Many individuals with social learning differences and/or challenges have hurdles and speedbumps when it comes to developing the organizational skills needed to manage increasingly complex demands in upper elementary, middle, and high school and beyond. Not surprisingly, identifying motivation, knowing how to get started on a project, and managing time across a variety of homework assignments can feel overwhelming. The impact of poor organizational skills can impact outcomes in school, at work, and at home. The reality is that individuals who struggle with organizational skills combined with low motivation are sometimes incorrectly categorized as lazy without consideration of the role of neurology.

In Part 1 of this two-part series, attendees explored how to wrap their minds around organized thinking and learned core strategies to help students get started in thinking about their goals and action plans.

In this second part of our two-part series on executive functions, we continue to take implicit expectations and show you how to address them explicitly. We review key executive functioning skills and practical metacognitively based strategies to help individuals track and tackle homework and other deadline-based responsibilities. We begin this section by talking about how to help our students “get things done when you don’t want to do them.” In other words, helping individuals find their motivation. We also explore, through many examples, user-friendly ways to help students learn more about the processes and strategies involved in:

• Preparing work environments
• Chunking and timing assignments
• Visually structuring the workload
• Prioritizing to plan what to work on
• Hunting and gathering materials
• Taking perspective
• Communicating about it
• Persisting and rewarding oneself with pride

This course has been enthusiastically received by interventionists (parents, counselors, mainstream and special education teachers, administrators, psychologists, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, and others). As with most of our courses, hands-on activities help attendees relate their own experiences to the content.

While this course was designed to support individuals with social learning differences and/or challenges, the information provided is relevant for everyone.

Who Should Attend

Components of the Social Thinking Methodology are used by a wide variety of professionals; including speech-language pathologists, special and general education teachers, social workers, counselors, clinical and school psychologists, occupational therapists, behavior specialists, and school administrators, to name a few. Both family members and caregivers find the information relevant.

In this two-part series, we explore key executive functioning skills and practical strategies to help individuals track and tackle homework and other deadline-based responsibilities.

In Part 1: Fostering the Development of Executive Functions: How Do Students Get Things Done? we start by asking educators and parents to think about their own lives and how they actually get things done, even though there are endless moving parts. We then explore how those with neurologically based differences in executive functions often run into roadblocks that may overwhelm their emotional self-regulation.

In Part 2: Strategies to Foster Motivation and Tackling Many Moving Parts of Any Assignment we cover nine other steps toward helping students learn to increase their organizational competencies beginning with the exploration of student motivation: how to encourage its formation and why managing time and priorities across a variety of homework assignments can feel overwhelming—even for those considered “gifted.”

Objectives

Participants will be able to:

1. Identify a strategy for helping teens explore their own motivation when approaching complex tasks.
2. Describe the importance of time prediction and how analog clocks teach this concept differently than digital clocks
3. Describe how a Gantt chart is helpful in understanding multiple assignments across time.
4. Explain how perspective taking is part of the organized thinking process.

Agenda

• 1 hour and 20 minutes
  • Finding one’s motivation
  • Preparing work environments
  • Chunking and timing assignments
• 1 hour and 40 minutes
  • Visually structuring the workload
  • Prioritizing to plan what to work on
  • Hunting and gathering materials
  • Taking perspective
  • Communicating about it
  • Persisting and rewarding oneself with pride
• 30 minutes Previously Recorded Q & A session

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We are proud to provide access to continuing education credit for:

• Speech-Language Pathologists
• Educators
• ...and others!

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