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1. The model is based on two premises:

1. Most individuals have an array of executive skill strengths as well as executive skill challenges.

2. Identifying areas of challenge enables us to design and implement interventions to address these areas.

2. Challenges in children often stem from undeveloped executive skills rather than lack of intelligence.

3. Skills develop over time as the prefrontal cortex of the brain matures. Skills can be hereditary but heritable does not mean unchangeable.

What could we do during development to positively impact executive function skills?

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1. For successful teaching of EF, make small gradual changes. Especially with supports and fading out the supports.

2. We have likely used many EF skills with children without realizing.

3. Work on modifying tasks based on capacity for effort. They are capable of completing the task but don't want to put forth the effort, modify it so it's not so daunting.

EF skills must be taught, just like school subjects, and that changing the environment can make things easier for kids. How could adults help teach a weak executive skill while also adjusting routines, classrooms, or homework to better fit a child’s strengths and challenges?

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1. Parents’ executive skills directly influence their children in the way they model and teach the skills to their children.

2. Being aware of which executive skills come naturally and which don't is important.

3. Conflicts often arise when a parent is strong in an area where the child struggles which can cause frustration.

4. Successful relationships between parents and children is not about having perfect executive skills but rather on how well the parent's style aligns with the child's needs.

5. Stress weakens everyone's executive function.

How are your own executive skill strengths and weaknesses influencing the way you respond to your child's challenges and what is one thing you could do differently to better meet your child's needs?

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1. Motivation comes in different forms including reinforcement with praise, natural and logical consequences, "first_then" solutions, and formal incentive systems.

2. It is vital to focus on the positive. Make positive statements. Example: "If you do this well, then you will be awarded with this." Avoid negative remarks, yelling, losing temper. Example: "If you don't do your chores, you lose your TV time." Don't go there, don't say it. Make it positive.

3. Describe the desired behavior, set clear goals, involve child in possible rewards and contingencies.

4. Other children can benefit from similar plans to reinforce executive skills (all children have something that can improved upon).

What are some experiences you have had in which you used practical applications, positive reinforcement, and other motivational strategies with someone? Did it work? How can you improve?

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1. The place to start with the assessment process is understanding what’s developmentally appropriate at any given age. To figure out where your child stands, you need to be aware of the kinds of tasks and responsibilities that are typically expected of children at different ages.

2. While some children’s executive skills are delayed across the board, it is common for children to be strong in some skills and struggle in others.

3. Well-developed executive skills look different at different ages. There are 4 questionnaires that represent four age groups ( preschool, lower elementary, upper elementary, and middle school).

4. When you are not sure how to rate an item on the questionnaire, think about other children the same age, or think about what an older sibling was like at the same age.

Question:

How can you use the questionnaires provided in the chapter within your role at your job?

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Chapter 6: Teaching Executive Skills Directly

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Chapter 6: Teaching Executive Skills Directly

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1. 2 ways to help your child improve their EF skills:

1. Naturally and informally

2. A targeted approach on problematic tasks involving EF skills

2. Direct Interventions for Teaching EF Skills:

1. Identify the problem behavior you want to work on

2. Set a goal

3. Outline the steps the child needs to follow to reach the goal

4. Turn the steps into a list, checklist, or short set of rules

5. Rehearse and support the procedure with your child

6. Fade supervision

How can we transfer these strategies into the school building and our classrooms to best aid students in developing their EF skills?

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1. Don't abandon a task. Work to find the task modification that fits with the skill(s) the child needs to practice. Be aware of the behavioral and emotional responses and note if the environment could be making the task more difficult.

If a child handles a task some of the time, try to figure out what helped make success possible.

2. You may need to find ways to modify the environment. This may could be the physical or social environment depending on the skill challenge. Either way, modifications hopefully allow the child to stay in the situation and meet task demands.

3. Also consider the nature of the task and if the task itself needs to be modified. Examples could be making it shorter, adding visuals, etc. One very important thing to consider is the way adults interact with the child in a preventative way to help set them up for success, but also during and after interfering behavior occurs.

