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Discover powerful insights in this episode of Tier 1 Interventions as we explore how visuals and counting can unlock student focus and engagement. Cheri Dotterer and Jonily Zupancic break down the Jesse and Kay problem, revealing strategies for developing executive functioning skills and creating inclusive, effective classrooms. Gain actionable tips to empower every learner, from early education to mature executive thinkers. Part 1
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DisabilityLabs.com sponsors this video podcast. We are committed to IMPACT the journey of 200K teachers (3M students) by 2030 so they can reignite their passion for teaching.
DisabilityLabs.com sponsors this video podcast. We are committed to IMPACT the journey of 200K teachers (3M students) by 2030 so they can reignite their passion for teaching.
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RESOURCES/COURSES MENTIONED
All episodes of Tier 1 Interventions are recorded live and edited for teachers, therapists, and parents to consume on their way to work.
- Join the Next Tier 1 Interventions Workshops LIVE: https://disabilitylabs.com/courses/tier-1-interventions-workshops
- Our next live workshop is on January 18, 2025. Follow the link for all the details. There will be no live event in December 2024.
- Holiday Box for Teachers and Occupational Therapists: available through December 15, 2024 https://store.disabilitylabs.com/products/holiday-teacher-box
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BOOKS
Making Mathineers on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Making-Mathineers-Transformational-Experiences-Conceptual-ebook/dp/B08NFCZ64K
Handwriting Brain Body DISconnect Digital Version: https://disabilitylabs.com/courses/hwbbd
Both books are also available in paperback and hardcover versions. All versions are available wherever books are sold.
Math DYSconnected - To be released in 2025.
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TIME STAMPS
01:00 The Jesse and Kay Problem: Visuals and Counting as Core Skills
08:00 Executive Function: Understanding Development Stages
15:00 Gaining Perspective: The "Tell Me About" Approach
20:00 Why Patience and Observation Are Key in Formative Assessment
27:00 Classroom Application of Jesse and Kay
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SUBSCRIBE and LISTEN to the Audio version of the podcast here on YouTube or your favorite podcast app.
AMAZON MUSIC/AUDIBLE: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/89f67d1a-98b5-4592-a53c-8f4acb3d8029
This podcast is created from excerpts from the Tier 1 Interventions Workshop. To hear the full math intervention, subscribe to watch the event live monthly on the 3rd Saturday during the school year.
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MISSION
We are committed to IMPACT the journey of 200K teachers (3M students) by 2030 so they can reignite their passion for teaching.
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WORK WITH US:
Join Tier 1 Workshops. Complete episodes with bonuses are included in the course. New episodes are added after the live events. https://disabilitylabs.com/courses/tier-1-interventions-workshops
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FREE RESOURCES
Saturday Math and IMPACT Wednesday https://www.eventbrite.com/o/jonily-zupancic-8523599443
3 Interventions OTs need to make your Students' Math Shine!
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Other ways to connect with Jonily and Cheri
Linked In: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cheridotterer/
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BE THE FIRST TO KNOW
Join our community https://disabilitylabs.com/community
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HASHTAGS
#tier1interventions #mindsonmath #jonily #cheri #dysgraphia #dyscalculia #first15days #focustriggers #IMPACTLearning #mathintervention #patternrecognition #responsiveteaching #rigorousteaching #visualperception #sensoryprocessing
- (01:00) - The Jesse and Kay Problem: Visuals and Counting as Core Skills
- (08:00) - Executive Function: Understanding Development Stages
- (15:00) - Gaining Perspective: The "Tell Me About" Approach
- (20:00) - Why Patience and Observation Are Key in Formative Assessment
- (27:00) - Classroom Application of Jesse and Kay
Creators & Guests
What is Tier 1 Interventions?
Math intervention, writing intervention, neurobiology, and cognitive-based learning - Jonily Zupancic and Cheri Dotterer are sharing how to incorporate them into your classroom. Jonily is a secondary math teacher and instructional coach for math K-12. Cheri is an occupational therapist specializing in neurology-based treatment across the lifespan and a Strategy-based Interventionist. Jonily secretly calls Cheri her Lesson Plan Whisperer because Cheri is always in her head, reminding her of the foundations of development before academics begin.
They met in 2018 and have been talking ever since. Together, they have discovered the Miracle Math Classroom. This classroom embeds all math standards from Kindergarten to twelfth grade, plus neuro-based interventions that improve proficiency and boost student engagement. Both gifted and learning support students thrive using the interventions they share, plus all students in between. Using cognitive enhancing techniques strategically placed in the lesson plan, students learn more and enjoy school more, and fewer students get removed from critical instruction for Tier Three Interventions.
Jonily has discovered how to teach all Kindergarten through algebra math standards using twelve, that’s right, twelve Reference Tasks. They include the Pizza Problem, 120-Chart, Paper Folding, Making Rectangles, Quick Dots, Locker Problem, Jesse and Kay, Geoboard, Candy Problem, Paint Problem, Staircase, and the Function Machine.
Cheri uses Body-Brain Anchors to ignite the flame inside everyone’s brain for learning. Whether a person is five or 90, her strategy-based interventions will ignite that flame. These Brain-Body Anchors include the Handstand Flip, Interlaced Bilateral Integration, and the Body Sentence Alphabet.
