Some clinicians feel apprehensive about addressing their students’ executive functioning skills because they’re not confident in their OWN executive functioning.
At the same time, they’re balancing a large caseload and coming up with ways to target complex things like language and cognition in a system that works against them.
Many people think about time that is either ineffective or incomplete. As a result they’re always throwing things together at the last minute, never leaving themselves enough time to thing about the long-term.
It’s an endless cycle of knowing you need to take the time to come up with a better language and executive functioning intervention framework, getting behind because you didn’t think ahead, but because you didn’t take the time to plan ahead, you’ve now added to your list of immediate fires to put out because again, you didn’t plan ahead.
We see our students struggling with these skills too.
The messy desks. Losing materials. Getting frustrated and anxious because the work is piling up.
That’s why I have clinicians use what I refer to as the “Master Plan” that allows them to think about time from multiple angles so they’re aligning their short-term “Things I’m doing right now” to the “Things I want to have done when I look back at the last year”.
And of course, help students do the same.
I recommend that when we’re thinking about how we spend our blocks of time, we think about future planning in two ways: “Across Tasks” and “Within Tasks”
Future Planning “Across Tasks”
Thinking about time “Across Tasks” is your macro lens. These are the bigger blocks of time you might see on a calendar over the course of long time periods, whether it be 12-18 months, 90-days, 1 month, or your weekly or daily schedule. This is where you start when you do strategic planning. “Across Tasks” planning allows you to look at the bigger “buckets” of time and fill them how you see fit. Some of these are more structured, and some are more flexible.
For example, a students’ Social Studies class might be a structured time block, while their free time is less structured. It’s good to have a balance of both.
For me, I tend to overload myself with work, so I need to consciously block out “unstructured” time so I actually take some time to just chill and rest my brain. Other people are the opposite.
Future Planning “Within Tasks”
Thinking about time “Within Tasks” is your micro lens, where we look at a multi-step task that would fit into one of our “Across Tasks” time blocks and map out the specific steps. Anyone who struggles to get into a “flow” while doing challenging work benefits a lot from “Within Tasks” planning.
You can create a list of items to do, or you can even shade out specific time blocks on a clock to show what you’re doing within a specific block of time.
When we think about time, our executive functioning skills allow us to toggle back and forth to “within” and “across” tasks, making connections between what’s happening now or in the near future and what we want to accomplish further out. Zooming in and out, from within to across is a powerful tool for YOU as a clinician, and is also an important skill to instill in your students.
Here’s an additional breakdown of “Across Tasks” versus “Within Tasks” planning:
I help clinicians get “meta” about planning with my Master Planning process, which is something I teach in Language Therapy Advance Foundations and The School of Clinical Leadership.
Language Therapy Advance Foundations helps SLPs design a scalable framework for language therapy, while the School of Clinical Leadership helps related service providers design an executive functioning intervention plan.
I also share how to design protocols for your students to think about time “within” and “across” in the School of Clinical Leadership.
I’d love to share my “Master Planning” process with you so you can see how it works. You can see a video walkthrough where I design a Master Plan in this article.
Learn more about Language Therapy Advance Foundations here
Learn more about the School of Clinical Leadership here
