Next steps:

Continue to let this grow (each Wednesday)

Target groups to see if it would help to have subject specific times during the week to be accountable for “math / humanities / writing / clubs?

Trusting the process… too many times we give up on some things a bit too soon – I know from experience that we sometimes hope that there is more adoption earlier than there really is – I know there will be some pushes of ‘trust’ over the next six weeks into Winter Break… will it really be ‘open’ from 1-2 [I totally anticipated someone logging in at 155 just to check…] and will it really be a safe space to just get work done, or will there be pressure to show how much work got done…

In the meantime I am going to continue to explore a bit more into how this could be better served to our community – day / time / etc to see if there is a better time than midweek… and if there is someone else who might be more ‘attractive’ (not physically) to have students give it a try – I know that not everyone has positive memories/experiences with principals… 

And looking forward to hearing if there is any feedback for what could be done better/different… sharing time left? More chatter? Sharing a playlist (but keeping the music in an earbud, but subjecting everyone to the same tracks…)? 

Hmm maybe ‘by request’? Asking an EA to advertise a Body Doubling session to work on resumes as a boring example!