Developing Situational Awareness and Intelligence: Strategies to Foster Independent Development of the Self-regulation and Planning Executive Function Skills

Description

Students with executive-function-based challenges often demonstrate limitations in the everyday classroom and home activities, despite average to above-average performance on standardized tests of cognition and language.  Situational awareness is a critical foundational skill of the executive control process and is self-directed, as the student is reading the room to answer the questions:  What do I need to do?  What is expected of me in this setting?  It involves self-directed observation as the student must observe:  What’s happening now?  What matters now? Students must then use  “IF … then” cause and effect thinking:  if this is what it looks like, then I need to ___? Features of  situational  awareness  include:  spatial,  temporal,  object, and social information. When teaching students, we refer to the acronym  ‘S.T.O.P.™”  that represents Space, Time, Objects & People™. When these situational factors of  peers, environmental cues, materials, and directions to attend to are increased even slightly and students ,must integrate and organize these factors as a means to regulate  their behavior, their executive control processes may decline.

In this practical seminar learn strategies to teach students the process of how to “STOP and Read the Room” to:

*Extract: information  about  the expected or less expected features of the space, time, objects  and  people around them to orient themselves and “gets a sense” of what is happening in the specific moment in time.  Teach students to use this salient information to successfully integrate information with their internal knowledge base to create a mental picture of the current situation. to navigate different learning and daily routines and preview future situations. Teach students to use situational awareness to develop the concept of “Future Self” to preview upcoming situations

*Determine Purpose: to know their role or purpose within that given volume of time and space of the situation.

*Predict: the meaning of the situation  to anticipate their expected behaviors in the near future and to predict the most efficient way to navigate space, sequence actions for goal attainment, gather necessary materials, and coordinate his or her actions with and in consideration of others.

*Shift flexibly and change their actions to match the dynamic nature of the situation. Specific strategies to help students use situational awareness to tolerate novel experiences.

*This lecture is full of practical strategies!  Everything from reading a room to successfully transition, to knowing how to clean and maintain and organized space, to efficiently navigating spaces and not zig-zagging about, to anticipating actions and expectations of future spaces!

This program is offered for 0.25 ASHA CEUs (Intermediate Level, Professional area).

Theramoves Services, LLC, is an AOTA Approved Provider of continuing education. AOTA does not endorse specific course content, products, or clinical procedures.

Approved by AOTA for 0.25 CEUs.

Approved by NYSED for Continuing Teacher and Leader Education (CTLE hours) (CTLE approval 23490)

Approved for Social Workers by the NY State ED Dept. #SW-0499

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About the Instructor

Sarah Ward, M.S., CCC/SLP has over 23 years of experience in diagnostic evaluations, treatment and case management of children, adolescents and adults with language learning disabilities, nonverbal learning disabilities, attention deficit disorder, executive dysfunction, Asperger’s disorders and social pragmatics.Read More

What Our Course Participants Say

"Full of practical useful tools and strategies backed by solid explanations of theories." – Danielle

"Practical tools for executing therapeutic goals that can be applied to children and adults" – Elizabeth

"The information was delivered in a very organized fashion and the speaker was interesting to listen to." – Sarah