Sept 12, 2024 | 9 - 10:30 AM Pacific
Organizational skills help us manage and achieve our life goals of all types. Establishing and maintaining an organized approach to achieving our goals is part of our executive functioning. In fact, any goal-oriented activity, across all aspects of our daily functioning (e.g., learning, playing, and working), requires performing related executive functions.
The process of building organizational skills requires executive functioning, which always begins with a goal in mind—e.g., turn in a homework assignment, make a friend, play a game, cross a street, attend class, go on a date, lead a group, manage a project, etc. To attain that goal, we engage in a set of parallel or sequenced tasks, many of which we’re expected to learn without direct instruction. Executive functions are the tasks we do to accomplish a goal; executive functioning is when the entire process is completed successfully. Many individuals with social learning differences and/or challenges struggle with developing organizational skills; they have limited executive functioning because they need support to identify goals and unpack them to determine and carry out specific sets of tasks (executive functions) to reach those goals.
The way most of us concentrate and focus our attention on things that matter has undergone a dramatic disruption in the past two decades. While what we need to do can be enhanced by technology, there are potentially even more digital factors that get in the way of meeting one’s academic, employment, and/or social goals. In this course, we will use a developmental lens as we introduce strategies to help students problem solve and self-evaluate how they set goals, make plans, and stay on task to foster executive functioning, while simultaneously and constantly being distracted by digital tools such as screens, phones, and watches. We’ll also take a deeper look at the latest research related to concentration and focus.
1.5 hours toward CE credit, available for select professionals.
This course explores the role of executive functions across school and home environments. We explain strategies for tackling motivation, time prediction, prioritizing workload, and tracking multiple assignments simultaneously. We review key executive functioning skills and practical metacognitively based strategies to help individuals track and tackle homework and other deadline-based responsibilities.
5 hours of CE credit available for select professionals.
In two keynotes, Dr. Damon Korb, MD FAAP and developmental behavioral pediatrician, and Michelle Garcia Winner, MA, CCC-SLP and founder of the Social Thinking® Methodology, will connect the dots between executive functions—including self-regulation and perspective taking—and creative, practical strategies to foster organized thinking. Damon’s keynote will explain five important steps professionals can learn to guide parents in how to raise an organized child. He will also present strategies and lessons he has learned during his 20 years as a developmental and behavioral pediatrician to help foster children’s active engagement of organized thinking, the kind of learning and functions they’ll use throughout their lives. Michelle’s keynote will focus on how to help students/clients develop friendships. How do people make friends? How do we keep them? What creative strategies can we teach to help tweens and teens learn to invest in these important but complicated relationships?
3 hours of training and CE credit available for select professionals
Access free webinars, thinksheets and visuals to help students improve their executive functioning. Our Thinksheets (worksheets that make you think!), articles, visuals and webinars are tools to break down, think through, and practice specific social concepts and strategies to support the development of executive functioning.
How to Ask for Help | Why It’s Hard & How We Can Help
In this webinar, we’ll discuss why children, students, and adults may resist help or refuse to ask for it and we’ll deconstruct the multi-step process through which we ask for help. We’ll also explore the social emotional benefits for all participating in this unique and rewarding relationship.
Demystifying Executive Functions | What They Are and How to Teach Them
Executive functioning is at the heart of our daily functioning across all places in which we learn, play, and work. It affects almost everything we do! Learn how to help students improve their executive functioning, which begins by avoiding assumptions as you teach them.
The Social Thinking Methodology provides evidence-based strategies to help people ages four through adult develop their social competencies, flexible thinking & social problem solving to meet their own social goals and improve: