Category: School Leadership

One of my favorite “hooks” or titles to use when I’m talking about executive functioning centers around the idea that executive functioning intervention is about “more than just checklists”.  I like this title so much because one of the go-to interventions or accommodations for students with executive functioning difficulties includes some type of visual strategy…

Every time I give a session on executive functioning, I have clinicians and teachers ask me the same thing: “How can I motivate students who don’t seem to care or don’t want to try new things?” Or something like “How can I convince students why this (insert task) is going to be important to them…

Students with executive functioning challenges often intend to complete tasks or meet expectations—but struggle to execute consistently.  The reason? They aren’t mentally envisioning future scenarios, predicting the steps needed to reach a goal, and thinking about what they need to be doing NOW in order to meet that goal.  This cognitive skill, called future pacing,…

I’m often asked if I can create an “executive functioning lesson plan” that a clinician could do within a 20-minute therapy session with a student or group of students.  I understand why people ask me for things like this. This traditional “pull-out” model of therapy is what many clinicians have been taught in our preservice…

Executive function is often defined as “having good time management skills”. While this isn’t completely off-base, it’s a vast oversimplification. The REASON people are good at time management is because they have the ability to estimate and sense the passage of time.  Most “textbook” definitions of executive functioning don’t fully call this out, and as…