Does your child struggle to plan ahead? Fail to turn assignments in? Struggle to stay organized?With the beginning of this year, we at NOLA Learning Support and Consulting are excited to offer sessions to students who are in specific need of help in developing their executive function skills. The coaching we offer is based upon the work of Drs. Peg Dawson and Richard Guare. These sessions can be booked through our website at https://www.nolalearningsupport.com/, and they are available for 30, 45, or 60 minutes and will focus solely on executive function skills growth.
Executive function skills are high level cognitive functions that help us to meet challenges and achieve goals. They help to organize our behavior over time and move beyond immediate demands in favor of accomplishing longer-term goals. They are essential to organizing activities, sustaining attention, and persisting in the completion of a task. A key piece to executive function skills maturity is the ability to manage our emotions as well as monitor our thoughts so that we can work more efficiently and effectively.
While there are certainly additional executive function skills to consider, below is a list of what have been deemed to be the essential ones needed for academic and personal success:
Foundational Executive Function Skills: Advanced Executive Function Skills:
Response inhibition Planning / prioritizing
Working memory Organization
Emotional control Time management
Flexibility Goal directed persistence
Sustained attention Metacognition
Task initiation
We as parents, teachers, coaches, etc. are responsible for fostering these skills, and it is important to remember that our brains develop over time, such that it is not until a person is roughly 25 years old that these skills fully mature. These skills can be taught, and as they are enhanced, the chances for success in school and later in the working world increase dramatically. Self reliance is the goal and for many students, without specific and consistent practice, these skills do not develop on their own or overnight.
Our coaching begins with an assessment and materials are provided.
If you feel like these services might be of interest to you, please contact us via www.nolalearningsupport.com, and we can schedule an appointment to discuss further.