What are Executive Function Skills? The ability to plan, initiate, organize, and carry out tasks while regulating emotions, focusing attention, controlling impulses, resolving conflicts, shifting gears when necessary and monitoring one’s efforts to do so.
Wow. Quite a powerful group of skills, right?
Yes. And yet, many adults don’t even know about executive functioning! Interstingly, however, children and adults alike must access these skills almost every moment of the day. In fact, a large part of “school readiness” relies upon executive functioning
An important fact: the part of the brain that that houses these skills does not fully form until the early thirties! Although children may demonstrate moments of using these skills, they cannot reliably perform them due to the lack of neural circuitry in their brains.
Many of the children labeled as “challenging” really have a deficiency in one or more of these executive functioning skills. Unfortunatley, they don’t receive targeted support for developing them because many adults don’t even know they exist!
EF skills have been called the “how” of learning that support the “what” of learning. Given their importance, it seems like more needs to be done to help adults understand these skills and learn how to teach them to children.
This training can be adapted for Pre-K through high school age staff or parents with children in this age range.
Get a sense of Laura’s training from this clip from on Executive Functioning Skills for preschool staff.
For more about this important topic, read Laura’s article published in Special Edge, “Executive Functioning in Young Children.”