What does the real world application of this look like in your schools? Discuss what strategies you use for prevention as well as intervention? What could you implement tomorrow that would be helpful?

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AT Tools In Schools Booklet-printable9.2023

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 Executive Functioning App Matrix_AbleNet _2016

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Megan Hawley - Resources from Tech Corner to help

Ellen Gilliland - when you breakdown tasks/goals - creating more opportunities to experience success and building confidence

We have weaknesses too - being honest with students about that

Need for parent education around EF

Understanding own EF helps better understand students

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Takeaways:

1. Adults can remember 4-5 items in their working memory at a time. This can be increased by chunking information.  However, children’s working memory is more limited. This skill has to be developed.

2. Cueing works as a reminder and organizational tool.  However, don’t rely on a child’s statement that they have followed the cue.

3. Making eye contact, minimizing distractions, having the child repeat back what is said, as well as teaching the child the concept of “offloading” - key ways to help build working memory in everyday situations.

Question:

How do working memory weaknesses impact a student’s ability to follow directions?  What role can school counselors (or other staff) play in supporting this executive skill?

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Chapter 10 - Building Response Inhibition

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Chapter 10 - Building Response Inhibition

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1. Response inhibition is the executive skill that enables other executive skills to develop.

2. The skills increases over time, but often may be disrupted in adolescence; emotionally charged situations also make it difficult

3. Ways to support: teaching wait and stop or first then routines, using timers, offering the opportunity to earn something--practice/rehearse the skill ahead of difficult situations

Question: What games might be useful in supporting this skill in the classroom or school counseling setting?

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Chapter 14 - Strengthening Sustained Attention

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Chapter 14 - Strengthening Sustained Attention

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1. You have to start where the child is. Know the time limit on attention for the child and slowly start to work your way up to longer periods of time.

2. Ways to help strengthen sustained attention: provide supervision, use a device that shows elapsed time, use a self-monitoring strategy, make the task interesting, offer praise, give incentives/rewards.

3. Be consistent and don't make significant changes to the plan until the child has maintained improvements over the course of 3-4 months. It's normal for the plan to initially work and then behavior to resurface.

Think of a child (or yourself) and some tasks that you do that are boring. What are some interventions that could be implemented easily and be the most useful in the classroom to help them (or you) increase the attention time limit? Or if you have seen success already, what did you implement to help?

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1. Students who have poor emotional control aren’t going to magically develop them in their teen years.  Teens development brings new challenges to all of the executive functioning skills.  Emotional language and regulation skills need to be addressed earlier.

2. “Name It to Tame It”  - The power of naming feelings and giving them the emotional language. Opening a dialogue.

3. Intervention plans - Gather stakeholders and use the template to write out goals, design intervention, skill, procedures and incentives.

4. Be consistent and make sure you have a plan to follow up

How can you use the Name to Tame It strategy in your work?  What strategies are you already using to prompt emotional regulation and how could you build upon it?

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Chapter 9: Ready-Made Plans for Teaching Your Child to Complete Daily Routines

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Chapter 9: Ready-Made Plans for Teaching Your Child to Complete Daily Routines

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1. This chapter provides plans to teach children daily routines, including: getting ready in the morning, bedroom cleaning, putting away belongings, completing chores, maintaining a practice schedule, bedtime, desk cleaning, homework, organizing notebooks/homework, learning to control temper, learning to control impulsive behavior, learning to manage anxiety, learning to handle changes in plans, learning not to cry over little things, learning to solve problems. The plans include step-by-step instructions and visuals.

2. The chapter provides a guideline for having a discussion with your child about the problem you want to solve. Each plan provides a visual to encourage supervision and teach self-monitoring, with a plan to fade supervision.

3. Give children as much control over the intervention process because:

This helps them exercise executive skills (planning, goal-directed persistence, metacognition).

We want them to eventually be able to apply this problem-solving approach independently.

When children are consulted and viewed by their parents as collaborators in the process, they bring ideas that we have not considered.

