Executive Skills

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Executive Skills

• A Practical Guide

The 1st Southern Tagalog Symposium on
Developmental Disabilities
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Executive Skills

• Conductor of an orchestra
• Channel selector of TV
• Chairman of the Board

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Role of Executive Skills

• Meet challenges
• Accomplish goals
• Help decide which tasks to pay attention to, to
  perform
• Organize behavior to delay gratification
• SIMPLY TO REGULATE BEHAVIOR

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Role of Executive Skills

• Thinking skills to achieve goals and problem
  solve
• Planning
• Organization
• Time management
• Working memory
• Metacognition

• Guiding skills to modify behavior
• Response inhibition
• Self-regulation of affect
• Task initiation
• Flexibilty
• Goal directed persistence

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Role of Executive Thinking Skills

• Select and achieve goals
• Develop problem solutions

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Role of Executive Thinking Skills

• Planning
• - the ability to create a roadmap to reach a
  goal or complete a task
• - deciding what is important to focus on
  (saliency determination)

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Role of Executive Thinking Skills

• Organization
• The ability to arrange or place things according
  to a system

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Role of Executive Thinking Skills

• Time management
• The capacity to estimate
• How much time you have
• How to allocate the time you have
• How to stay with in time limits and meet deadlines

Instilling that a Sense of time Is important!
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Role of Executive Thinking Skills

• Working memory
• Ability to hold information in the mind while
  performing complex tasks
• Ability to apply previous learning to the lesson
  at hand for problem solving

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Role of Executive Thinking Skills

• Modifies your behavior to be able to meet the
  goals
• Metacognition
• The ability observe yourself in a situation
• Self-monitoring

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Role of Executive Guiding Skills

• Response inhibition
• Capacity to think before you act
• Evaluating how a behavior may impact a situation

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Role of Executive Guiding Skills

• Self-regulation of affect
• The ability to manage emotions in order to
  achieve goals, complete tasks, control or direct
  the behavior

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Role of Executive Guiding Skills

• Task initiation
• The ability to start a task with out undue
  procrastination

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Role of Executive Guiding Skills

• Flexibility
• The ability to revise in the face of obstacles,
  new information, mistakes
• Being adaptable to changing conditions

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Role of Executive Guiding Skills

• Goal-directed persistence
• Capacity to follow through to the completion of a
  goal and not to be put off by competing interests
  and other demands

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Role of Executive Thinking and Guiding Skills

• Not so much for day-to-day habits and routines
• To help you face new challenges and resolve to
  pursue a goal

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Developmental Tasks Requiring Executive Skills

• Preschool
• Running simple errands (get your shoes from the
  room)
• Pack away things
• Perform simple chores and self-help tasks with
  reminders
• Inhibit behaviors dont touch hot stove, dont
  run into the street, dont grab, hit, push, etc

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Developmental Tasks Requiring Executive Skills

• Kindergarten - grade 2
• Run errands with 2-3 steps directions
• Tidy room
• Simple chores
• Deciding how to spend money
• Inhibiting behaviors - follow safety rules, keep
  hands to self

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School Related Expectations Requiring Executive
Skills

• Grades 1 - 3
• Greater demand for sustained concentration
• Need for enhanced filtering of distractions
• Initial stress on reflection, planning and
  self-monitoring
• Call for persistence and task completion
• Stress on consistency control

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School Related Expectations Requiring Executive
Skills

• Grades 4 - 7
• Less predictable information flow
• Explosion of decontextualized details
• Growing social distractions
• Need for attention on low interest topics
• Stress on extended mental effort
• Planning and self-regulation is are often demanded

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School Related Expectations Requiring Executive
Skills

• High school
• Multiple degrees of saliency in information
• Heightened attention, memory, language
  interactions
• Growing affective distraction
• Stress on previewing, pacing and self-monitoring
• Flexibility of bottom-up/top-down processing

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Keys PARTNERSHIP COLLABORATION OPTIMISM
Successful Learning
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Reference

• Dawson P. and Guare R., (2004) Executive Skills
  in Children and Adolescents, A Practical Guide
  to Assessment and Intervention, The Guilford
  Press, New York, NY

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Thank You!