Coaching Executive Functioning Skills

Are your middle or high school students having trouble focusing, disorganized, or struggling to complete classroom assignments? Perhaps you’ve also noticed that they have challenges with self-monitoring their thoughts, behaviors, and actions. Managing all these types of activities requires executive functioning skills that teachers can identify and teach to support students’ growth.

Executive functioning (EF) isn’t a new fad or something that research contradicts. Instead, EF is an integral piece toward success in all areas of life. One way to view EF is as a collection of high-level cognitive skills that act as the brain’s control center. These skills play an integral role in managing yourself, your emotions, time, and actions to achieve success both inside and outside of the classroom.

Gain Perspective on Students’ Experience

To gain a better sense of what it feels like to struggle with EF skills, consider engaging with the activity I devised. Try it out yourself or have someone read it to you:

Tap your finger to the beat of “Happy Birthday.” Keep tapping your finger to the beat of the song, but now start counting by three. Keep tapping your finger to the beat of “Happy Birthday” while counting by three. After every other number, say out loud a different United States president. Keep tapping your finger to the beat of “Happy Birthday” while counting by three and alternating with the name of a U.S. president. While you’re doing this, with your writing hand, write down a list of things you need to do tomorrow. Finally, while still doing everything above, say your two favorite colors out loud.

That simulation is meant to give you perspective and insight into how many of your students might think and feel when they try to navigate EF in the school setting. Moreover, the mental energy exerted in this simulation can drain the cognitive and internal battery of all students.

Effective Strategies That Support Students’ EF Skills

As teachers, we have the opportunity to take a few moments in class to incorporate and coach EF skill-building. One approach to do this is by guiding your students with EF strategies—becoming an EF tour guide.

A tour guide is an expert who leads people through an attraction, destination, or site, and shares interesting information to the group to make the experience more informative and enriching. As teachers, we have the opportunity to do something similar for our students as we guide them toward increasing their executive functioning skills. Some stops along the EF tour include the mental processes that enable them to plan, focus, stay organized, and maintain emotional control in the classroom.

The following five strategies are effective for strengthening EF skills and allow you to add personalization depending on your students’ needs.

1. Three-Minute EF Meeting: Schedule a weekly meeting with each student to support their EF skills. Intentionally design this time to ask questions, provide strategies, and learn more about the systems they use to facilitate their learning.

Some sample questions to ask during these meetings include:

“What’s an area of EF in which you can improve? How do you think you would go about improving it?” (Provide them with a list of the EF skills.)

“When is a great time to use one of the EF skills? Describe where they could be used in and outside of the classroom.”

2. Technology Organization: The computer screen can be an overwhelming place for many students. In particular, when students have multiple tabs open (online classrooms, email, and other personal sites of interest), their brains can become overwhelmed by disorganization and confusion.

To maintain attention and minimize distractions on the screen:

Share tips, apps, and processes that work for you and others in the class. For example, students might benefit from using the Microsoft Sticky Notes app to make lists and notes. You can also share and model your own process for decluttering, maintaining organization, and keeping track of documents on your computer.

Incorporate side-by-side support opportunities. In this strategy, two students work to support each other with EF on their computers. A guiding prompt could be, “Take 5 minutes with a partner and share, or show, a strategy that could help them with an EF skill.”

3. Five-Minute Mini Lesson: Set up a daily five-minute lesson, or even a few times a week, to keep students aware of the importance of EF in their lives. Offering strategies and information about an EF skill provides your students with support toward achieving success in their learning and life beyond the classroom.

Here’s an example of a mini-lesson:

An organization strategy: PSP4 (Pile, Sort, Purge, Put back, Photo, Plan)

• Pile all papers in your backpack.
• Sort out the ones you need by making “yes” and “no” piles.
• Purge your paper in the “no” pile into the trash can.
• Put back the other papers in their correct folders, binders, etc.
• Photo time: Take a photo of your organized backpack.
• Plan out how you’ll keep your backpack organized throughout the next week, month, year, etc.

4. Enter/Exit Intentional Practice: As a way to incorporate intentional awareness and practice with EF skills, provide students with an enter/exit ticket activity. When students enter the room, they fill out a note card. On one side, they’ll answer the following question:

“What EF skill will you put into play today? How will you go about showing this skill?”

When students leave class, they reflect on their use of the EF skill and answer this question on the other side of the note card:

“Explain how this EF skill supported your success in class today. How will you use it tomorrow, or down the road?”

5. Anchor EF With a Habit of Mind: Combining two powerful frameworks can reinforce one another. Try matching a habit of mind with an EF skill, and use each one to build upon the other. For instance, using the habit of mind, persisting, can drive one to persevere in the skill of organization.

As a high school teacher, I’ve found success with all of these strategies; I hope that you do too.