COUNSELORS & CLINICIANS
Clinicians Guide to Using LearningWorks for Kids
Child psychotherapists are often in the role of providing direct training in the area of problem-solving skills as a part of individual and family psychotherapy. In addition, they offer consultation to parents on how to help children regulate activity and emotions, manage their time and behavior, and develop metacognitive skills. Given that the majority of children who are seen in psychotherapy have some type of executive dysfunction, it is important for therapists to develop strategies to teach executive functioning skills to parents and children. Specific strategies for modeling and teaching in the office setting, as well as home-based strategies to practice and generalize these skills, are invaluable.
An important part of child psychotherapy is developing and maintaining a positive relationship with a child. For many younger children, this involves interactive game play during the therapy session. For older children, it may involve a brief opportunity to play an exciting or interesting game that may not be available to them at home. Increasingly, psychotherapists are using computer and video games as a part of their psychotherapy sessions. LearningWorks for Kids helps you to identify popular games and tools that are not only engaging and fun, but that also serve the purpose of identifying and developing the use of executive functioning skills. Rather than using games developed specifically for psychotherapy, the LearningWorksforKids model provides you with strategies, talking points, and methods of using popular video and computer games for training executive functions. Our Playbooks provide you with guidelines for office-based interventions and engaging homework strategies to support psychotherapy. Therapists can provide parents with specific behavioral strategies designed to practice executive functions used in game play.
Engaging children in wanting to learn executive skills and then practicing and applying them in the real world can be challenging. The use of video games and other digital technologies to engage children in learning executive skills is often very helpful. Child therapists are encouraged to familiarize themselves with general information about executive functions; behavioral strategies that support, practice, and develop executive skills in the real world; and reward strategies that reinforce the use of these skills in appropriate settings. We encourage you to use the LearningWorks fo rKids Playbooks and our recommendations for the use of low-tech toys and other neurotechnologies to assist in developing executive functions.
The LearningWorks for Kids approach is personalized to individual children with whom you work. In order to provide a focused, child-centered plan for using video games, toys and digital technologies towards enhancing executive function skills, we use the following simple process. We ask you to complete a brief narrative questionnaire describing the child (without any personal identifying information) and have you and the parents complete LearningWorksforKids questionnaires that help us to assess a child’s executive strengths and weaknesses. We then provide you and the family with a set of specific recommendations and strategies. These include Playbooks complete with Talking Points and Making It Real sections that are not available in our current website. In the future we will also have mini-games available to register children directly on our website.
Therapists can register for this service by completing the following questionnaire.