Executive Functioning: Beyond Checklists and Planners

Do you remember when it was nice to me? I was changing the mask to me while chasing the clouds away. Tiffany, you're on mute.

Sorry about that. Welcome everybody. I am Dr. Tiffany Williams, one of Parallel's clinical managers. I'm going to be your host for tonight's webinar. I've been an SLP for 19 years and I absolutely love the work that we all do as clinicians to impact the lives of those we work with each and every day. In fact, I love it so much that I Started a weekly podcast called Tuesday Talks, where I discuss all things education and even have my 10-year-old son on from time to time to give a kid's perspective. So come join the conversation one day and connect with me on LinkedIn. You'll find the link for that in the chat. So thank you for being here today and spending the next hour and a half with us for a great presentation and some free ASHA CEUs and NASP CPD credits. At Parallel, we really do take pride in nurturing our professional community as well as the broader community by offering innovative, high-quality programming for clinicians and educators alike. So a few housekeeping items before we start. This course is offered for 1.15 ASHA CEUs and 1.5 NASP-approved CPD credits. If you can advance to the next slide. If you wish to have us report CEUs to ASHA and NASP CPD and/or receive a certificate of completion, please be sure to do the following. Attend the entire webinar. Your attendance will be tracked through Zoom reports and no partial credit will be awarded. Be sure to join with the email address attached to your registration. Complete and submit a self-assessment evaluation within 3 business days of today's presentation. So that will be Wednesday, August 20th. At the end of the presentation, you'll see this same slide with a QR code to fill out the survey, and we'll also send an email with the survey link. For ASHA CEUs, be sure to indicate that you want to receive ASHA CEUs and provide your ASHA ID in the post- webinar survey. We love and encourage questions from our participants, so if you have any questions, please feel free to drop them in the Q&A, and we will do our very best to answer them during our Q&A session at the end. You will have the option to stay on for a few extra minutes to hear a little more about Parallel and how we're supporting districts across the U.S. and about our open provider positions. So please join me in welcoming Dr. Karen Dudek Brannan for tonight's presentation. I'll turn it over to you.

Thank you, and I'm excited to be here. So a little bit about me. Um, so as, uh, Dr. Tiffany said, I am Karen Dudek Brannan. I spent about 14 years in the school systems as a speech pathologist before launching an online education company in 2015, which I still do among many other things, and I'm also the host of the De Facto Leaders podcast. But really, one of the things that I discovered that led me to a lot of the work that I'm doing now is that when I started off as an SLP in the schools, I did not feel prepared for a lot of the students on my caseload. Particularly in the area of language and executive functioning. I actually didn't really discover executive functioning until I tried to find a solution for language therapy. I like to say that I was talking about executive functioning without realizing it for many years. So that's partially what inspired me to go back and get my doctorate in special education, because I realized once I got into the school systems that I had about, you know, again, a large portion of my caseload students who needed support with language, literacy, cognition, and I didn't feel like I had a system to support them. So language therapy was definitely on my radar. That's what inspired me to go back and get my doctorate, specialize in that area, as well as put together a lot of the courses that I have offered since then. But as I was working through my framework for language therapy, I realized that there needed to be a lot of executive functioning work embedded into that language therapy, and that led me to a lot of the things that I'm doing now where, um, once— regardless of what your background is, a lot of times once you start to dig into one area and you start to peel back the layers of the onion, uh, you start to realize that You, you figure out how to, how to solve one problem and then you uncover many other questions. And so I can, I can share a little bit more about specific context of how figuring out how to support my students directly led me to a lot of the things that I'm going to share with you tonight. Also, just on the screen here, you can see my speaker disclosures, so I can let all of you read through that as I'm talking, and we will get to the main part of the presentation, which is why you're here.

Dr. Karen, will you turn on your camera?

Oh, yes. All right. And then here again are my disclosures. Again, I own a company called Dr. Karen LLC, where I offer paid trainings and resources for clinicians, educators, and caregivers. And the views that I'm sharing in this presentation are my own and not a reflection of the views or any of my, of any of my current or past employees or employers. So talking about the agenda for tonight, which is why a lot of you are here. So what we'll start off with is where I always start when talking about executive functioning, which is defining what it actually is. Now, I'm sure that a lot of you know or have some idea what executive functioning is. Functioning is, which is probably what led you to sign up for this presentation. But where people sometimes— where there's a lot of points of confusion is linking the internal to external. So after we define what executive functioning is, we'll talk about how it relates to some of the things that you might be seeing externally. So relating to things like anxiety, behavior challenges with generalization, And then move on to some of the strategies that are commonly taught. So really defining the difference between some of these tools that we often see as executive functioning strategies, like using a checklist, using a planner, talking through feelings if students are showing behavioral challenges, and talk about why we sometimes don't see improvements with executive functioning, even if we think we're working on it. And then finally, I will walk through a specific strategy that you can use to start working on executive functioning. It's one example of a tool that you can use to start building these skills, and really, as you see this example, I hope that it helps you to rethink service delivery, so rethink how you're designing services for your students. So the learning outcomes are that we're defining those external and internal mental processes, We're identifying 5 skill areas that multidisciplinary teams can focus on to inform interventions and strategies that support executive functioning and describing those barriers with service delivery models that we often use. And then of course, what are some more effective ways we can support our students? So we'll start off with definitions. So I'm sure that many of you have students who are showing some of these, some challenges in these areas that I have on the screen. I like to start off here because if you are in a related service provider role, if you are in some kind of a special education role, and you're someone who is specifically supporting students who might be struggling, who might need some services, above and beyond the support that they're getting in the general education curriculum, a lot of times the things that teachers or parents or other professionals might be reporting to you are challenges in these areas. These are typically what we would refer to as the symptoms or the external behaviors. A lot of times you might hear issues with attention. Either you have students who appear to be inattentive or they're off task. So maybe the class is— everybody else is moving on to the next activity, but this particular student is often off task. Or maybe they're seeing the opposite, where the student has a difficult time transitioning from one task to another, what we would refer to as hyperfocus, where If the activity is an activity of interest, they actually have a difficult time putting it down and focusing on something else, or they're focused so much on this one activity whenever they're doing it that they are not paying attention to relevant information in the environment. So you might also see in that next category, so some of those learning challenges. So students who have difficulty problem-solving or inferencing, reading between the lines, or you might hear hear from teachers or other people who are working with the students, he or she or they just doesn't learn from past mistakes. We've explained this over and over again, and then they're not able to remember