Welcome back to our Executive Functioning Series where we have spent the last few weeks exploring the role of executive functioning across settings and some starting points for finding executive functioning strategies and skills to practice. 

In Part 1 we looked at some executive functioning skills important to living at home while in Part 2 we took a closer look at executive functioning skills related to school. In Part 3 we looked at the ways different executive functioning skills can be practiced across support needs, and for Part 4 we are going to take a closer look at practicing executive functioning skills for high school students with an eye toward college.

College can be one of the most challenging transitions of a person’s life for a whole variety of reasons, and the increased workload coupled with lack of structure typically featured in high school can be one of the most significant. 

Not only is it hard to meet the increased demands, if you find yourself struggling it can be a huge challenge to simultaneously juggle working on executive functioning skills to better manage workload while still being responsible for the workload that is already presenting a major challenge! 

The more we can help high school students prepare for the reality of college, the better equipped they will be both to meet that increased workload challenge and navigate new challenges as they arise. 

But what kinds of skills should we be thinking about? And what other kinds of executive functioning skills might be relevant to the transition to college even if they’re not strictly academic-related. Let’s dive in and take a closer look!

As we alluded to earlier, one of the biggest shocks of college life can be grappling with the expectations and sheer volume around workload while simultaneously losing much of the structure that made completing higher volumes of work in high school easier. 

No one strategy is right for everyone as we begin to navigate that reality, but there are some strategic starting points we can use to start getting students accustomed to that kind of schedule. 

One obvious path is to consciously build up student workload over time, but how can we emphasize the more open schedule of college which might require more careful planning around what times of day are best to get independent work done. One way we can approach that reality is by making some usual classwork into “homework” and finding some times during the week to designate and periods for getting independent work done even though the school day itself is technically active. 

In college, the way we use our downtime during the day can make a huge difference in how much work we find ourselves doing every night, and getting students accustomed to the practice of getting work done at different times of day can be a big difference maker!

Another important metric students might need to begin considering is how to prioritize work, and what we want to make sure gets done first. Working with students on listing out the different reasons why different assignments might be prioritized over others can be helpful so that students don’t feel overwhelmed by trying to build that thought process on the fly.

While no college experience is universal, for many incoming college students in addition to moving away from the structure of a high school day they are also moving away from the structure of their home life to live independently for the first time. While living in a college dorm is not quite the same as living completely independently, many students will find themselves fully in charge of their own daily living routine for the first time, with nobody to remind them if they begin to neglect it. 

One great way to prepare students for that reality is to help them begin to build their own framework for self-care when it is entirely up to them. Some students may feel comfortable largely relying on a similar routine as what they have at home now, while others may need to build systems to remind themselves in ways that a parent or caregiver previously might have. 

Some students may change their system altogether to fit their own needs more comfortably now that it’s entirely their choice. Even if students do not master this routine before going off to school, preparedness is not a binary and keeping it front of mind as part of preparation for college can make life that much easier when the time finally comes!

While managing workload day to day can present its own challenges, another important feature of college is the number of classes that feature major long-term projects with few guardrails ensure that students will finish on time. With all the other stuff going on it’s all too easy to find yourself staring down a deadline for a bigger project than you’ve ever done in your life with only a few days to get it done! 

Having a process for when we are made aware of long-term projects can help to mitigate some of those challenges and install our own guardrails on the process. One example is to make a policy of mapping out what a project needs early and trying to set deadlines for oneself. 

This skill is helpful even if you are not perfect at estimating everything you will need, and continuing to use it will only help you better estimate how much time you need for other projects in the future. It can also be helpful to set a certain day of the week where day-to-day classes aren’t so high pressure to focus on those types of projects. 

If you are unsure where to start with a particular student, it can be helpful to think about where they face challenges on bigger high school projects, and it’s likely those challenges will only become more difficult in college.

Managing big projects is a long-term goal in its own right, but what about those big-picture goals? Why are we going to college in the first place? What do we hope to do with our degree? It’s OK not to have all the answers right away, but it’s also great to be able to start thinking about which long-term goals you do have. 

The point of establishing long-term goals early isn’t necessarily to stick with them no matter what, but rather to work on the skill of determining what you need to move toward that goal and measure how well you are progressing. 

If you want to be an engineer for example, what long-term goals help you reach that profession? What do you need to meet those goals? How do you know when you are making good progress? Is that still your top priority? 

The ability to evaluate progress and determine what goals are most important are both vital executive functioning skills that get to the heart of why we go to college in the first place, and the earlier we can start the process the better, even if we don’t feel totally committed to the long term goals we think we might have in that moment.

With that, we are wrapping up our Executive Functioning series for now, and we hope that this exploration has yielded some great ideas for working on executive functioning skills across different students with different skill sets and needs. 

If you would like to see us revisit executive functioning sometime or talk about a certain component of it more in depth then we would love to hear from you! Just drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com and we will be back next week with a new series focused on work-based learning experiences.

We hope this post has helped spur some thinking on some broad ways to begin working on executive functioning skills across a variety of needs and support levels! 

If you have experience working with students on executive functioning or want to see us cover this topic more in depth then we’d love to hear from you! Just drop us a line at hello@autismgrownup.com and we will be wrapping up this series (for now!) next week in part 4 as we focus on executive functioning in high school with an eye toward preparing for college.