How to Teach Better Executive Function Skills to Middle Schoolers

Each school year, Mary Ann Reitano Calzada is surprised by how unprepared her students are for the organizational demands of middle school. When she announces upcoming test dates, for example, her incoming seventh-graders rarely open their planners to pencil in the information. “How can you sit there and have a teacher tell you ‘there's a test coming up’ and not jot it down anywhere?” she wonders.

Middle schoolers often struggle because “they still have that elementary mentality” that a teacher will keep their folders organized and scaffold deadlines for them, says Reitano Calzada, who teaches Spanish at Gillette Road Middle School in New York. To bring kids up to speed, she now dedicates chunks of class to teaching executive functioning skills to help them plan ahead, monitor their own learning, and stay organized.

As students enter the adolescent years, the prefrontal cortex—the part of the brain responsible for executive function—goes through the “biggest reconstruction since the months after birth,” says neurologist and former educator Judy Willis. This just happens to coincide with middle school, a period marked by a sudden escalation in independence and responsibilities: Students need to hustle between classrooms, take on complex assignments with drawn-out timelines, and keep their materials organized. This experience, Willis says, puts them in the “prime time for building executive functions.”

We asked middle school teachers, like Reitano Calzada, to share their best strategies for teaching students the vital skills they need to thrive in middle school and beyond. 

build Calendaring habits

Planners land in the hands of most middle school students, but “only some have been taught how to use one,” writes middle school teacher Elizabeth Emmons. To fill the void, she models her best calendaring practices every Friday by projecting an agenda identical to the ones her sixth-graders use on the board and demonstrating how to fill it out. To reinforce good practices, Emmons might highlight assignment due dates or mark the number of book pages they need to read each night. Beyond the obvious academic benefits of using planners more effectively, Emmons says she’s noticed more students participating in school events, dressing up for “Kindness Week” for instance, because they had time to plan for it after marking the special event in their agendas.

As with any new skill, it’s important to start small—one assignment per day is a good bite-size entry point, says English teacher Miriam Plotinsky, and reinforce skills over time. To break calendaring down further, Plotinsky, who teaches at Montgomery County Public Schools in Maryland, asks her students the following questions: What did we write down yesterday? Why was it important? How did it help us reach our learning objective?

“They're not going to write down just one assignment forever,” she says. “Ideally, they're going to build on it, and then they'll also learn how to prioritize.” Plotinsky gradually scaffolds by tacking on more assignments to record and prompting them less. She begins to ask more open-ended questions like: What do we have to do today to be ready for tomorrow? “Then it eventually turns into: ‘Okay everyone, we're going to take our minute right now and write down what you have to do,’” she says.

Conquer Paper Chaos

Once paper worksheets and text passages are passed out, there’s a high likelihood they’ll become lost in the abyss of students’ chaotic backpacks. To avoid this common problem, high school English and history teacher Daniel Vollrath embeds a 10-minute organization routine into class every other week for the whole year. It’s a strategy that works at the middle and high school levels, he says. At the beginning or end of the week, his students:

• Empty backpack contents onto desks and sort papers from all their classes into “yes” and “no” piles.
• Purge “no” papers into the recycling bin, and put “yes” papers back into correct folders, binders, etc.
• If phones are permitted in the classroom, Vollrath recommends snapping a photo of the organized backpack. If not, students can quickly jot in their planners about it, or make a rough sketch. 

By the end of the year, the practice “becomes part of their routine,” says Vollrath, who teaches at Hunterdon Central Regional High School in New Jersey. After the school year is over, alumni of his class will even unzip their backpacks when they pass Vollrath in the hallway and flaunt their tidy arrangements.

teach Digital routines

Beyond paper management, there’s also digital organization. “The computer screen can be an overwhelming place for many students,” writes Vollrath. If they don’t learn how to make digital folders, name their files, and regularly clean up their digital workspace, students’ computers can become just as messy as their backpacks. Before assigning anything digital, New Zealand educator Tricia Faulkner demonstrates online organization habits, such as how to set up, color-code, and name folders, and then create sub-folders for individual units or projects.

To bring order to email inboxes, Kasey Short began allotting five minutes each week during advisory periods for students to sort through email. Prior to these sessions, student inboxes were jammed with spam; they didn’t understand the need to respond to emails, and some didn’t check email at all, she says. With dedicated email organization time, Short, currently an assistant head at Charlotte Country Day School in North Carolina, can demonstrate how to unsubscribe from junk email, create folders, and stay on top of important academic and extracurricular updates.

Chunking 101

Left to their own devices, many students will procrastinate big projects and assignments because they’re overwhelmed by the scope. Cue the late night cramming. Teaching students to plan backward from a due date is a critical skill most middle schoolers haven’t learned, says educational specialist Sarah Kesty. Whenever a large multi-step project, unit exam, or research-heavy essay is announced, she walks students through a set of steps which she breaks down in a rubric:

1. Deconstruct the directions: Circle the verbs and decide what actions are needed to complete the assignment. 
2. Hack the rubric: Double-check actions list by checking the column that represents the highest grade on the rubric. What does it require?
3. Estimate time: Once steps are listed, estimate how much time each will take.
4. Schedule backward: Add steps to calendar based on due date and realistic scheduling demands.
5. Final Checks: Compare project with the rubric and adjust as needed.

To hold students accountable, some teachers opt for grading these plans. Incorporating this process into the grading system can “encourage goal-oriented students to practice and apply these skills to support their success,” says former special education teacher Brittany Patrick.

Break Down Instructions and Problems

Most middle schoolers, when faced with a word problem or a set of instructions, will dive right into the work, barely slowing down to absorb and process important details.

In Fei Liu’s algebra class, however, deconstructing word problems is a whole-class activity where Liu walks his eighth-graders through a plan of attack designed to get them to slow down, conceptualize, and formulate a mental map of the problem and the steps required to solve it before pencils even touch paper. They might start by defining what each number in a problem represents, before analyzing the mathematical relationships, and then conceptualizing them with algebraic formulas. “One of the biggest things I see when a kid sees a math question is: You put a number on the page, and you just start doing it,” says Liu. “But math is not just about doing the numbers, it’s about explaining what the numbers mean and coming up with an idea of the story so you can get a result.”

Similarly, students often skip or rush through instructions. To deter them from this habit, a 2026 study suggests fragmenting instructions into digestible steps. When giving spoken directions, pause often so students can fully understand the steps, the researchers note. Use transition phrases like “first,” “next,” and “finally” to signal progression, and organize instructions from simpler tasks to more cognitively demanding ones so students don’t feel overwhelmed from the start.