something that we talked about from one day to another, which again, we'd see that poor generalization. So they are able to perform a skill or seem like they understand what they're supposed to do in one context, but then they don't generalize to another setting. We also might be seeing some of those behavioral challenges, so those really extreme emotional reactions that seem like they don't fit the situation. They seem more intense than you would expect based on whatever happened. Some anxiety or nervousness about new situations, and as a result, what we'd refer to as task avoidance, refusal, often what gets labeled as defiance. So not really wanting to try new things or not wanting to do things that require effort or that aren't immediately stimulating. So those would be things that you may be seeing. And then of course, when we go to the bottom left here, we have the things that people commonly think of when we're thinking about executive functioning. So the lack of organization, so students who miss assignments, lose track of their belongings, and then also this poor sense of time, what often gets reported as poor time management, which in practice, how that can present is that they might take way longer than you would expect to do things that you, You might think take only 5 minutes, for example. So I can think of how this might present in the home. Their parents say, go upstairs and get ready for bed. It should take about 10 minutes, but 30 minutes goes by and their parents go upstairs and they still haven't made progress towards whatever that end goal is, and it takes way longer for them to get ready, things like that. And then, You may also see difficulty estimating how long things will take. So maybe you know that the task that they are about to do takes 20 minutes, but they only leave themselves a couple minutes and they wait well to the last minute. And as a result, they constantly seem like they're running behind. And then also you may be seeing that poor sense of time passing. And poor awareness of whether or not, you know, how much time has passed. And then finally, some of the things that don't get talked about as much as it pertains to executive functioning would be some of those social challenges. So how that might present is you may have students who are not participating in the conversation. So for example, they may have a difficult time going up to a group of peers who are having a conversation and knowing how to jump into that conversation and initiate and socialize in that capacity. Or maybe they are doing the opposite, where they are really enthusiastic about participating in that conversation, but the comments that they're, that they're saying, maybe they're blurting things out at times that others might feel is inappropriate. Or others may perceive their comments as off-topic and not relevant to the conversation, or it comes across like they're dominating the conversation or kind of perseverating on a topic that's really interesting to them but not necessarily what the conversation is about or what their, their peers or other people might be interested in talking about. And as a result, they may have difficulty interpreting the actions of others or interpreting how they come across to So this is kind of that summary of some of those external behaviors that may present, and many times when I share this information, I have a lot of people nodding their heads thinking that, yes, I have a student that fits this profile, or yes, I have a student that really struggles with one of these boxes or all of these boxes, or maybe you have a handful of students that are, that are struggling with all of these things. So obviously, these are what we might be seeing on the outside, and then the next step is that we want to figure out what do they mean. So unfortunately, when students are showing some of those external behaviors that I just mentioned, people think certain things about someone when they're interrupting frequently or when they're not on task or when they're having intense emotional reactions. Or when they're refusing to do work. A lot of times the perception is that person is lazy or they're, you know, unintelligent. But of course, we know that that is not necessarily true. These behaviors do not mean that someone is lazy, unintelligent, incapable of improving, or unconcerned about friendships, or even lacking empathy, even though they might appear to not necessarily be aware of how they're coming across. We know that what these behaviors can mean is that a student might be struggling with executive dysfunction. So what— when we define what executive functioning is, if you were to Google it, you'll probably get a definition something like this, and then you'll probably see 8 or 9 skills listed underneath it. So we're going to start there, and then we're going to break it down even further, because one of the challenging things that we have as practitioners supporting students is that executive functioning skills are very abstract. So people tend to focus on those things that we're seeing externally. So what they are is that they are a set of skills that are a set of mental processes that allow us to engage in goal-directed behavior and self-regulate. So what people think of when we say executive functioning and when they're thinking about executive functioning strategies, a lot of times they think, well, it's about being organized. It's about showing up on time. It's about being able to keep track of your things and turn in assignments, partially because a lot of times these behaviors might show up when we have a challenge in front of us, which often happens in academic situations. So these are the things that are on people's radar, and these are things that have to do with executive functioning, but they are— executive functioning is much more than just being able to turn your assignments in on time and be organized, and it can have a significant impact on many other things in your life, as, as we saw from those external behaviors. So defining what executive functioning is. This is more of the textbook definition. So obviously we have these 8 or 9 skills that often come up as a definition for executive functioning, which are really important things for us to understand in just having that clinical definition or that understanding of what are those internal mental processes that are going to allow us to engage in goal-directed behavior and self-regulate. So we have attending. So again, that was one of the external behaviors. This one has a little bit more of a correspondence with what we might see externally. Again, attending is about noticing when you're off task and redirecting yourself, being able to sustain effort towards something that is Difficult, or that is not as stimulating as something that might be easy or fun, being able to filter out that irrelevant information, and then noticing environmental cues. So going back to what often gets reported, part of it, people might say the student is impulsive or inattentive, but attention is more than just being able to sustain attention to a task, which is part of it. It's also having the self-awareness to notice when your attention needs to go somewhere else. So noticing an environmental cue that shows you, hey, you know what, this— there's something else that's more important over here that I need to pay attention to. Um, you know, for example, a student is working at something, uh, and the teacher comes up to the front of the room and wants to get the class's attention. So they need to know, hey, there's something going on over here, I need to redirect my focus. And then, of course, noticing when you're off task and not focused on something that, that you're— it would be beneficial for you to pay attention to. And this is, you know, this is a 90-minute presentation, for example. There are going to be times during this presentation, because this is how our brains work, that you're going to notice yourself thinking about something that isn't what I'm talking about. And what you would do is notice and redirect yourself. So all of those things would fall under attention. And then of course we have skills like working memory, being able to take in incoming information, both verbal and nonverbal information, holding that information in your mind and doing something with it, engaging in some kind of a goal-directed behavior in front of you to, uh, to— and using that information that's coming in. So holding onto it and completing a task. Strategic planning and organization. So being able to, when you have a task in front of you, whether it's something immediate or whether it's something in the, you know, far off into the future, being able to see and feel and really having a strong sense of the goal and the steps to get to the goal. So seeing and visualizing that end goal.

Mm-hmm.

