Teaching Executive Functioning Skills to Teens with Emotional Disturbance

Executive Functioning Skills

If you were to walk up to anyone on the street and ask them what executive functioning is, you could be met with many different responses. According to the Hill Learning Center, which specializes in furthering the education of students with learning differences, executive functioning skills facilitate the behaviors required to plan and achieve goals. This includes abilities like planning, organization, self-regulation, working memory, and attention. These can all contribute to a student’s success in and out of the classroom. 

Here is a breakdown of key executive functioning skills:

Planning and Organization:
The ability to set goals, break down tasks, and organize materials and time. 

Self-Regulation:
Managing emotions, impulses, and behaviors, including the ability to delay gratification and resist distractions. 

Working Memory:
Holding information in mind long enough to complete a task, such as remembering instructions or a sequence of events. 

Attention and Focus:
Maintaining focus on a task, filtering out distractions, and sustaining attention for an appropriate duration. 

Cognitive Flexibility:
The ability to adapt to changing situations, switch between tasks, and think flexibly. 

Task Initiation:
The ability to start tasks without procrastination or delay, even when they are challenging or uninteresting. 

Problem-Solving:
Identifying problems, generating solutions, and implementing strategies to overcome challenges. 

Time Management:
Understanding the passage of time, estimating how long tasks will take, and managing time effectively. 

Emotional Control:
Recognizing and managing emotions and responding appropriately in various situations. 

Learning these skills as a teen is vital as most teens are preparing for high school, which means their first job is often on the horizon. They also need these skills to manage their time more effectively. Everyday activities, such as getting up and ready for school, require executive functioning skills. Your students must know how long it takes them to be ready to leave for school in the morning. Then, they must plan what time to wake up, how long to shower, what they will wear, what to have for breakfast, and how long it will take them to get to the bus stop or walk to school. Not to mention making sure their homework is done and they get the needed amount of rest. As adults, we are so used to doing things daily that we don’t realize how much decision-making and planning goes into an ordinary day. 

Students can be easily overwhelmed if they do not have the skill set to plan and make time for their school day. And that overwhelm can turn to shutting down or giving up when things get too tricky. To prepare for life, they must know how to manage themselves daily. This can be done through the use of checklists, using a planner, and establishing daily routines. Breaking tasks into smaller steps is a helpful way for a student to feel successful as they work through projects. Writing important dates into a planner can help them remember due dates and assessments. Having a daily routine helps things to become more familiar and second nature. As Benjamin Franklin said, “For every minute spent in organizing, an hour is earned.”

Try some of the following strategies when working with your students:

Executive Functioning Strategies

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Emotional Safety is Key to Learning

Emotional Safety

Throughout my time working with students, I have read many studies about how to keep students engaged during lessons. What many fail to consider is how do we engage the child who is not quite ready to learn. Maybe this student didn’t get a good night of sleep or the student deals with feelings of self-doubt, especially when it comes to academics.

Emotional Safety
Emotional Safety

But what is emotional safety? The National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments defines emotional safety as “an experience in which one feels safe to express emotions, security and confidence to take risks and feel challenged and excited to try something new.” Our emotions have an impact on how we feel about ourselves, the way we communicate with others and how we learn, Let me reiterate that: Emotions have an impact on how we learn!! They help us to process information and aid with comprehension. It can also be termed as social and emotional learning.

According to the National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments by focusing on children’s social and emotional learning, we are working to create children that are skilled in five critical areas:

  1. They are self-aware. They are able to recognize their emotions, describe their interests and values, and accurately assess their strengths. They have a well-grounded sense of self-confidence and hope for the future.
  2. They are able to regulate their emotions. They are able to manage stress, control impulses, and persevere in overcoming obstacles. They can set and monitor progress toward the achievement of personal and academic goals and express their emotions appropriately in a wide range of situations.
  3. They are socially aware. They are able to take the perspective of and empathize with others and recognize and appreciate individual and group similarities and differences. They are able to seek out and appropriately use family, school, and community resources.
  4. They have good relationship skills. They can establish and maintain healthy and rewarding relationships based on cooperation. They resist inappropriate social pressure; constructively prevent, manage, and resolve interpersonal conflict; and seek and provide help when needed.
  5. They demonstrate responsible decision-making at school, at home, and in the community. In making decisions, they consider ethical standards, safety concerns, appropriate social norms, respect for others, and the likely consequences of various courses of action. They apply these decision-making skills in academic and social situations and are motivated to contribute to the well-being of their schools and communities.

Not too long ago, I write a post about creating a trauma sensitive classroom. Those steps can also help foster an environment that encourage social and emotional learning. This year the school where I work has incorporated a social emotional curriculum into our school day. We are using the Caring School Communities curriculum and it has been very successful thus far. Do you use any social emotional learning during your school day? If so, what do you do? Comment and let me know!

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