Executive functioning (EF) involves the cognitive processes that enable goal-directed behavior, such planning, prioritizing, self-monitoring, and regulating attention and emotions. Difficulties in these areas can impact every aspect of a student’s academic, social, and emotional life, yet EF often remains misunderstood and under-addressed in school-based interventions.

This presentation provides a comprehensive overview of how executive dysfunction manifests in daily school routines and explores how the external symptoms (such as disorganization, inattention, and poor follow-through) connect to internal processes like self-talk, time perception, episodic memory, and encoding. Attendees will examine common misconceptions about EF, including the overreliance on surface-level tools like planners, checklists, and behavior charts.

Dr. Karen Dudek-Brannan will introduce five key EF skill areas that can be used to design systematic, scalable interventions within multidisciplinary settings. The course will also address why common practices such as talk therapy, isolated skill groups, and “pull-out” sessions don’t produce generalization, and how clinicians and educators can instead design supports that transfer across environments.

Participants will leave with a deep understanding of how EF skills present across real-life routines and academic contexts. This session is designed for professionals who want to go beyond one-size-fits-all interventions and create meaningful, functional change for students with executive functioning needs.

Time-Ordered Agenda
0–5 min Introduction
5–15 min External symptoms of executive dysfunction
15–25 min Misconceptions about executive dysfunction
25–30 min Defining executive functioning
30–35 min Organizing EF into specific behaviors for planning
35–40 min Service delivery models and their pitfalls
40–45 min Time-blindness, anxiety, and executive dysfunction
45–50 min Barriers to generalization in talk therapy/behavior charts
50–60 min What’s happening when planners/checklists don’t work
60–65 min Generalization barriers in social skills groups
65–75 min “Planning service delivery” vs. “Planning therapy”
75-90 min Moderated question and answer session

As a result of this presentation the participant will be able to:

Understand typical language development for bilinguals
Demonstrate language therapy techniques that have been shown to be successful when treating diverse caseloads
List similarities in typical monolingual and bilingual development
Identify intervention goals for bilingual children
Participants will leave with a practical system they can implement immediately, along with renewed confidence in using language sampling as a central component of ethical, effective, and culturally responsive assessment.

Practitioners attending live events will be asked to answer questions at the end of the course about what they learned and how they will use the information they learned in practice. Once the questions (below) are completed, participants will receive their certificate.

One practical takeaway I plan to apply from this session is __________.

Overall, how familiar were you with today’s topic before attending this webinar?

After attending, how confident are you in applying at least one concept from this webinar?

Rate your overall satisfaction with this webinar.

One practical takeaway I will apply from this session is __________.

Practitioners attending recorded sessions demonstrate learning and attendance by passing a quiz with a score of 80% or greater. The quiz addresses questions from material presented throughout the course. Practitioners can retake the quiz if they do not initially obtain a score of at least 80%. For events including case studies, participants download, read, and utilize materials in order to participate.