Practical strategies for improving executive function skills in children
Presenter(s)
Sarah Ward, M.S., CCC-SLP
The first day of this online workshop will provide you dozens of practical strategies and techniques that you can utilize immediately with children with executive functioning deficits in their daily activities, including academics, behaviours, homework, morning routines, projects, sensing time, transitions, chores and home tasks, and bedtime routines. The workshop will begin with a clear overview of executive function skills to determine the most effective interventions and to understand the development of the executive function skills and what is meant by the term “executive dysfunction". The second day of this online workshop will provide you additional strategies and techniques, advanced intervention examples, and increased knowledge on the scope and sequence to implement executive function strategies. Best practices will be discussed to get children motivated, focused, organized and performing closer to their true potential. Participants will learn where to start, what goals to set with their clients, and how to make and implement a Toolbox of Strategies for teaching executive function skills. 10:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (Eastern Time) Registrants may select registration for Day 1 only or Day 1 & 2. Registrants are provided access to the recording for two weeks following the workshop.
By the end of day 1, you will be able to: 1. State the functional working definition of what is meant by the term “executive function skills” as it pertains to therapeutic interventions. 2. Define how situational awareness, self-talk, forethought and episodic memory are the foundational skills for successful task execution. 3. Integrate the theory and techniques of the 360 Thinking model to develop lesson plans to remediate executive function skills in the classroom and/or individual and group therapy. 4. Generate a framework of interventions and choose at least five ways to foster children’s ability to sense and manage the passage of time. 5. Describe four strategies to develop children’s capacity to read a room then shift and be a ‘mental time traveler’ to pre-experience the physical actions to complete a task in prospective time and space. 6. Breakdown the clinical interventions and techniques for teaching children how to plan for, initiate and complete complex assignments and long-term projects within allotted time frames using the Get Ready * Do * Done (Get Done) Model (Ward & Jacobsen, 2014). 7. Create a therapeutic alliance with parents to improve the effectiveness of clinical interventions with children with executive function-based challenges and articulate the relationship between how individuals self-regulate and executive function symptomatology to educate clients, family members and school professionals.
By the end of day 2 (optional) you will be able to: 1. Differentiate and explain how situational awareness, self-talk, forethought and episodic memory are the foundational skills for successful task execution and state the functional relationship between executive function, working memory and speed of information processing as it pertains to therapeutic interventions. 2. Evaluate and select and implement five advanced applications to teach children how to (a) visualize simple, multi-step and complex tasks and assignments and then sequence and plan the requisite steps to fully complete work and (b) improve self -regulation and inhibition to meet behaviour expectations. 3. Implement specific strategies to develop representational co-thought gesture for forethought and task planning. 4. Select and implement specific strategies to improve situational awareness and self-regulation skills to improve children’s ability to “stop and read a room” and transition to follow routines with a reasonable pace and requisite materials with less supervision and fewer prompts. 5. Develop and implement intervention strategies to improve children’s capacity to visualize and sense the passage of hourly and daily time, calculate how long tasks will take, break down and complete tasks and long-term projects within allocated time frames and control for procrastination and time distractions. 6. Design and implement a block and box schema training to improve children’s processing speed for following routines, making decisions, planning tasks, doing assignments, completing writing assignments and engaging in social language/conversation skills. 7. Implement specific strategies to improve working memory for stronger mind miming forethought skills so children can go from intention to action to initiate and complete tasks and process information with greater accuracy and efficiency. 8. Design and implement specific strategies to improve processing of figurative and abstract language