Executive Function: Building Blocks for Success

education-executive-functioningFor 20-year-old college junior and Glencoe native David Jaffe, learning has always been a struggle.

It’s not the capacity for knowledge—as a child, his keen mind and passion for learning put him ahead of his peers—but rather the way the brain organizes.

But David, diagnosed in third grade with a specific learning disability, struggled with more than just classroom learning. He faced tremendous difficulty in reading faces, spaces and places, and along with this nonverbal learning disability came anxiety, attention issues and social alienation.

David’s bewildered parents—including his mother, Leslie, an eighth-grade English teacher at Elm Place School in Highland Park—turned to their extensive network of friends, colleagues and professionals, who all led the family to the Rush NeuroBehavioral Center (RNBC).

“We had so many questions,” Leslie says. “But we knew he struggled with more than just learning in school.”

RNBC supplemented the information already gathered by the Glencoe schools, where David was enrolled. “(RNBC’s) deep look into his processes armed us with immense information that guided our actions,” Leslie says. “The data they gathered helped support us at home. Through Rush, we became better advocates for him.”

A New Solution to an Old Challenge

At Skokie’s Rush NeuroBehavioral Center, affiliated with the Rush University Medical Center, trained clinicians assess children with brain-based disabilities, emphasizing identification and treatment of social-emotional learning impairments. RNBC strives to build on and celebrate the individual strengths of children, producing results that allow children to integrate and succeed.

Since 1997, RNBC has worked directly with more than 10,000 children, helping them overcome the challenges presented by brain-based learning disabilities. Research from RNBC suggests that 20 percent of children and adolescents live with some form of brain-based academic, developmental or social learning impairment.

Many of the students RNBC mentors struggle with executive function skills, or the cognitive processes that allow people to plan, organize, focus and make decisions. According to the National Center for Learning Disabilities, executive function helps connect past experience with present action. Problems with planning and attention are coupled with a weakness in working memory, and behavior becomes poorly controlled. Executive dysfunction can affect a person’s ability to work or go to school, function independently and maintain appropriate social relationships. 

“To be successful in school and in life, you really need good executive function skills,” says RNBC Educational Director Dr. Georgia Bozeday. “A lot of these skills used to be incorporated into just basic classroom work, but, when your curriculum load increases significantly and the pressure felt through tests, something has to go.”

Strength in Numbers

RNBC rose out of a discussion group held in the mid-1990s at Medical Director Dr. Meryl Lipton’s house, which centered on kids who had a very specific type of nonverbal learning disorder. “These are kids whose strength is language,” Lipton says. “Their disability has to do with their visual-spatial processing. They often have difficulty with motor skills, visual skills, social cues. They also have executive function issues, which are difficulties with organization and planning.”

Interest in research grew, and together the group launched the center to care for children with these learning disorders and gather information to better understand them. The organization has expanded to include in-service teaching for educators, programming for parents, one-on-one training for students and a fully integrated curriculum for students at all levels. Five thousand teachers have received Executive Function Training through RNBC since 2009, and the curriculum has served more than 250,000 students.

“For too long, educators have assumed that students will develop executive function skills by osmosis,” wrote Dr. Bozeday in her paper, Media Multitasking and the Student Brain. “Only recently has research affirmed the benefits of teaching such skills in the regular classroom.”

How to tell if a child may have an executive function problem:

Children with executive dysfunction may exhibit some of the following difficulties:

  • Trouble organizing work: has difficulty getting started on tasks or struggles to remember all of the individual tasks in a series
  • Trouble completing tasks: may not finish tasks or check to ensure that each step is completed; has good ideas but doesn’t get the job done
  • Trouble managing materials: starts tasks without necessary materials or loses important papers or assignments; fails to turn in work; may have a messy or cluttered bedroom
  • Trouble managing time: over- or underestimates the amount of time needed to complete tasks; wastes time on small tasks and fails to complete big projects
  • Trouble managing attention: skips steps in processes; has difficulty related to a story chronologically; appears distractible or impulsive; struggles with transitions or coping with the unforeseen
  • Social difficulties: exhibits inappropriate responses or overreacts; socially “jumps the gun”; picks smaller, immediate rewards over larger, delayed rewards; doesn’t realistically evaluate school performance

The National Center for Learning Disabilities recommends effective organizational strategies to help with executive function challenges. These strategies, which include creating visual organizational aids, minimizing clutter, breaking long assignments into chunks with transitional shifts and routine scheduling, are appropriate for both children with executive dysfunction and adults alike.

Bozeday recommends goal-setting as an effective way to keep a child on task, whether it be finishing homework or cleaning his room. Bozeday suggests creating a rubric to measure progress and breaking tasks into SMART goals (specific, memorable, appropriate, relevant and time-centric). “Take the big task, break it down, and set time deadlines,” she says. “Record those so you have a way to monitor them.” Hold your child accountable to self-regulate to learn to efficiently managing time and materials, but help them be more self-aware by reminding them to understand their greatest strengths and weaknesses.

“If we can resist the temptation as parents and teachers to deliver praise, and instead substitute recognition of effort, tying recognition of effort to achievement, we will find that we actually influence our kids to value learning instead of just success.”

A Successful Future

David Jaffe, now a junior at George Washington University, received the Creating the Future Award with his family at RNBC’s 17th annual Awards Dinner in October. “All of RNBC’s support impacted David’s success as a young adult,” Leslie says. “He advocates for himself with extreme confidence and, fortunately, never felt labeled, only empowered by knowing more about his strengths and weaknesses.”

At the Awards Dinners, David Jaffe stood before nearly 300 attendees to speak about his experience with RNBC’s educational programming. “I realized I was not always OK with who I was,” Jaffe said. “I now recognize that the tremendous energy, determination and help has taught me how to create a future for myself. I now feel like I fit in my own skin.”

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