Question:

How can we use these plans designed for parents and adapt them into tier 1, 2, or 3 instruction/intervention for students?

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1. Children are not born with inherent flexibility in thoughts, needs, and understanding of their world. As adults, we must be active in encouraging plasticity in our day-to-day planning while recognizing (and validating) the heavy feelings this growth evokes.

2. While we should make every effort to follow routines, provide advanced warnings about upcoming changes to those routines, and provide choices in those moments, we must be ready to model flexibility, help the child deconstruct the task/problem into manageable steps, provide social stories to support dynamic thinking, and provide them coping mechanisms (including how to advocate for help and/or request a "time-out").

3. Be sure to make discussions of possible changes in routines part of the routine... if you discuss the "Plan B" on a regular basis with children, most will begin to incorporate "backup plans" in their everyday thinking.

Question:

Are you a "go with the flow" type of person or do you constantly find yourself "thrown for a loop" (even in the most routine or over-planned moments)? If you can flow, what techniques can you share with those of us who get thrown? If you find yourself with little flow, what can you do to help yourself reframe in those moments?

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1. The skill of task initiation only applies to nonpreferred tasks. The challenge for those who struggle with task initiation is getting started.

2. Elicit student input in creating a plan of when to start. Develop a plan for how you will prompt the student. Try to avoid verbal prompts, since they are more difficult to fade. Consider visuals, timers, apps, or even Alexa or Siri. Tying the start time to something the student already routinely does is effective. Consistency is key.

3. You may need to break a large task into smaller pieces or even practice and reward the process of starting the task without completing it and gradually increase the length of time before the reward.

Question: Who do you know who always underestimates the amount of work they have and the time it will take to complete and overestimates the time they have for preferred activities? What strategies have you tried or what new ideas do you have to put a plan in place to support a student who is a professional procrastinator?

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This chapter gives you guidelines of what to do before you begin using an intervention with your children.

1. Start small and set your child up for success. Parents can make simple environmental changes, use positive motivation, and scaffold tasks into manageable steps or games to support success without overwhelming their child.

2. Choose the right routine to tackle first. Focus on a daily problem that either causes the most stress or is small enough to allow for quick wins. Give your child a choice of what to tackle first and/or target a routine that will allow for shared responsibility of implementation.

3. Target key executive skills through routines. Identify the executive skills underlying your child’s challenges; improving one routine often strengthens multiple executive skills at the same time.

Question:

When we think about “doing the minimum necessary” to support children, where is the line between helping and over-supporting?

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Task Initiation Menu adapted from OT4ADHD

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I have provided parents with some of the tech links about helping their teenager remained focused during homework time to combat required computer work and a technology addiction.

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Took to Elem schools in small snipets. Encouraged staff members to get book. Also in after school. Individual teacher utilized for herself to improve.

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I've shared some of the resources from the book and PDF questionaries or checklists to help guide 504 accommodations in some serve ADHD cases.

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I have used timers in my personal life and want to implement it in my classes. For an unpreferred task (to initiate the task and sustain attention to the task), I will set a timer for a certain amount of time. After that amount of time, I can take a break and come back to it later. Most of the time, I actually end up finishing the task even after the timer is up because I'm into the groove of it.

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1. Organization is not just being clean, but creating and maintaining systems for managing important items and information.

2. Providing visible systems such as labeled bins, designated areas, or homework stations can help to facilitate independence. Model, practice together, monitor, and then fade support.

3. Set up the organizational scheme carefully, making sure to involve the child. Children must see the value in using the strategies.

Question: How does school culture either support or hinder student organization? What barriers prevent us from implementing student organization consistently?

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Chapter 16:  Promoting Planning & Prioritizing

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Chapter 16:  Promoting Planning & Prioritizing

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1. Planning/prioritizing is the ability to create a roadmap to reach a goal, complete a task, or make decisions about what is important to focus on. Task initiation and follow through are important pre-requisite skills.

2. To support students who struggle with knowing what is important, creating timelines, or sticking with them, it is a best to support with planning WITH them rather than FOR them.

