SMART BUT SCATTERED: EXECUTIVE DYSFUNCTION AT HOME AND AT SCHOOL

Youngsters with poor executive skills are disorganized or forgetful, have trouble getting started on tasks, get distracted easily, lose papers or assignments, forget to bring home the materials to complete homework or forget to hand homework in. They may rush through work or dawdle, they make careless mistakes that they fail to catch. They don’t know where to begin on long-term assignments, and they put the assignment off until the last minute, in part because they have trouble judging the magnitude of the task and how long it will take to complete it. Their workspaces are disorganized, and teachers may refer to their desks, backpacks, and notebooks as “black holes.”

Learning Objectives: As a result of this workshop, participants will:

• Understand executive skills within the context of brain development.

• Be able to identify how executive skills impact school performance and daily living.

• Have access to a repertoire of strategies to improve executive skills in students. These will include strategies to modify the environment to reduce the impact of weak executive skills and procedures such as coaching that can be used to teach children how to improve specific executive skill deficits in the context of home or school performance expectations.

• Have a framework for placing school-based executive skill interventions within a 3-tiered, Response to Intervention (RTI) model.

The material covered will be useful down to the preschool level (age 3-4), although the expectations for executive skill development at that age are very different than with school age children.

This program has been approved for .6 CE Units from the University of Maine.
Maine Board of Psychologists has approved this workshop for 6  CEs.