People often say to me, “I get why executive functioning is important, but when are you going to tell me how to work on it”?
I wish I could jump right to the lesson plans and “here’s what you do in a perfect hierarchy to work on these skills”. But brains don’t work that way.
That’s why I start with the framework before the lesson plan. The macro before the micro.
When you Google executive functioning, you often get a list of 8 or 9 skills, and a broad definition. This is important information, but it doesn’t tell you “the how”.
It also doesn’t explain how you’d scaffold. That’s why when I help clinicians design executive functioning interventions, I start with five broad areas that start to make those abstract cognitive skills more tangible.
In episode 268 of De Facto Leaders, I explain what those five skill areas are. I also explain why we can’t teach them in isolation, and why they have to be embedded into tasks students are already doing in their daily lives in order for intervention to be meaningful.
You can listen to the episode here:
In this episode, I mention the Task Execution and Planning Protocol, which gives school clinicians an intervention strategy that takes students from “demand avoidance” and prompt dependence to independence during daily academic and functional tasks.
You can learn more about the Task Execution and Planning Protocol here.
In this episode, I mentioned School of Clinical Leadership, my program that helps related service providers design scalable executive functioning interventions to ensure students get the scaffolding they need across the school day.