3. Involve your students in as much as possible in the planning process. Use real life scenarios and interests as jumping-off points for teaching planning and prioritizing skills and consider using the prompt, "What needs to happen first or before (preferred task)"

Question: How might challenges with planning and prioritizing be misinterpreted as lack of motivation or effort, and what practices can teachers use to better recognize and support students with executive functioning needs? What is one classroom routine, tool, or strategy you could implement to help students practice planning and prioritizing, and how might you measure whether it improves student independence?

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1. Take a close look at the intervention, making sure key elements are in place. Questions to consider are: what’s the specific problem being tackled? How do you judge success/failure? What’s the standard for improvement? Are expectations realistic? What supports have been put in place? Who, what, and how? What motivators are being used? Consistency is another factor to consider.

2. If you’ve tried everything and exhausted all options with not much improvement, then what? Sometimes children have more challenging executive skill problems than parents are able to handle on their own. We can turn to licensed clinicians such as psychologists, social workers, or mental health counselors to help us. The title of the professional doesn’t matter as much as the orientation and scope of the clinician’s practice. They should use either a behavioral or cognitive-behavioral approach and be experienced in parent training. Those clinicians focus on identifying the specific environmental triggers (antecedents) that contribute to the problem behavior and the way the behavior is responded to (consequences) then help the parent alter the antecedents, consequences, or both.

3. Thoughts on Medication

Why? Stimulant medications help with ADHD by controlling symptoms and increasing time management and goal-directed persistence. Medications for anxiety can help with emotion control. Medication can help, but it should not be the first step or used alone because, when combined with psychosocial or behavioral interventions, dosages can often be reduced, and success rates are higher.

When is medication warranted? Consider whether the attention disorder is: affecting the child’s ability to make/keep friends, affecting their self-esteem, affecting their ability to learn, affecting their overall emotional adjustment (when the amount of effort needed to make good grades is too much, stress, not sleeping, etc). Also consider the severity of the problem.

Questions?

1. When the executive functioning intervention isn’t producing improvement, what questions should we ask about the intervention itself (expectations, supports, motivators, consistency) before deciding that additional support (such as outside professionals or medication) may be necessary?

2. What are some ways to discuss the positive effects of medication with a parent? (ex: he raised his hand 4 times today vs. he’s acting better).

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The Role of Schools in Executive Skill Development 

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The Role of Schools in Executive Skill Development 

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1. There is a large disconnect between a child’s IQ and their "executive age." While preschools are designed for accessibility, middle schools often abruptly withdraw support, assuming students have naturally developed these skills. Executive skills (like organization and time management) are a "hidden curriculum" that must be taught as explicitly as reading or math. We must recognize that middle schoolers often need more scaffolding, not less, as they transition from one classroom to many.

2. Executive skills are "situational." You cannot teach a student to be organized in a vacuum or during a summer workshop and expect it to stick months later in a different environment. Skills must be taught in the moment and in the specific context where they are needed (e.g., teaching locker organization at the locker). This can be worked on in school by providing explicit instruction in the moment that allows the student to practice the skill exactly when needed.

3. Homework is rarely just about the subject matter; it is a real test of task initiation, sustained attention, and working memory. When a student fails at homework, it’s often a breakdown of the process, not a lack of knowledge. Success requires a "School-to-Home" bridge. Using the book’s Homework Plan ensures that parents and teachers are speaking the same language and using the same tools to support the student’s underdeveloped skills.

4. The book moves beyond theory by providing concrete tools for the common challenging points in a student's life. High-level planning (like writing a research paper) is overwhelming for a student struggling with executive skills. We can use the book’s provided templates and rubrics for long-term projects and study habits to assist these students. These tools act as an "external brain," breaking down complex, multi-step tasks into manageable, bite-sized actions.

Discussion Questions

1. If we view executive function deficits as a skill deficit in the brain's management system, how does that change the way we handle 'laziness' or 'defiance' in our classrooms?

2. If we view middle school as the 'Perfect Storm' where demands increase while support decreases, what is one specific 'scaffold' or template from the book we can implement immediately to catch students before they fall?

