The way most of us concentrate and focus our attention on things that matter has undergone a dramatic disruption in the past two decades. While what we need to do can be enhanced by technology, there are potentially even more digital factors that get in the way of meeting one’s academic, employment, and/or social goals. In this course, we will use a developmental lens as we introduce strategies to help students problem solve and self-evaluate how they set goals, make plans, and stay on task to foster executive functioning, while simultaneously and constantly being distracted by digital tools such as screens, phones, and watches. We’ll also take a deeper look at the latest research related to concentration and focus.

This course explores the role of executive functions across school and home environments. We explain strategies for tackling motivation, time prediction, prioritizing workload, and tracking multiple assignments simultaneously. We review key executive functioning skills and practical metacognitively based strategies to help individuals track and tackle homework and other deadline-based responsibilities.

In two keynotes, Dr. Damon Korb, MD FAAP and developmental behavioral pediatrician, and Michelle Garcia Winner, MA, CCC-SLP and founder of the Social Thinking® Methodology, will connect the dots between executive functions—including self-regulation and perspective taking—and creative, practical strategies to foster organized thinking. Damon’s keynote will explain five important steps professionals can learn to guide parents in how to raise an organized child. He will also present strategies and lessons he has learned during his 20 years as a developmental and behavioral pediatrician to help foster children’s active engagement of organized thinking, the kind of learning and functions they’ll use throughout their lives. Michelle’s keynote will focus on how to help students/clients develop friendships. How do people make friends? How do we keep them? What creative strategies can we teach to help tweens and teens learn to invest in these important but complicated relationships?