As well as the steps to get to that goal, having that good sense of something, estimating how long it will take, and knowing where to look for the information. If you have, if you have limited information that is going to guide you in being successful in doing something that's in front of you, do you know where to go to get that clarification? Do you know how to move forward with the task? And, and gain additional information in order to complete your goal. And then of course initiation, which is highly tied to all of the skills that I just mentioned. So in order to initiate the first step of something, we need to be able to redirect our attention to the right place. We also need to be able to see and feel that end goal and the steps in order to know what the first step is. We have to estimate how long it will take because what happens sometimes is that if something feels too far off or overwhelming, a lot of times we might have the tendency to put it off and not get started because we're overwhelmed. So that can impact our initiation skills. And then of course we have to be able to transition between tasks, which of course is impacted by some of these other executive functioning Skills that I've mentioned. Moving on, we have things like inhibition. So this is that impulse control, again, having to filter out irrelevant information and resist the impulse to do certain things that we might think about. For example, if we have an idea that pops into our head while we're listening to something that a peer is saying, Do we know how to resist the impulse to say it right then, or, and, and wait till they're finished talking and mention it at a relevant time, or do we just say it out loud at that given time? And there are many other instances when we might see, again, impulse control. Something looks really interesting over on the other side of the room, or you want to grab something, but you realize, oh, you know what, that's not appropriate at the time. Um, being able to take in incoming information and then having that attention to the impact of our actions. A lot of times the reason that we're able to inhibit our behaviors is because we have that, that pause and that thought of, you know what, this, this isn't a good idea. I, I should wait. I should wait to do whatever it is I'm thinking about. Moving on to things like fluency and shifting, these skills are highly tied to that strategic planning and organization because in order for you to get started and engage in goal-directed behavior and think about, um, how do I, how do I moderate my behavior, how do I get to the end goal, um, I'm thinking about what I want to make for dinner and I'm thinking about the different options. Well, being able to go through those options and find think of a plan A, B, C, and consider the relevance of all those different options and pick one of them to move forward with. That is fluency. So again, you might, you might hear the term ideational fluency to be able to generate those options. And then also, as you're, as you're executing your plan, let's say you've generated your options, you're executing, you go downstairs and you think of something that you want for dinner, and you, you go and look in your cabinets and realize you don't have all the ingredients that you need. Can you adjust your plan based on those options and choose another option? So that would be shifting, knowing how to adjust your plan when you realize that you're not on track, um, realizing that something's taking longer than it needs to. You need to take a detour in your original plan. Noticing your progress. A lot of times when we're in the middle of a task, let's say that we're getting ready to go to work in the morning, we normally have about 40 minutes to get ready and something interrupts us. Well, we have to pay attention to the time and notice, you know what, do I need to condense my normal routine so I can get out the door faster? Because You know, maybe something popped up and interrupted me. So that's— that all has to do with shifting. Another thing that falls under that cluster of shifting that can impact us socially would be things like communication repairs. So I'm having a conversation with somebody, or I'm trying to explain something to someone. We do this a lot if we're in a role where we're teaching or supporting students. We're in the middle of a session with a group of students and we're explaining and we realize that our students don't understand the lesson. We have to have those communication repairs to clarify based on the input that we're giving and be able to shift our plan. And that's important in, you know, more formal vocational settings. It's also important in just those day-to-day interactions that we have. And then of course, finally, we've got that self-monitoring and regulation that kind of lays over all of these, all these other skills. So you can kind of see that all of these, all of these skills that we can think about as internal processes, we can think about them to help us define what executive functioning is, remembering that They all are interrelated. So I think where this can get challenging when we're trying to figure out, okay, we have students that are presenting with some of these external behaviors that indicate that executive functioning may be a challenge for these students. We need to bolster those skills. And then when we look at this definition of executive functioning, and this gives us an explanation of why, why might students be showing those external behaviors?

Right.

However, where a lot of people get stuck when we think about this traditional definition is, okay, how do I translate these very abstract things into tangible strategies and then implement those on a multidisciplinary team and, and figure out how do we support students? So what I have found to be helpful is to take those 8 skills and organized them into these 5, what I would say, more tangible, more specific skills that are easier to translate into treatment activities and just embed into the day, especially when we're thinking about school, when we're thinking about not just how do we support students who are in special education, but also when we're thinking about universal design. So how do we put supports in place that support all students? So we have universal accommodations and supports that may be available in classrooms and multiple settings, and maybe they might be accommodations for certain students or strategies that we do for students who are getting specialized services, but also we're implementing this This spectrum or this continuum of support. So when we think about these skills, the 5 that I pull out into a framework are time perception, self-talk, future pacing, episodic memory, and encoding. And so these 5 skills are what we can use to start coming up with an intervention framework. Think about How can we embed these skills into our interventions? And then how can we also train other people that we're working with to work on some of these skills alongside some of the things that they're already doing? Those— when we do that, we can impact all those executive functioning skills that are in the middle there in the blue. And then what that's going to do is impact students socially, academically, vocationally, and functionally, because we know that these skills are really important. So, when we're talking about time perception, a lot of times we cluster it into this category of time management, which of course, time management, people think of it as, again, like managing your schedule and getting to places on time and turning in your things. But the reason that people are able to do all of those things that I just mentioned The reason that they're able to have the ability to execute and have good time management skills is because they have strong time perception. So this is the ability to sense time, to feel the passage of time as you're doing something, to have that concept of, you know, it's been 5 minutes or 15 minutes, or you have something in front of you. You have that sense of Based on my past experiences, how long will this thing take? So you can conceptualize time. You have a sense of what 5 minutes is. You have a sense of what a day, a week, a month, all of those things are. And what that allows you to do is take your schedule and execute and use all those different blocks of time in your day and your week and months. and get where you need to be at the right time and things like that. That tends to be very difficult for those students who struggle with executive functioning, and that's why we see some of those external behaviors. Another thing that is very powerful because it's something simple that can be embedded into anything that you're already doing, and that is self-talk. So self-talk is just what we use when we're talking to ourselves. So we are, as we're going through our day, we have this internal dialogue. So as you're going home from work and you're thinking about what do I need to do this evening, um, you're, you're having a conversation with yourself in your head or I mean, I know when I used to drive home, sometimes I'd be saying out loud to myself what I needed to do when I would get home from work. So that internal dialogue is what helps you to self-regulate, engage in that strategic planning. What it also helps you do is, um, it, it can have an impact on your emotional wellbeing as well. Like you're nervous about something, you can talk to yourself and give yourself strategies and give yourself mantras, or someone upsets you. You can talk yourself through that situation. So it's important for strategic planning and that modulation, as well as