“Facing the Frontal Lobe:

Strategies to Support Executive Function Skills in Students with Planning, Organization, Emotional Control, Working Memory and Attention Needs”

By Jill D. Kuzma, M.A., CCC-SLP

March 26, 2019,8:30-4:00

GranTree Inn,Bozeman

6 OPI Renewal Units Available

Executive function skills have come to the forefront in the world of education.  Recent research suggests a strong correlation between students’ executive functioning their academic success.  It also has been noted that deficits in executive functioning results in difficulty with organization, time management and task completion, problem solving, on-task behaviors and social interactions. 

Participants in the workshop will explore the impact of Executive Functioning on student learning and social interaction.  The workshop is designed for all educators as attention is given to those skills needed by kindergarten through middle school students to be successful in a general and special education classroom.  Participants will learn about the five domains of cognitive skills and will be given resource ideas and strategies that are designed to support strong cognitive skills in students.  The strategies presented focus on skills that promote effective organization and time management, task completion, independent work, student goal setting and accountability.  Additionally, the intervention ideas also provide a foundation to assist student self-monitoring, impulse control and emotional management.    Jill is widely known for her energetic presentation style and for providing teaching ideas that are user-friendly and immediately applicable in the classroom. Get to know Jill and preview some of her teaching tools and resources by checking out her website at http://jillkuzma.wordpress.com.

Jill Kuzma is a Speech-Language Pathologist who works full-time with elementary-age students on the autism spectrum, with attention deficit challenges, receptive/expressive language needs, and executive function challenges.  Her primary roles are to teach peer interaction skills, emotion awareness and management strategies, and support receptive and expressive language skills through a literacy lens.  In recent years, Jill’s work has focused on the integration social/emotional instruction within the framework of balanced literacy instruction in a collaborative co-teaching manner with other general and special educators.  Jill presently explores specific strategies and resources to share with audiences that can accomplish two critical instructional goals – provide engaging, relevant direct instruction supporting social/emotional skills as an added layer to the  existing materials and frameworks used in classrooms that target literacy learning standards in reading, written language and speaking/listening domains.  A secondary recent focus for Jill has been to develop strategies for early childhood/primary learners to weave social/emotional instruction into pre-literacy activities.   

Jill has had the opportunity to provide staff development opportunities across the country for the past 9 years, while continuing to recognize the importance of working full-time – immersed in the classroom with learners.  Jill recognizes and personally lives through the unique gifts and obstacles of being in the teaching-trenches.  Jill’s workshops strive to provide concrete, relevant and immediately applicable resources/strategies that teachers can bring back into their classrooms the next day.   Jill has also been an adjunct faculty member at Hamline University in St. Paul for the past five years in their Autism Spectrum graduate program.  When not immersed in work, Jill and her husband have 2 teenage sons, she enjoys camping, football, going to the theater, and reading mysteries.