![]() Here are some of our favorite tips to help your son or daughter understand the gestalt. How to help your child see the big picture If he cannot put himself in his teacher’s shoes then he may have difficulty understanding why the task is relevant, what he is expected to learn, or predict what will be on a test. Your son may think his teacher is torturing him with pointless assignments because he may have difficulty with perspective-taking skills. She may have trouble with her working memory which affects her reading efficiency. Your daughter may highlight everything because she has difficulty identifying important details or paraphrasing information to determine the main idea. He is not self-monitoring his work and seeing the task to completion. ![]() One reason your son may have trouble following all the directions on an assignment is that he rushes through the task and does not check his work because he would rather watch YouTube videos for the rest of the evening. The explanations for the common scenarios posed at the beginning of this article are as varied as your son or daughter’s unique learning profile. Add in challenges such as ADHD, autism spectrum, or other learning differences and you can start to imagine why big picture thinking is difficult for many students, yet it is so important for success in school. Moreover, students vary in the rate at which they develop Executive Function skills. No wonder it’s so hard for many students to see the big picture - cognitive flexibility and metacognition are evolving skills for children throughout their school years. To recap, the ability for your child to see the big picture relies upon his ability to understand what is expected of him and why it is relevant, in addition to being able to self-assess along the way. She may ask herself, “Does this contain enough information so that the experiment can be replicated exactly?” or “Did I set myself up for addressing sources of error in my discussion section later in the lab report?” In the example of the lab report, the student uses her metacognitive skills to zoom out and look at the big picture in terms of deeper self-assessment. Second, to go a step further, the ability to accurately see the gestalt involves another Executive Function skill: metacognition, which is the ability to self-monitor our thinking and problem solving. They can put themselves in a teacher’s shoes and infer what she is looking for. When students can fluidly zoom in and out of small detail to big picture thinking, they successfully understand not only what is expected, but why they are doing it. First, the ability to shift her focus from a small detail (“Use the correct punctuation in this sentence.”) to a wider lens (“Keep this paragraph on-topic and use the correct sequence.”) requires the Executive Function skill of cognitive flexibility. Say, for example, a student is writing a paragraph in a lab report on the methods she used for a biology class experiment. The term gestalt means realizing that something is more than the sum of its individual parts - viewing the parts together allows you to see the full picture. Has your son ever lost points on a test or assignment because he did not follow all the directions? Does your daughter highlight everything when she reads and as a result can’t figure out what to study? Does your son complain about how his teacher is “torturing him” because he does not see the point of the assignment? If any of these common scenarios sound familiar, you may find yourself wondering, “Why does my child miss the big picture?”įirst, let’s look at the skills involved in seeing the big picture, or the gestalt. Building a Great Relationship with Your Child (14).adults with executive function challenges (15).Benefits of Executive Function Coaching (17).Executive Functioning for Children (20).Academic Coaching for College Students (23).Executive Functioning for Adolescents (37).Developing Executive Function Skills (55).
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