just reacting and responding to those different things you might be experiencing throughout your day. Many times students with executive functioning challenges are not engaging in that internal dialogue and self-talk, and so it's really important that we teach them how to do it by pulling it out and making it more external. A lot of times we do this so naturally, it comes so easy to us that we don't realize we're doing it. And so many times adults who are trying to support kids or clients, you know, maybe even adult clients who struggle with executive functioning, it comes so naturally to them that they don't realize, oh, this might not be something my client is doing and it might be something I need to explain to them. And that obviously leads us to those skills like future pacing again, Being able to think to your goal in the future, and then what do I need to be doing with my behavior right now? And then engaging in that strategic planning. So that specific envisioning your goal, envisioning the steps, and then using things like self-talk to plan into the future. And then we have things like episodic memory, which goes along with future pacing. Episodic memory is your ability to have that Mental imagery of past experiences. So it's almost like this movie in your head of an experience that you had. We use episodic memory for self-regulation. You know, we're having a certain experience, we might think back on a previous experience that it reminds us of, or we have to go do something and we need to figure out a way to do it successfully. We take those past experiences, we draw on those mental movies of the past in order to plan for the future. And students with executive functioning challenges struggle with creating those mental images, and that's why we see that poor generalization. So maybe you've gone through something in a therapy session, they seem like they get it, and then the next day in their classroom, they're not remembering the strategy. It's because they're not using episodic memory to think about what you did in that therapy session and apply it to the situation that they're currently in. So again, we can, as we're going through different planning processes and bolstering these skills, cue students to generate some of that mental imagery through different strategies, through visuals, and also just talking them through the steps of of reminding them to create that mental image in their head. And then finally, we have encoding, which is just, um, as we're planning, as we're thinking into the past and planning into the future and regulating our behavior based on what we're experiencing right now in the moment, we're— we have this combination of things going on in our heads. So we have that mental imagery, and then we're also using language to engage in that self-talk and planning. So encoding is just that ability to, to pair that mental imagery with language, which is really important for a lot of the cognitive tools we might be using with students. So as we go back, as we've talked about some of those executive functioning skills, I'm going to just revisit these external behaviors and just let you process for a second. Now, as we're thinking about time perception, we can kind of see why a student might present with what would appear to be attention challenges, learning challenges, some of those intense behavioral or extreme emotional reactions, why they might appear to not be organized, and why they might have some of those challenges with social situations. They start to make sense when we think about some of those internal behaviors. So, um, some things— obviously I, I wanted to, to get to the, the strategies as soon as possible, but I wanted to quickly talk about some things that you might already be trying. Because a lot of times when people learn about executive functioning, they're like, all right, you know, I've already got some plans in place and some of them aren't working. So why might some of the things that you've already tried not work. And many times it's because there's a partial solution in place. There might be a lot of good things happening, but maybe there's some kind of a missing link somewhere, or maybe the strategies that are in place are useful for certain things, but they're not specifically addressing executive functioning. So this is a very important distinction because we have a lot of conversations about evidence based practices, and a lot of times when people say, well, is this strategy evidence-based, the question, the follow-up question should always be, evidence-based for what? There are some times when a strategy is good for one thing but not for another, so it's really important that we think about that when it comes to executive functioning. So going back to some of those things that are pretty common, And these are often some of the more significant things that come up because if you're seeing some of those behavioral challenges like the avoidance or the refusal, a lot of times it can be difficult to get students to do academic work or maybe other things that you are skill-based that you would need to work on in therapy. So again, that anxiety and nervousness about new challenges, new situations, anything that's unfamiliar, The challenges making friends, behavioral issues, some of that task refusal, and then of course the extreme, pretty intense emotional reactions and then difficulties regulating emotions. So one of the things that I wanted to just discuss here is again, this relationship between nervousness about difficult situations Unfamiliar situations, or just things that maybe aren't the number one favorite thing that a particular student wants to do. So thinking about time perception, if you have strong executive functioning and I tell you this, you know, we've got to— you've got to fill out this form. It's not, you know, it's not an exciting form, but it's just going to take you about 15 minutes to do this. It might not be your favorite thing in the world to do, but I'm telling you it takes 15 minutes. You know what that means. When you see the number 15, what you probably think of is maybe like when I think of a unit of time, I actually envision a clock in my head and I can see that little, you know, if you said 15 minutes, I would envision that quarter of a clock because I have that sense. Of what it means, I might think of an activity that takes about 15 minutes. I might think of a 15-minute block of time on my calendar. I can visualize, and I I have a sense for what it means because I have developed executive functioning skills. But if you have weak executive functioning skills, you might not be able to do that. So, you know, if you see the number 15, like the written symbols 15 minutes, or if somebody says. Auditorily to you, um, this, this task is going to take 15 minutes and you don't want to do it, that might seem really overwhelming and scary. Because if you don't really have that sense of time and all you know is that there's something in front of you that's unfamiliar and scary or difficult or not what you want to be doing, what may end up happening is one of two things. One, you might, instead of thinking about that 15 minutes being this tiny block of time out of your day, you might inflate it in your mind because you don't have that sense of time. And this tends to happen. I even, as a person who has strong executive functioning skills, if I don't want to do something, it just feels like it's going to take so long and I have to talk myself through like, It's only going to take you 5 minutes to unload the dishwasher, Karen. It's not a big deal. So, like, I have these conversations with myself, but I'm able to get through it most of the time. But again, if you have those weak executive functioning skills, you might inflate it and as a result want to avoid it. And that's what a lot of times our kids are doing that shows up as defiance, nervousness, or another thing that you may do is Underestimate how long something takes if it's going to take a really long time and then not give yourself enough time to do it. That can happen as well. And then that can create anxiety because you can't get your stuff done, and then it's frustrating. You're not successful, and then you've had a negative experience doing something. So this can kind of create this spiral of negative experiences, and that can often contribute to some of these these behaviors that we're seeing. So again, when you can feel that end goal, you can sense the steps to get there, challenging tasks feel attainable even if they're uncomfortable. Discomfort is normal. We all experience it, and it's healthy for us. But when you can't see yourself being successful and you don't have clarity on how long it's going to be, all you might be thinking is, This is hard and challenging, and I don't know how long it's going to take. So it can feel impossible and scary. And then a lot of times what happens is that when we see these kids having these behaviors, and a lot of times we try to talk them through it, which, you know, maybe that might be done in a therapy situation. And there are many times when therapy is absolutely appropriate. If we've got students who are dealing with trauma and all kinds of challenges of course, we want to give them that outlet and somebody safe to talk to. But when they're having this, we've got this behavior or we've got this challenging thing that's happened, and then we're asking them to explain and process why they did something or why they're refusing to do a certain task, we're asking them to explain this really complex mental process that a lot of us adults are having a difficult time to understand, and it's really