Assisting with Executive Functioning Tasks: Using Visual Supports

A visual support is anything that we see that helps us comprehend environmental information. Maps are an excellent example of a visual support that helps us understand how our surroundings are laid out. Speed limit signs are another example of a visual support that serves as a notification or reminder of driving expectations.⁴ Although most of the research on visual supports is based on their use with students with autism spectrum disorders, we have found that these supports help many students with behavior challenges.

Visual supports play a double role in prevention: they help with executive functioning skills such as organization and attention,⁵ and they clarify verbal information, which can be confusing for students with language disorders.6 Many students with chronic behavior problems have language disorders, so it stands to reason that some behavior problems stem from these disorders and the communication difficulties they cause. Visual supports are one way of improving and supporting communication and executive functioning tasks as they clarify verbal information, are quickly and easily interpreted (the old saying, ''A picture is worth a thousand words,'' applies here), encourage independence, and provide additional structure. In addition, visual supports stay still in time. This allows the learner to review the verbal input by looking at the visual representation of the input as often as needed.

Let's use the analogy of learning a foreign language to clarify this concept. If you were visiting Paris and were conversational but not fluent in French, would you rather have a native give you verbal directions, give you visual directions using a map, or pair verbal with visual directions? I think most of us would agree that we would find the verbal and visual pairing most helpful.

Many educators use the software program Boardmaker (a free trial can be downloaded at www.mayer-johnson.com) to create visual supports but we find that free computer graphics, digital photographs, or hand-drawn visual supports work just as well, and that is what we used for the visual supports provided in this book. (Free images can be found at http://office.microsoft.com/EN-US/CLIPART.) Don't let thinking that a visual support has to look perfect keep you from using them. We prefer to have students illustrate their own visual supports when possible because they can choose the visual representation that is most meaningful to them. In addition, going through the illustration process helps them comprehend the content of the visual support. Some very simple visual supports that we most commonly use to assist students are organizational helpers, behavior prompts, visual schedules, and transition helpers.