How to support executive functioning with environmental scaffolding (self-talk, time-perception, planning)

De Facto Leaders

Today, I wanted to share some FAQs that people ask about how to teach executive functioning.
Some of those common questions are:

How do you teach self-talk, time-perception, and strategic-planning?

How do you offer help without making kids prompt-dependent?
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I understand that executive functioning intervention is more than just checklists and behavior charts, but what’s the right way to structure interventions?

​How can I provide environmental scaffolding after students leave my therapy sessions?
What exactly is “environmental scaffolding”?

I understand I need to coach and train others, but how should that look in practice?

One of the ways I answer these questions is through the concept of “scalable protocols”. This is an alternative to the way we traditionally think about lesson plans.

It allows you to define the specifics of the “how”, which is why people are asking questions such as the ones I’ve listed above, and also enables clinicians to train others.

In this episode, I share the audio of two video clips that help give an overview of how that could look, as well as the overview of a framework I use to support executive functioning in context.

If you’re a clinician who wants to know how to do this in therapy AND coach others, it will help you through the first step in that process. If you’re a parent or teacher and you want to learn a strategy you can use to support kids, you can also use this strategy.

In this episode, I mentioned this blog post https://drkarenspeech.com/whats-better-than-an-executive-functioning-lesson-plan/), where I include the full video clips that contain screen shares of some of the protocols I mentioned.

I also mention this article about scalable protocols and how they fit in to your intervention model.
Link here: https://drkarenspeech.com/executive-functioning-support-three-paradigm-shifts-for-school-teams/

In this episode, I mention the School of Clinical Leadership, my program that helps related service providers develop a strategic plan for putting executive functioning support in place in collaboration with their school teams.

You can learn more about that program here: https://drkarendudekbrannan.com/clinicalleadership

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