placing a lot of, like, a lot of pressure on them when we're having them kind of revisit and talk through some of these challenging behaviors. Now, of course, again, like I said, if kids want to discuss things, if they have things that they want to get off their chest, obviously we want to create a space for this, but what I've seen happening is that sometimes we When we're seeing those behaviors, we kind of focus on them so much. So what I'm going to share today is a way to gently redirect and move through some of those challenging behaviors when it is in fact more tied to executive functioning. Another thing to consider is that when we're asking kids to explain those past experiences and they're struggling with episodic memory, it may be legitimately difficult for them to remember why they did or didn't do something. Maybe if they're having language challenges as well as executive functioning challenges, that which is very common, some of those language skills required to use complex syntax or retell narratives, that can be really challenging for them and they might not be able to explain the why behind their behaviors. So that's where we've got to come in and just be aware of some of these things. So another thing that kind of addresses what comes up sometimes when we're supporting some of those behavioral-emotional challenges that are— that can be tied to executive functioning that may require some bolstering of skills to move kids through some of those challenges. One of the other things that is pretty common is if we have kids that struggle with organization, a lot of times an obvious thing is, well, let's give them a list, let's write down the steps for them, if they're having a difficult time generating the steps, or use a planner, use a checklist, you know, use a timer. And there is a place for all of those things. Those are very logical solutions, but the way that they're implemented misses the mark in many situations. So what can be helpful is thinking about when we're using a strategy like a list, What skills are actually required to use that strategy effectively? And if you are a, a list person— I'm definitely a list person— why is that an effective strategy for you? Why does it work for you? And why isn't it working for your students? Well, let's just go through the sequence of steps and the internal processes that are required to use a list effectively. So what we often do is that we have to, like, we've got to go do something. We're going to go to the grocery store. We've got to write down the list of things that we need to do at the store. Or sometimes if I have a, like, a very challenging project that I need to do, I actually write down the steps that I need to do in order to complete the project. Like, I like to get it down on paper. In order to do that, before I can even start writing anything, I've got to envision that end goal and I've got to visualize the steps. Then I have to start planning and I have to estimate how long those steps will take. I have to think about the potential obstacles, like what things might come up when I'm doing whatever it is that I'm trying to do. I've got to generate options to figure out Like, what things need to go on this list? What things do I need to be able to write into my planner or my list that I'm— my list of steps that I'm doing? Even if you are working with a student on some kind of a visual schedule of how do we get ready for the day when we walk into our classroom, or how do we get ready to get on the bus at the end of the day, we've got to generate those options. And all of those things— envision, visualize, estimate, think, generate— that's all in your head. And yes, maybe you might be writing down while you're, while you're doing that, but a lot of those things are mental processes that happen really quickly, a lot of times without us realizing it because we've gotten so efficient at doing it. Then we also typically— a lot of those, a lot of those things, again, we're encoding, we're going back and forth. Between those visual images, we're thinking on past experiences. We're planning into the future. We're envisioning that end goal, and then we have to pair it with language because you need that language to know what do I write down on my planner? What words am I writing on this list? And then you actually have to write it down. Then you actually have to use this strategy that you just created. Use this tool, this list of things, this schedule, this planner. whatever it is to go do whatever it is you're doing. You've got to initiate, and then once you're executing, you've got to evaluate your progress. You've got to notice if you're on track and shift and redirect. You, you have a list you've got to remember to— while you're doing whatever it is you're doing, you have to remember to reference back to it. And then you're utilizing episodic memory throughout that process. I know that sounds like a lot, and it probably doesn't feel like a lot when many of us are doing it, because again, we're— a lot of these things are just automatic skills that we do in our day-to-day process and just as we're living our lives without thinking about it. Now, what I often see being done in classrooms when it, it comes to strategies like, like organizers, planners, lists is that what people will do is that there's an adult who writes down things on a list and gives it to a kid and gives it to one of their students, or the student is copying the list down from the board. So look at the list of steps on the left, which is how to use a list effectively, and then look at what the student is doing in that situation. They're only doing one step. of all the different things that you'd need to be doing in order to use that strategy effectively. And that's why you often may hear people when they're talking about executive functioning say, saying, don't act as students' executive functioning, meaning don't do the internal processes for your students. So don't do, when you're envisioning the end goal for them, when you're actually writing things down for a student, you're actually engaging in that internal processing, and not allowing your student to do it. So again, a lot of these cognitive tools and strategies and visuals and all kinds of things that we can pull into our classrooms are great, but we have to engage students in the entire process and make sure that we're not unintentionally doing a lot of this internal work for students. We've got to figure out how to fade ourselves out of the process. And what happens with a lot of students, many of my colleagues who are working with kids who are in college, they don't realize how much help they're getting until they're, you know, they have a 16-year-old who's getting ready to think about college or going into the workforce, and they realize that they've been getting way more help from the adults in their lives, and they're not necessarily ready to go out into the world. So all those things are very important. Again, this strategic planning is really important for a lot of these functional skills. I'm talking a lot about academics, but of course it can be so many things that impact your day-to-day life. So yeah, like it comes out in academics, but it can be something that impacts when you, you know, when you get a job, when you have to manage a schedule. When you're trying to manage a schedule with your friends, or even just as you're, you know, trying to manage your life and your family. I have a lot of situations where there's parents who reach out to me and say, you know what, this is true for my kids, but I could also use some support in executive functioning as well. So a lot of people find this very relatable. So the important thing to take away here is that These tools are not executive functioning skills or executive functioning strategies in themselves. Organizing tools are things that we are using when we've already engaged our executive functioning because we have to think and plan to think to yourself, you know what, a strategy would be relevant here. It would be useful for me to give myself a reminder. So just that process of knowing that a tool is relevant is part of executive functioning. So they can facilitate the process, but tools alone don't teach those executive functioning skills. And then also we want to think about things like motivation and persistence as skills, not personality traits, because that future thinking and that seeing the process is what helps us to motivate ourselves toward tasks and persevere through challenges. So it's really important to make that shift. So one other thing I wanted to cover really quickly before I move into strategies is, so I've talked a little bit about how sometimes the therapy is really great for certain things, but then doesn't always address those executive functioning skills. We need to also make sure we do that skill-based training as well. Checklists, again, we need to teach how to use those strategies. And then the final thing is that a lot of times, when there are kids who are struggling socially, they're referred for social skills groups. Again, those kids who maybe they interrupt, they don't know how to jump into a conversation, they either focus really much on topics of interests and their conversations are one-way, or maybe they're the opposite and they, they are isolated socially because they're not sure how to jump in or they're struggling to read the room. With social skills, some shifts that we wanna make, and I'll go through these quickly so we can get into the strategies, but the challenge with social skills groups is that many times there are, when we think about knowledge versus skills, you