This document discusses executive functioning skills and classroom accommodations that can help students with executive functioning difficulties. It defines executive functioning as skills that support learning like attention, working memory, cognitive flexibility, and inhibitory control. The document recommends accommodations like initiating action, maintaining attention, organizing work, planning projects, and improving working memory. It describes common behaviors seen in students with executive functioning issues and closes by emphasizing the importance of executive functioning for school success and its role in self-control, reflection, and considering multiple perspectives.

1. Classroom Accommodations to
Help Special Education Students
with Executive Functioning Skills

3. Executive Function and
Self-Regulation (EF/SR)
These are the skills that
provide critical supports for
learning and development,
and while we aren’t born
with these skills, we are
born with the potential to
develop them through
interactions and practice.

4. Executive Function and
Self-Regulation
1. Paying Attention or Focus
Focusing is obviously central to achieving our goals. If we are so
distracted that we can't pay attention, we can't concentrate.
2. Working Memory
Working memory is holding information in our minds while
mentally working with it or updating it, such as relating what you're reading
now to what you just read or relating what you are learning now to what you
learned earlier.
3. Cognitive Flexibility
Cognitive flexibility is being able to flexibly switch perspectives or the focus of
attention and flexibly adjust to changed demands or priorities.
4. Inhibitory Control
This is the ability to resist a strong inclination to do one thing and instead do what is
most appropriate. It means sticking with something you are doing after you've
had an initial failure -- inhibiting the strong inclination to give up or continuing
to work on something even when you're bored.

5. Why teach Executive
Functioning Skills?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efCq_vHUMqs

6. In the classroom…
Executive functioning allows students to access
information, think about solutions, and
implement those solutions.

7. In the real world…

8. The facts…
• Children with learning disabilities often have
executive functioning disorders as well.
• Executive functioning is a term psychologists
use to describe the many tasks our brains
perform that are necessary to think, act, and
solve problems.
• Executive functioning includes tasks that help
us learn new information, remember and
retrieve information we've learned in the past,
and use this information to solve problems of
everyday life.

9. What are we working towards?
The goal is for students to:
• initiate action
• maintain attention
• organize their work and daily
environment
• plan oral and written
assignments/projects
• improve working memory
• improve self-awareness

10. What behaviors are we targeting?
The student…
• Fails to give close attention to details or makes careless mistakes.
• Has difficulty sustaining attention.
• Does not appear to listen.
• Struggles to follow through on instructions.
• Has difficulty with organization.
• Avoids or dislikes tasks requiring sustained mental effort.
• Loses things.
• Is easily distracted.
• Is forgetful in daily activities.
• Fidgets with hands or feet or squirms in chair.
• Has difficulty remaining seated.
• Runs about or climbs excessively.
• Difficulty engaging in activities quietly.
• Acts as if driven by a motor.
• Talks excessively.
• Blurts out answers before questions have been completed.
• Difficulty waiting or taking turns.
• Interrupts or intrudes upon others.

11. How our brain processes
information

12. Being able to focus, hold, and work with information in mind, filter
distractions, and switch gears is like having an air traffic control
system at a busy airport to manage the arrivals and departures of
dozens of planes on multiple runways. In the brain, this air traffic
control mechanism is called executive functioning, a group of skills
that helps us to focus on multiple streams of information at the
same time, and revise plans as necessary.

13. Here are some common accommodations
teachers can make to pave the way to learning.

17. Closing thoughts…
If you look at what predicts how well children
will do later in school, more and more
evidence is showing that executive functions -
- working memory and inhibition -- actually
predict success better than IQ tests.
The beauty and the purpose of executive
functions is they enable the student to control
themselves, to reflect deeply, and to consider
things from multiple points of view. As such,
they involve paying attention, remembering
what the student needs to remember to
pursue their goals and thinking.