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Key Takeaways:

1) Metacognition is the awareness that you have thoughts and that you can use those thoughts as tools to understand the world and yourself, solve problems, and make sense out of things.

2) In order to intervene with a student who is having difficulty with an aspect of their lives, it is important to establish a behavioral goal, develop interventions, and explicitly teach those interventions.

3) Students will need external supports such as cueing or checklists to help them improve their metacognitive skills to improve behaviors.

4)Students in middle school are developing new metacognitive skills and may have increased focus on conformity. Students have not yet realized that just because others CAN think about them doesn't mean that others ARE thinking about them. This can lead to lots of anxiety and feelings of self-consciousness in middle school (and beyond).

Discussion questions:

1) When a student is struggling with behavior or decision-making, how can we move beyond simply correcting the behavior to explicitly teaching the metacognitive strategies the student needs?

2) What external supports (such as checklists, prompts, visual cues, or reflection routines) could help middle school students build metacognitive awareness and reduce anxiety related to peer perceptions?

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1. Goal-directed persistence refers to setting a goal and working toward it without being sidetracked by competing interests.

2. Goal-directed persistence is one of the last executive skills to mature. However, parents encourage the development of this skill when the child is quite young. Every time a child is encouraged to keep trying when something is hard, it helps increase their goal-directed persistence.

3. Goal-directed persistence is not just a single skill. It incorporates many of the earlier developing skills, such as working memory, planning, task initiation, sustained attention, response inhibition, and emotional control.

4. If children develop goal-directed persistence, they can use it to help overcome executive skill challenges.

5. Steps to help a child develop goal-directed persistence:

1. Start very early with very brief tasks where the goal is in sight.

2. To help the child reach more distant goals, begin with goals that the child wants to work on.

3. Give the child something to look forward to when the chore is finished.

4. Gradually build up the time needed to help reach the goal.

5. Help the child remember what they are working toward.

6. Use technology to provide reminders.

7. Make sure the reward used as an incentive is one the child really wants and doesn't have free access to.

As educators, how can we help a child increase their goal-directed persistence in the school setting?

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·  Time management is an executive function that involves estimating how long tasks take, planning time, and completing tasks before deadlines.

·  Many children struggle with time management because they underestimate time, procrastinate, or get distracted.

·  Children need explicit instruction and support to develop time awareness rather than being expected to learn it naturally.

·  Breaking large assignments into smaller steps with time limits helps children stay organized and avoid feeling overwhelmed.

·  Adults should provide external structure at first (reminders, planning help) and then gradually reduce support as the child becomes more independent.

·  Practice in everyday routines (homework time, chores, planning activities) helps strengthen time management skills.

Question: What are helpful strategies that school staff could use to help students make time more concrete?

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1. Technology itself is not inherently good or bad.
Its effects on children depend largely on how it is used, how much time is spent using it, and what activities it replaces. The real concern is often the loss of time for sleep, physical activity, social interaction, and other important experiences.

2. Technology can interfere with parent–child interactions.
The chapter introduces the idea of “technoference,” where parents’ use of phones or devices disrupts interactions with their children. Children notice when attention shifts to a device, which can increase frustration, emotional reactivity, or disruptive behavior.

3. Technology affects lifestyle factors that influence executive skills.
Screen time can impact important areas linked to executive functioning, including:

sleep quality

physical activity

nutrition

social interactions

participation in hobbies and hands-on learning

4. The biggest concern is time displacement.
Excessive technology use may reduce time spent on activities that build executive skills, such as physical play, real-life social interaction, exploration of interests, and focused schoolwork.

5. Parents should actively guide technology use.
The authors recommend educating children about digital media, monitoring online activity, discussing risks and benefits, and creating a family technology plan that sets clear expectations for when, where, and how technology is used.

Discussion Question

How can parents and educators balance the benefits of technology with the need to protect time for activities that support executive function development, such as sleep, physical activity, and face-to-face interaction?

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This is a great tool to help organize your class in concrete ways with timers, schedules, and visual noise monitoring