There are a lot of specific strategies that people recommend for problems with executive functioning and there’s a lot out there in books and articles about that. The most important thing from my perspective though is that there is no one specific strategy that works for every child. It’s always got to be targeted. And situations change. So it’s important for teachers and parents to understand the principles of how you intervene to help kids.
Let’s talk about three general categories that are really important for intervention. Number one is we have to be sure that we have both short term and long term strategies in there. So what the research tells us, for instance, about folks with ADHD is that their executive functioning is delayed, sometimes it’s an anomaly and it will always be weak, but for some kids it can be as much three to five years delayed.
And so those kids will be out of sync with the demands in terms of executive functioning, although they may be capable of higher level cognitive work. And so our job is to support them so they can be successful in the short term. But that’s only half of our job and if that’s all we’re doing then we’re not really doing the whole thing.
The other piece is how do we teach them what they need to know in order to function independently over time. So that’s principle number one, we want to do short and long term accommodations.