can have knowledge of something, you can have awareness of how you're supposed to act or what the, like what a nice way to respond to a friend would be, it doesn't necessarily mean that you have the skills to be able to remember to use those strategies or remember to use the knowledge that you have. And so a lot of times there is, when we have these more structured adult-led groups, they focus on the knowledge, they build the knowledge, which for some kids, if that's the issue, If the issue is that they don't have the knowledge of how to react in a certain situation or context, then building the knowledge will be helpful. But if a student has the knowledge, but they don't necessarily have the skills to be able to pull, you know, use their episodic memory skills or apply it in a certain situation, then the social skills group tends to be less effective. And this is really common with students who have ADHD. Because a lot of times they have knowledge, they're not sure, they don't necessarily know how to use that knowledge they have. So this goes back to having strategies versus having the ability to retrieve and use those strategies. And when we're talking about structured academic versus unstructured social situations, many times students are able to apply and retrieve those strategies in a more structured academic situation when there's more scaffolding, but it gets more difficult when they move out into those social situations. So what we need to do is pull some of those interventions out and make sure that kids are having those less structured situations and think about embedding that intervention into other less structured situations in addition to our structured groups. And this help gets into things like understanding feelings and rules versus situational awareness and perspective-taking. So for example, when we focus solely on these, these groups and these isolated siloed sessions, students get really good at explaining what different feelings mean or looking at, you know, pictures of people's facial expressions and saying like, this person is sad, this person is happy, and these are some things that might make a person sad or happy, or these are the rules about how to act in the classroom, or These are the things that I'm supposed to be doing when I'm in the lunchroom or at recess or at a sporting event. But if they don't necessarily have the ability to read a situation and know how to pull in that knowledge of those rules and have some nuance and when to apply those rules, then their application is— it's either not present or it tends to be awkward and not appropriate to a situation. There are many situations when We have some awareness of cultural expectations, environmental expectations, but we know how to go into a situation and take that information we, we know about rules and read the room and determine when it's appropriate to apply those rules or when we might need to adjust a little bit based on what's going on or the responses that we're getting from other people. And that goes into perspective-taking. Which is, I am noticing the way that people are responding, and I'm adjusting my behavior accordingly because I have this awareness of the fact that other people might have a perspective. And in order for kids to be able to apply the knowledge and develop those situational awareness and perspective-taking skills, we have to get out of these siloed interventions, because again, they can be good, for building some of that knowledge and preparing, but then we have to give the opportunity for application because that generalization tends to be a struggle when executive functioning is impacted. So what do we do about all of these things? So what I'm going to do now is just give a bit of a reframe for how we might think about how we support our students. I, as a speech pathologist, had an idea of What my role was. It primarily was in that, you know, I'm pulling students out into therapy sessions. I'm doing direct intervention, whether it be in a small group, maybe I am going into the classroom a little bit, maybe sometimes I'm doing things one-on-one. That is, of course, an important piece, and for many situations, including students who are working on executive functioning, that is a piece. of what can be effective. But we want to expand how we think about that because of the challenges with application, because we know that students need that support in those real-life situations in addition to building that knowledge. We have to take that information and make sure that it's not siloed, but rather embedded across the student's day. How I like to think about this is, that our end goal is thinking about intervention or instructional contexts. So this is what needs to be happening for students in all of the, in some way, in their day-to-day environment, in order for them to be successful in many of those situations. So we need to have priming or front-loading of those skills, And then we need to have real-life practice of those skills, but support during that real-life practice. So priming and front-loading are those more structured situations, but then that real-life practice would be that— those opportunities to actually apply those skills, sometimes with very little support and sometimes with some support, depending on, depending on what the situation is. And then review and evaluation of that real-life practice and continued priming. So it's preparing for a situation, doing the situation, reevaluating and— or evaluating and reviewing that situation, and then rinsing and repeating. So this needs to be embedded into students' days with the different skills that they're working on. So how we can execute that is thinking differently about are about the way that we deliver services. So on the left, we have, what am I doing in therapy, which is very much where I was as a new SLP when I was working in the schools. I was very much focused on my therapy protocols, my lesson plans, and my materials when I was working directly with a group of students, really with what fits into that direct intervention bucket, which is on the left-hand side of the screen. But the way that we can, as practitioners, figure out how to get that support, ensure that the priming, the real-life practice, and then the review and evaluation is happening in different contexts, is that we have to think beyond just the direct intervention and think about using some other models of service delivery to make sure that we take that clinical knowledge that we can use to support those students in those more structured instructional or therapeutic settings, and then take that information and share it with other people to make sure that those strategies are, are used outside of our therapy room or our special education setting, depending on our role. So the models that we can use for the actual activities and things that we're doing would be engaging in some training and development or coaching and consultation. So using some of the, the knowledge that we have from our direct intervention to actually conduct training and development for some people that we work with. So, so teachers, other colleagues, or doing some consultation and coaching with peers or with parents and family members so that they can be supporting some of these strategies in other settings. And then using what I like to refer to as scalable protocols and materials. So taking some of those things that you find to be effective when you're supporting your students and simplifying those strategies enough that you can document them and share them with other people so that you can, you can train and coach others to do what you do. And then of course that long-term strategic plan is just How you figure out how to execute all of these things. So what I wanted to share with you right now is an example of a protocol that you can use to start with that, that place where a lot of us are the most comfortable now, which is direct intervention, and to give you a jumping-off point for how might we create something that we could try in a therapy session, in our, in our group of of students that we're working with, start off with something that you do in a therapy session and use that to create some tools that you can share with other people. So that's kind of that starting point. You almost want to think about it as an initial test or a pilot that you can use to develop something and then simplify it to figure out how might I train other people to reinforce this or maybe do this in a little mini lesson outside of my session so that I don't feel like I'm the only one working on this skill, and I can make sure that my students are generalizing. So this is, um, I'm going to go through this quickly, but I like to— what people, when I start to talk about these other service delivery models, people get kind of overwhelmed because we have big caseloads already. A lot of times some of us are working virtually, and we've got to be really creative with how we collaborate with our coworkers. But the way that I recommend, if you want to develop something that you could eventually use to share with other people, is that I recommend building one thing at a time. So you kind of have your tasks that you're doing in your regular schedule, but then you have this devoted time for, here's where I build something new that I might be able to share with other people, kind of your what I like to refer to as new project time. And I refer to those new projects or those tools as assets. So things where you build one thing, you get it good, it's developed, and then you don't have to devote so much time to it. You create it and then you, you can come back and use