Executive Function Course
30+ Executive Function Brain Coaching and Cognitive-Motor Activities for the Classroom, Clinic, and Home
This is a Unique Time
- The result of coming back to school after a pandemic has led more teachers to report developmental, cognitive, social, and behavioral declines in their students than in previous years.
- Emerging research has shown that the pandemic has resulted in significant setbacks in English Language Arts and Math (Dorn et al., 2020).
- On average, less than 34% of students are achieving at grade level.
- In high-need, under-resourced communities, 80% of students are not meeting grade-level academic expectations.
- According to the NAEP 2022, we are seeing the largest declines in math achievement in grades 4 & 8 since 1990.
There are Skills You Can Help Students Develop that Will Help Turn This Around
There is meaningful neuroscience research we can apply in our schools, homes, and clinics to develop and support the skills that underlie learning and social-behavior.
Children with better executive function skills show academic, social, and behavioral success compared to their peers. When we improve self-regulation, attention, memory, and cognitive flexibility, these skills impact success across many domains in life, including reading, math, social-relatedness, employability, income, and mental health.
Did You Know?
For many students, Executive Function is a better predictor of academic outcomes than intelligence quotient (IQ) and socioeconomic status (SES), (Blair & Raver, 2015; Cortés Pascual et al. 2019; Micalizzi et al., 2019).
Executive Function skills predict math and reading in higher grade levels (Ribner et al., 2018; Magalhães et al., 2020).
Self-Regulation skills predict academic, behavioral, and social achievement across a lifetime (Robson et al., 2020).
The Key Is To...
Empower children and adolescents with the skills to think, plan, attend, inhibit, and self-regulate. When students develop their ability to think things through, pay attention, manage their emotions, resist their impulses, and plan the sequence of their actions they are better able to successfully learn, connect, and behave.
This Is Achieved By...
Improving Executive Function and Self-Regulation Skills. In this course, we will show you how...
Get started now!
If you are a….
- Teacher
- Parent
- Clinician
- Administrator
Working with PreK-12th-Grade Students Who:
- have difficulty focusing
- are disinterested in learning
- are impulsive
- have difficulty calming themselves down
- have difficulty remembering what they have been taught
- are poor at planning their actions
- are rigid or inflexible in their thinking
- have difficulty "thinking things through"
Join Our 6-Hour Executive Function Course to...
- Learn how to help students calm down, in the moment
- Learn how to improve your students' focused attention
- Teach your students Brain Priming activities to alert their brains in under 5 minutes for better learning and behavior
- Learn how to help your students become "Cognitive Scientists" more invested in their own learning
- Bring effective cognitive-physical activities to your classroom, clinic, and home
- Learn how to enhance children's cognitive skills with music and movement
You will help your students learn how to:
- Be more mindful of their attention cycle with My Attention Engine
- Play cognitive-motor activities like CogniTap and Think-Ups which require attention, memory, and self-control
- Take in academic content more easily by learning how to “encode slowly”
- Discover an “alert state of calm” with rhythmic beat-based movement patterns and sequences
- Get excited about learning by becoming the “Best Coaches” for their own brains
- Work collaboratively with others as they develop their own coaching strategies
There are several evidence-based non-pharmacological ways to strengthen and support executive function skills: Cognitive Skills Coaching, high-quality neurofeedback, empirically-researched computer-delivered cognitive skills training, mindfulness, and rhythmic coordinative cognitive-motor movement. With our CogniSuite activities, we have developed a solution for 1:1 therapy, small groups, and classroom interventions that are useful for every student from MTSS Tier I-Tier III.
This Course is Organized for Your Ease of Learning and Enjoyment (We like to make learning fun.)
- 8 Sections of Easy-To-Understand Lessons, Strategies & Activities
- Developmentally Progressive Activities from PreK-12th Grade
- Videos walk you through each activity in the CogniSuite™
- 70+ pages of downloads including proprietary cognitive-motor stimulus cards for your use
- Immediate strategies to better understand and intervene with children who have learning and behavior challenges
- Cutting-edge cognitive-movement activities to improve learning, attention, and behavior
- Cognitive coaching printable motivation badges to help your students become the "Best Coaches" for their own brains
In this 6-Hour Course You Will:
- Learn the biological precursors to executive function, self-regulation, and learning.
- Understand the meaningful overlap of co-existing diagnoses including dyslexia, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, and ADHD, from a data-based perspective.
- Learn the differences between self-regulation, self-control, and response inhibition.
- Learn how to have the “cognitive conversation” about executive function skills including self-control, attention, and memory with your students.
- Learn the CogniSuite™ of coordinative rhythmic beat-based motor movement to engage executive function.
- Practice cognitive-movement strategies to help children move out of the stress response into an alert state of calm.
- Experience a variety of cognitive-motor activities including marching, drumming, ball, desk, and beanbag work to engage thinking and self-regulation.
Your Instructor
Dr. Lynne Kenney is the nation’s leading pediatric psychologist in the development of classroom cognitive-physical activity programs for students grades K-6. Dr. Kenney develops curriculum, programming, and activities to improve children’s cognition through coordinative cognitive-motor movement, executive function skill-building strategies, and social-emotional learning.
Dr. Kenney’s most recent educational program is CogniMoves™ a universal Tier I MTSS cognitive-motor movement program, co-developed with Benjamin S. Bunney, MD, Former Chairman Department of Psychiatry at Yale University. CogniMoves™ is designed to increase executive function skills in K-3 students.
Dr. Kenney is a pediatric psychologist on the Language & Cognition Team at Wellington-Alexander Center for the Treatment of Dyslexia, Scottsdale, Arizona. She has advanced fellowship training in forensic psychology and developmental pediatric psychology from Massachusetts General Hospital/Harvard Medical School and Harbor-UCLA/UCLA Medical School. As an international educator, researcher, and author, Dr. Kenney is dedicated to improving the trajectory of children's learning, particularly in high-need, under-resourced communities.
Dr. Kenney’s books include Brain Primers, 2020 (Kuczala and Kenney); 70 Play Activities for Better Thinking, Self-Regulation, Learning and Behavior (Kenney and Comizio, 2016); the Social-Emotional Literacy program, Bloom Your Room™; Musical Thinking™; and Bloom: 50 things to say, think and do with anxious, angry and over-the-top-kids (Kenney and Young, 2015). My Attention Engine: An executive function skill activity book for teachers, parents, and children is slated for 2023.
Since 1985, Dr. Kenney has worked as an educator in community service with national organizations including the Neurological Health Foundation, Head Start, Understood.org, HandsOn Phoenix, SparkPE, the First Nations in Canada, and Points of Light (Generation On). She values closing the education gap in poverty and enjoys working with Title I schools.
Upon successful completion of the course, please email us to receive your certificate for 6 hours of professional development that may be used for state re-certification hours or professional development hours.