Peg Dawson

If you are a learning support teacher, parent, guidance counselor or otherwise associated with educational enterprises, and you are looking for a good book on executive skills--what they are and how they affect learning and behavior in the classroom, how to assess them in children and adolescents, and how to coach students who struggle with these essential cognitive skills--than this is a book well worth reading. Moreover, its generous menu of solutions and interventions for remedying weaknesses in executive skills are indispensable and therefore well worth trying out with your students or children.… (altro)

I was surprised by the amount of charts/checklists throughout the text, as this is not what I was expecting. I had never thought of “thinking” and “doing” as two separate dimensions of executive skills, but I think the text did a nice job in helping me decipher the difference between the two. As a child, I’m sure I thought proper time management, for example, was an overwhelming cognition skill; however, as a parent and a teacher, it has become a necessity for my success. Parents (and teachers) forget we were once children and get too caught up in the now, which seriously puts our children at an immediate disadvantage. I like that the text forced me to step away from my role as mom and put myself in my child’s world.
I think the text did a nice job of pointing out many areas that I feel my own children and my students could use: guidance, strengthening, and motivation. As a parent, I found myself tabbing a few pages that I would like to discuss or try with my children; but as a high school teacher, I was often a little disappointed. I would get into a target area, completely relate to the text, but then not find much advice that I felt could really work in a highschool classroom of all boys. I do, however, certainly believe there are many skills mentioned throughout Dawson’s text, such as verbal scaffolding, incentives, goals, and personal interaction, that are extremely important both in school and at home. ( )
vote | flagKMClark | Jul 15, 2014 |
The new buzzword/term in special education is "executive function." This book does a good job explaining it and how to deal with it with kids ages 0-12 years old. ( )… (altro)