your project building time or your, your, your project doing time to build another asset. And over time, you build and you stack so that you have more resources and tools that you can share with other people. So it can start off with you coming up with some kind of a plan for what you want to do. So that first step on the ladder is what's your long-term strategic plan for what do you want to accomplish this year? And then you can figure out, okay, the first thing that I want to do on my plan is I'm going to develop What I refer to as a within-tasks time perception strategy. So that's my first asset that I'm going to build. I'm going to work on it within my therapy sessions. I'm going to get really good at implementing it. Then I'm going to share it with other people and do a little mini pilot. And then I'm going to use that pilot to develop some training materials from that strategy that I developed by myself. And then I'm going to use that to do a pilot with a classroom, so a classroom-based pilot. So I've created something, I've developed it, now I'm going to expand it and see if I can get some of my peers involved, and that pilot can serve as kind of that next step. And then once you do that pilot and you've got some other colleagues involved, then you can create your own plan as a team to start implementing these things. So you want to kind of think about stacking and layering. So what is an example of a strategy that you can start developing that builds executive functioning skills that you can use to, one, bolster your own skills and understanding of how to support executive functioning, but also that you can use to approach some other peers and support them? So I'm going to do a walkthrough, one example of how this could look. So, and this is something, something that I did in collaboration with one of the special ed teachers when I was working in the schools. We had a lot of students who really struggled with writing, and so we had to come up with a good strategy that the teachers could use to, to support students in the classroom that were showing some of that task avoidance and difficulty planning when writing. So here's a case study, just an example of a student. So, when Billy is asked to do a writing assignment, he often finds ways to avoid getting started. He often rummages around, and he doesn't necessarily know how to get his supplies together. They've— we've tried to motivate him with a sticker chart, but it doesn't seem to be working, and a lot of times he's really dependent on the teaching assistant, and she'll have to kind of pull questions out of him, but if she leaves him alone and doesn't sit there and give him a lot of prompts, then he starts distracting other students and he doesn't really know how to prepare for that writing assignment. So this is kind of a case study that is compiled from many students that I worked with when I was in the schools. So what did we do? The protocol that we that we worked on addressed what was going on with this particular student or these particular behaviors. So one of the reasons and one of the challenges that this student might be having is difficulty assessing how long the task would take. So not necessarily watching the time and knowing when it's time to get started, not using self- Talk to talk himself through, what do I need to get ready? What should I be doing? Or using that self-talk to encourage himself to move on. Not picturing how done looks or thinking about what the next step is so he knows how to get started, or thinking about the consequence of what happens if I keep avoiding this writing assignment. Well, I might— Like, he's not thinking, well, I might have to you know, my assignments might build up and then I'll have a lot of things to do and I might miss out on doing something fun. He also might not be thinking about past experiences when he was successful and using that information to plan for the future, and then also probably not encoding and using language to engage and, and figure out what he needs to be doing. So what we did was a strategy that I would refer to as front-loading, which is really that priming phase where We're going to teach a strategy for planning and preparing and engaging in that self-talk and putting some tools in place that are going to build time perception that we can work on in a small group. But then eventually we're going to take this tool and figure out how it applies to, to a classroom. We're going to train the teachers in this strategy, train a teaching assistant how to do it, and figure out how we can take what we're doing in this individual session and pull it over to the classroom. So when we're practicing this strategy up front, this can really be done in any, like, any situation where you have an opportunity to work with a student. Where we did it was in direct therapy in a resource setting, but really this could be done like a teacher pulling a student aside in a large class, in a small group. This specific strategy, this could even be something that parents do at home, this whole process of walking through and talking through how to do a multi-step task. So the main thing is that it's flexible how you teach this strategy, but if you're in a situation where you have direct intervention with students, that's a golden opportunity for you to do things like this. Who needs to do it? Well, obviously, if you're a clinician, you might have a lot of background knowledge that makes you a good person to work on executive functioning, but really it could be anybody who is trained to work on those skills. We can all play that role. So again, in the situation that I'm thinking of, it was the speech pathologist and special ed teacher, but it could be a social worker, psychologist, um, it could even be be the teacher, the special ed teacher, so there's a number of people who could implement this. So just think about the therapy session or any kind of special ed intervention as a delivery mechanism and an opportunity, not the only place that you can do some of these tools. You want to think about if you're in a role where you're providing services for students, remembering that you might be someone who is has a responsibility of making sure that some of these services get put into place, but that doesn't mean you always need to be the one doing them. You might just be facilitating and making sure that they're happening somewhere. So when we're front-loading, the whole purpose of this is to reduce anxiety, provide some modeling, guided practice, and independent practice, and really focus on those internal skills needed for external output. Yes, there might be an external goal, like in this instance, complete a writing assignment, but really the purpose of this front-loading is to teach those skills needed for the external output. The main thing is you don't want to get too caught up in, we've got to finish this assignment in a certain amount of time. You want to focus on the skills. So, the main things that we worked on with this particular student were Showing, showing how to do the setup, the planning and monitoring and scaffolding, and then the evaluation. So as we're doing a multi-step task, we've got to set up for it, and then we've got to do planning and monitoring while we're doing the task, and then we've got to evaluate the task after to see how we did. So we want to get students into this process because this is really how we execute any of those multi-step tasks that we have, whether it's a writing assignment, whether it's going downstairs and making yourself breakfast in the morning. So what we do when we're teaching the setup, what you can do is you can start to ask students and talk to them about when we plan for things, we're envisioning into the future, we're thinking of pictures in our head and we're talking to ourselves. So, here is where we are explaining to students directly that we need to be using language and talking to ourselves, and then also we need to be thinking of pictures in our head and visualizing. And we can actually use physical pictures to help facilitate that, that process. So, for a writing assignment, you might give an example of a completed written document for a student, for example. So we're simply starting off by asking students this question and asking them some, some self-reflection questions that we would normally be saying in our head when we're planning. So one thing that you might be thinking when you're getting ready to do something is, how long will this take? And what we do here is that we can actually take a physical clock and talk about how long it will take and then shade that in on the clock, because then you're going to be using that while you're doing the actual task. So it's important to pair it to that visual of time and then also maybe have a visual of whatever your end goal is to aid in that visualization. And it's really important to use that clock because it gives you a visual that, that gives them that ability to sense the passage of time. We can also go through some pros and cons questions with students, which is kind of rooted in things like cognitive behavioral therapy. So talking through with them, okay, what are the pros and cons? Like, what are the upsides and downsides of getting started right away and completing this assignment or avoiding it? And again, this is just a really quick reframing and talking through it. It doesn't need to be a huge long thing. And you're gonna be doing a lot of modeling when you're doing these pros and cons questions. Again, this whole setup phase, it might be a little bit longer the first time you do it, but the whole point of this is to show kids how to go