In over 30 years of clinical practice, Drs. Peg Dawson and Richard Guare have worked with thousands of children who struggle at home and in school. At the center of their struggles are weak executive skills, and through our writing and now this website, we spotlight these skills that are critical for school and life success.
We hope that by sharing what we have learned, we can help parents, teachers, and therapists to better understand the role executive skills play in healthy development and to identify tools and strategies they can use to assist “smart but scattered” kids become successful problem solvers and self-reliant adults.
Dr. Dawson offers a number of workshop options. In addition to the ones described below, she is happy to work with school districts to design trainings that meet their specific needs. These may include:
- workshops directed at regular education teachers to provide an overview of what executive skills are, how brain development governs executive skill development, what are developmentally appropriate expectations for executive skills at different grade levels, and classroom-based strategies to support executive skill development.
- workshops for special educators (including teachers, school psychologists, speech pathologists, occupational therapists, and behavior specialists) to learn how to design interventions both to limit the negative impact of weak executive skills and to help students learn effective coping strategies.
- consultation services to help school districts implement school-wide approaches targeting specific executive skill challenges. We have not found “off the shelf” curricula to be particularly effective for schools that want to do something more comprehensive to address executive skills. Rather, helping schools identify the specific challenges they want to address and to work with them to design an approach that fits the unique needs of the school or district appears to be a more effective approach.
- evening presentations for parents. These are offered to school districts within driving distance of Portsmouth, New Hampshire as a stand-alone offering. When a school district hires Dr. Dawson to do a full-day training with professionals, she is happy to provide a 1l5-2 hour presentation for parents at no additional cost.
(Peg has hosted PD in Saskatchewan before and would likely come back in the future) Has been initiated in the past from this source: http://www.jackhirose.com/
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