You can give a student a planner, checklist, graphic organizer, timer, or visual schedule and still find yourself reminding them to use it every single day.
Either they forget to use it, still struggle to organize themselves, or flat out refuse to use it.
That’s because having access to a planning tool and knowing how to plan are two different things.
A checklist can help organize the steps of a task, but you have to be thinking strategically to remember to use the list in the first place.
A checklist also can’t anticipate what might get in the way, what might be missing from the list, or figure out what to do when the original plan doesn’t work.
If a student hasn’t developed those skills yet, the tool itself can become one more thing they depend on an adult to help them use.
This is one of the reasons students can have a long list of supports and accommodations, and still struggle to function independently.
We’ve given them tools to support the process without teaching the process those tools are supposed to support.
I break this down in the video below as part of the 5-part framework I use to build executive functioning.
In the video, I’ll show you why supporting executive functioning skills like strategic planning is much more is much bigger than making a checklist, and how the rest of the framework helps students do more of the thinking that adults often end up doing for them.
You’ll learn why some students get stuck before they’ve even “gotten ready to get ready,” why a checklist doesn’t teach planning, how adult reminders can accidentally do a student’s monitoring for them, why some students genuinely can’t tell whether they’re finished, and how reflection and self-talk can help students generalize what you’re teaching now into future tasks.
The goal isn’t just less prompting today. It’s helping students develop the internal planning, self-talk, monitoring, and self-appraisal skills they’ll need when an adult isn’t standing next to them.
You can watch the video here:
ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
▶️ Free training: How to Be Evidence-Based and Neurodiversity-Affirming by Supporting Executive Functioning: https://drkarendudekbrannan.com/efleadership
▶️ See the case study: This Student Argued Through Every Study Hall to Avoid Writing. Here are Three Things We Changed: https://youtu.be/saLjwFhc8pQ
READY TO IMPLEMENT THE FRAMEWORK?
▶️ Get the Task Planning & Execution Protocol: https://drkarenspeech.lpages.co/task-planning-execution-protocol-26-yt-1/