through this self-talk. So we naturally think about how long something will take and we generate options and think about pros and cons when we're setting up for a task that we're planning. We also can ask them to rate it. How hard is this and how do I know this? Again, we can just simply write down a number based on their response, and it's okay if they just say pretty hard, pretty easy. It doesn't necessarily have to be a number, but the main thing is we want to get them in that habit of talking through and thinking about this level of effort. And how hard they think the task is. I'm going to keep moving because we're almost at 10 till, so I'm going to keep moving through these tasks really quickly, but I can afterwards— I'm certainly happy to answer questions and share additional information about this process, but I'm going to keep going so I can make sure that I save time for questions at the end. So some things you might see here in this setup phase is that you might see some of that avoidance or some of those self-defeating comments. Here is where you want to just do a gentle redirect, or if students are way off in their assessment of their ability to do a task, that's okay. We can gently guide them to get started whether they're really hard on themselves or where they have, whether they have a positive illusory bias where they think, oh, I'm great at this, and you know that maybe they need to work on it. A lot of times we can gently redirect and be factual, like when we actually do the task, you can point out some of those things and allow some of those natural consequences to occur there. You don't necessarily, you know, need to encourage or convince a student in the moment that You know, maybe you need to work on this writing. The main thing is that we want to keep moving them through the process and allow them to develop that self-awareness. What we don't want to do in this process is use too many imperative statements. So what we've moved on to now, we have the setup phase, which I just talked about the last 3 slides. What we've got here Is that we're moving on to the planning, monitoring, and scaffolding phase. And here's where we're actually— the setup phase is more that talking yourself through getting started. Here's where we're actually planning and executing the steps, where we're encouraging students to think of the steps that they need to do in order to complete the task. This is where a lot of people accidentally start doing the executive functioning for kids. So that's why we want to be careful with imperative statements like, direct commands, do this, do this. It's fine when you're initially teaching a set of steps to students, but you want to fade it out as soon as possible because if you're always telling students what steps to do next, you're not allowing them to engage in that planning, which essentially is that executive functioning. So what we want to do instead would be use things like declarative statements and reflective questions to help them start thinking about the steps and cue them to different places in the environment where they might find that information rather than directly telling them the steps. So we can use those gentle guiding statements that are less direct that kind of steer our students in the right direction and get them thinking rather than just telling them what to do. So some examples of some questions and reflective questions we can start to say would be, What do I need to do to get started? What are my steps? What is my end goal? How does it look? And of course, it's normal the first time you're doing this with a student for a specific task, whether it be writing or, or anything else, to have to model it. But again, eventually, as you repeat this process with students, you want to encourage them to do it on their own. And when you're introducing these reflective questions, you want to be telling students, hey, I'm going to say these things out loud, but this is what we, what we do in our heads as we're thinking through some of these challenging tasks. Here are some examples on these next few slides of some different reflective questions and declarative statements, just to give you an idea of an example of how you can move from those directive statements. So something like, what's next, would be an example of a reflective question. Saying, I wonder what's next, would be an example of a declarative statement where you're just making a comment to get a student to think about something. You're being less direct, and that's requiring students to do some inferencing, which is really important for those executive functioning skills. And there are some other examples of the reflective question and an example of a declarative statement. On the, on the slide there as well. So the purpose of this is to model how you would do that internal dialogue and self-talk, improve time perception by having that clock there and using those reflective questions and directive statements to make sure that they're watching the time as they're doing those tasks, and model that strategic planning and those opportunities to access those past experiences and improve their ability to self-monitor. So again, the goal is always to eventually finish the task, but you don't need to be stressed out about, like, if it's a writing assignment, it's okay if you don't finish it. That's just a natural consequence if it takes you a long time to get started. So we want to get to the end goal and the external outcome, but not at the expense of building these internal skills. And then when we wrap up, we're wrapping up with these— this— we've completed the task, and then there's more modeling of these self-talk and strategies, giving students some additional modeling of ways that they can have those self-questioning statements to evaluate and talking through with students. And so this is essentially that strategy. So this is a good place for me to— I think this is the end here. I'm going to stop here because I know we've gone just a few minutes past the Q&A time. I want to make sure that we leave some time for questions.

Thank you so much, Karen, for such an amazing, informative presentation. So I saw a couple of questions in the chat. We probably only have time for one or two. One I want to share is from Beth. She said, I've heard of a variety of both adults and children that cannot create They don't make pictures. She asks, what can we do in this case?

That is a great question, and I, I get it a lot. And this is where it's really important to pull in those visuals. So, um, one thing that you can do, especially if you are talking through something like this particular example when there's steps, is that you can actually look up actual images, or you can walk through with that person, take pictures of them doing the different steps in the task, and then come up with a, like, an actual picture of them completing the task. And that's a way you can start to facilitate those mental images. So a lot of pairing visuals with language here and embedding that in the process, and that can be part of the planning and front-loading that you do with your, your students or clients.

I love that. Um, we have one more question. Um, Tammy says, do you have some strategies to help with episodic memory? She said, I feel like some of my students forget everything we learned within a few minutes, and especially by the next week.

Yeah, that is a good question. So again, pairing all of the information that you have with visuals is really important. And then I think another it's another opportunity to figure out a way that you can develop a strategy for students. So, for example, if you know, like when you're talking with someone and they're giving you a lot of instructions and you know that you're not going to remember it in that moment, you might say, wait a minute, let me write that down, and you develop a strategy for capturing that information so you can use it later. So, when you're doing whatever the initial strategy is that you want to remember, that you're— or that you want your students to remember later, that could be the opportunity where we say, okay, it's really important that we think about this experience when we do this other task or this other thing that's coming up tomorrow. So you can front-load there and create some kind of a tool or something that you can reference, and then when the future experience comes, remind them to think back on the past experience and maybe even create some kind of a tool that they can reference back to. So what that does is gets them in the habit of like, right now, what am I going to have to think back on this experience? And then actually doing it in the future situation, but also giving them a strategy when they have the awareness of, you know, I might need to remember this later. Because part of the, part of the reason why we have those challenges is because They're, they're not necessarily thinking back on those past experiences, but they're also not coming up with strategies to help them remember. So part of it is building the skills, but also part of it is understanding where you are with your skills to know when you need a strategy.

I love that. I know we didn't get to all of the questions, but you'll find Dr. Karen's contact information in the chat, so feel free. And on the next Slide, you'll see some information about Dr. Karen as well for her contacts. We did put it in the chat as well, so feel feel free to connect with her on LinkedIn through her website and follow up with any remaining questions that we weren't able to get to tonight. So this does conclude the educational portion of our webinar available for.