I'm still a student. Trying to take it all this year, my last official year of studenthood. I'm also an intern, which is like learning in overdrive. Some days my head starts to explode from all the consolidating and "aha" moments and generalizing and trying to remember names, copy codes, where to find lightswitches and bathrooms and pencil sharpeners... But I digress.
I'm interning in an amazing school district in a department that places a high value on professional development and research-based practice. This is not always the state of affairs, and I realize how lucky I am. I have more days of trainings than I can count on my hands just in the first couple months of internship: Intervention Support Team basics and advanced case handling, Responsiveness to Instruction (RTI) team planning with my school, Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS), CHAMPS classroom management, Suicide Intervention Training, Crisis Prevention Training, Autism overview, Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule training at TEACCH, PAR's BRIEF/TEC training with developer Peter Isquith... and more. Just remembering all the acronyms is a job in itself.
Anyway, I thought it might be fun to share some shiny nuggets of knowledge here on the blog so I don't forget, and because my dear readers might be interested of course. So here's today's nugget. Executive Functioning.
Executive Functioning is becoming a pretty hot area of research in the neuropsych world these days. I think a good way to conceptualize it, taken directly from Isquith's talk today, is to think of it as the conductor and to think of all of the other tasks of the brain as the symphony. Executive Function is what allows a person to shift attention, to inhibit, to initiate... all of the things you think of a conductor doing for an orchestra so that all of the players work smoothly together. Without the conductor, you have a mess of noise. Without good Executive Functioning, you have an inability to shift attention, sustain attention, inhibit thoughts or behaviors, get going on a task, organize, etc. Which sounds an awful lot like ADHD, right? Yes. Not that poor Executive Functioning equals ADHD, but ADHD does indicate poor Executive Functioning just by its clinical definition.
So why do we care? Because we see kids struggling with Executive Functioning issues all the time. Trouble with transitions or kids who fixate on one thing and can't move to the next - that's something wrong with the ability to shift. Kids who call out, do things they know they shouldn't but can't seem to stop themselves - problems with inhibition. Kids who can't organize or make sense of the world around them, conversation, their backpack or bedroom... yes, it's there too.
Much of the time, we talk about accommodations for Executive Functioning deficits more than we talk about actually changing the EF processes themselves. That's because there's decent evidence that there are some organic (biological) roots to our abilities to inhibit, shift, organize, have good working memory capacity, and all of the other conductor/frontal lobe EF tasks. So we recommend structure, routine, coaching, modeling, and so on. This is the stuff that parents of middle or high schoolers with ADHD listen to and then say, "But he should be doing that on his own by now" (where that = homework, cleaning the room, getting ready in the morning, or any other number of daily tasks). Brain development is different. There's no magic age when EF is developed and ready to go (actually EF skills are still developing until the late 30s).
But there is some really cool research, and this is actually what I wanted to share, regarding EF in preschoolers and how we can help them along in the process of getting that conductor going in their little heads. Most of this research comes from Adele Diamond. She talks about doing a pretty straightforward activity that beautifully taps and stretches many EF areas all at once, and it can be done with some of the shortest ankle-biters among us. Basically, it involves getting kids to plan what they're going to do before they do it. Sounds painful, no? But it's not. It looks like this: dump a box of legos on the table. Preschoolers will immediately start to attack the legos, so you quickly say, "WAIT!" and before they jump in, they have to talk about what their plan, or goal, is. What are they going to make? What do they want to play? What colors or shapes of blocks are they going to get? Bam, you've just tapped inhibition (can the kid stop herself from doing what every impulse is telling her to do - grab legos and go?), shift (switch from what kids are used to - dump and go with toys - to this weird new activity of planning), planning, organization, attention... that little conductor in the mind is growing before your eyes.
So we can work to build and strengthen EF, even in the littlest ones. Pretty cool stuff.
This story from NPR talks about Diamond's work and also gives a nice overview of Tools of the Mind preschools, which are incredible. And make me want to pack up and move just to let my kids go to them.
I'm interning in an amazing school district in a department that places a high value on professional development and research-based practice. This is not always the state of affairs, and I realize how lucky I am. I have more days of trainings than I can count on my hands just in the first couple months of internship: Intervention Support Team basics and advanced case handling, Responsiveness to Instruction (RTI) team planning with my school, Positive Behavior Interventions and Supports (PBIS), CHAMPS classroom management, Suicide Intervention Training, Crisis Prevention Training, Autism overview, Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule training at TEACCH, PAR's BRIEF/TEC training with developer Peter Isquith... and more. Just remembering all the acronyms is a job in itself.
Anyway, I thought it might be fun to share some shiny nuggets of knowledge here on the blog so I don't forget, and because my dear readers might be interested of course. So here's today's nugget. Executive Functioning.
Executive Functioning is becoming a pretty hot area of research in the neuropsych world these days. I think a good way to conceptualize it, taken directly from Isquith's talk today, is to think of it as the conductor and to think of all of the other tasks of the brain as the symphony. Executive Function is what allows a person to shift attention, to inhibit, to initiate... all of the things you think of a conductor doing for an orchestra so that all of the players work smoothly together. Without the conductor, you have a mess of noise. Without good Executive Functioning, you have an inability to shift attention, sustain attention, inhibit thoughts or behaviors, get going on a task, organize, etc. Which sounds an awful lot like ADHD, right? Yes. Not that poor Executive Functioning equals ADHD, but ADHD does indicate poor Executive Functioning just by its clinical definition.
So why do we care? Because we see kids struggling with Executive Functioning issues all the time. Trouble with transitions or kids who fixate on one thing and can't move to the next - that's something wrong with the ability to shift. Kids who call out, do things they know they shouldn't but can't seem to stop themselves - problems with inhibition. Kids who can't organize or make sense of the world around them, conversation, their backpack or bedroom... yes, it's there too.
Much of the time, we talk about accommodations for Executive Functioning deficits more than we talk about actually changing the EF processes themselves. That's because there's decent evidence that there are some organic (biological) roots to our abilities to inhibit, shift, organize, have good working memory capacity, and all of the other conductor/frontal lobe EF tasks. So we recommend structure, routine, coaching, modeling, and so on. This is the stuff that parents of middle or high schoolers with ADHD listen to and then say, "But he should be doing that on his own by now" (where that = homework, cleaning the room, getting ready in the morning, or any other number of daily tasks). Brain development is different. There's no magic age when EF is developed and ready to go (actually EF skills are still developing until the late 30s).
But there is some really cool research, and this is actually what I wanted to share, regarding EF in preschoolers and how we can help them along in the process of getting that conductor going in their little heads. Most of this research comes from Adele Diamond. She talks about doing a pretty straightforward activity that beautifully taps and stretches many EF areas all at once, and it can be done with some of the shortest ankle-biters among us. Basically, it involves getting kids to plan what they're going to do before they do it. Sounds painful, no? But it's not. It looks like this: dump a box of legos on the table. Preschoolers will immediately start to attack the legos, so you quickly say, "WAIT!" and before they jump in, they have to talk about what their plan, or goal, is. What are they going to make? What do they want to play? What colors or shapes of blocks are they going to get? Bam, you've just tapped inhibition (can the kid stop herself from doing what every impulse is telling her to do - grab legos and go?), shift (switch from what kids are used to - dump and go with toys - to this weird new activity of planning), planning, organization, attention... that little conductor in the mind is growing before your eyes.
So we can work to build and strengthen EF, even in the littlest ones. Pretty cool stuff.
This story from NPR talks about Diamond's work and also gives a nice overview of Tools of the Mind preschools, which are incredible. And make me want to pack up and move just to let my kids go to them.
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