Together, they connect the puzzle behind math instruction and instructional delivery alongside these cognitive-enhancing activities to maximize math education for all students.
Join us live on the third Saturday of the month, sans July, for the math behind the Reference Task. Every live event is approximately 2.5 contact hours. The first 30-ish minutes become this podcast. To hear the entire training, join our membership program.
Please note: we will not record on holiday weekends. Join our mailing list for updates on dates.
To join us live, register at Tier1interventions.com. The 2.5-hour sessions include the PowerPoint slides, additional audio files of Jonily teaching the Reference Task, resources from Cheri, and much more. A subscription to these 2.5-hour Workshops is $97/month or $947/year.
Membership includes:
*Approximately 27.5 hours of direct training per year
*Audio files of Jonily's Hear Me Teach segments - complete
*PowerPoint Slides to grab and use in your Magic Math Classroom
*Resources from Jonily and Cheri for you and your students
*A copy of Math DYSconnected when released.
Or, you can listen to the first segment on your favorite podcast app for free; no membership is required. No matter how you listen, you will come away with golden nuggets that will transform your classroom.
Reach out to Jonily: jonily@mindsonmath.com
Reach out to Cheri: info@cheridotterer.com
Tier1Interventions.com
Clips from T1I Jesse & Kay question 1
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Jonily: [00:00:00] Tier 1 interventions should be a complete system for how to strengthen the core Tier 1 regular general classroom with academic, mathematical, and non academic interventions.
Jonily: Think about this. Are you looking for ways as a general classroom teacher to increase the engagement and focus of your students?
Cedric: I'm Cedric, Tier 1 Interventions AI assistant. Sorry the screen went black. It's okay Sheri and Jonily will be with you in a moment. This is segment 2 of the Tier 1 Interventions Workshop held November 2024. Next week we will bring you segment 3. Listen in to last week's episode for the first segment.
Speaker 7: Hey everybody, Cheri Dotterer here.
Speaker 7: I am here for Tier One Interventions this time. My other podcast is The Writing Glitch. Maybe you didn't know that, but if you want to hop over [00:01:00] to The Writing Glitch, you can hear interviews with people who are improving the connections between reading, writing, mostly reading and writing, but We always get that math and writing in there as well.
Speaker 7: I am here today with Jonily Zupancic , and we are going to talk today about a problem that is happening with counting with our students. why do we have these difficulties with Math, and how do we help them as an occupational therapist? And I think that this particular problem is going to be the one that goes AHA to the occupational therapist because it focuses on counting and visuals.
Speaker 7: Look for information coming up in January for the [00:02:00] subscription box. We had some people purchase Christmas version. Teresa, share to the rest of the crowd your impression of the holiday box.
Teresa: I had an awesome experience with it.
Teresa: , It was like a treasure trove. I kept going over layer and layer and I kept finding some neat stuff.
Teresa: Even though you have one box, it still keeps giving to others. I think it was wonderful.
Teresa: Thank you.
Speaker 7: One of the things that , I've been working on for probably six months. And that was a connection to a publisher who does Decodable books. We have a contract with a company that sells decodable books.
Speaker 7: Not only are there going to be books in there for elementary, but there's also chapter books, there's going to be some for each.
Speaker 7: The books that Teresa's talking about are those reader books.
Speaker 7: What is amazing about her product [00:03:00] is in every one of the books that she has written and has published herself, she has taken the time to go through all these standards of care for literacy and she will identify the word that goes with that standard of care in a list. The other thing about it is she allows space. So it's not a chapter book that it's written on every line. It's double spaced and the paragraphs are even separated by an extra space.
Speaker 7: There's plenty of white space for these kids who are struggling. We have taken the pizza problem, and we've put it on a little checklist that's two sided. That is one of the other things that was in the box. There's also some stuff about writing in there about why kids shouldn't have, in kindergarten and first grade, shouldn't have those long pencils that everybody wants to give them.
Speaker 7: They need short sized [00:04:00] pencils. Why is that? Basically they don't have the control in their hands to hold something that heavy for their fingers. That's some of the stuff that you can use for work. , one person asked me recently, what about getting it for CEUs? I said, yes, you can very well get your school to pay for it.
Speaker 7: If you purchase the annual plan, you can get. to pay for CEUs for that product. Plus you get fun things for yourself. And the only thing I have available that we included in the holiday box was a bracelet, silver.
Speaker 7: It's pretty. I have some earrings to go with it. At the last minute, which I didn't announce before the box went out is I found neck silver necklaces that are with a long chain. Teresa said that was, One of the things that she didn't have available and it was very grateful to have that long chain necklace [00:05:00] to be able to wear for work.
Speaker 7: That's the subscription box. Jonily, did I miss anything today? All right, the reason we did that at the very beginning of the program.
Speaker 7: of the episode is because everybody gets to twinkle off at the very end and sometimes you go before we get to that point and I wanted to make sure everybody heard it this morning.
Cheri: Jonily, tell us how do we get kids to focus?.
Jonily: Here's what I have to say about that. Reel it in, people. Reel it in. Because we were making good progress, and now we're just going back to where we were. Tier 1 interventions should be a complete system for how to strengthen the core Tier 1 regular general classroom with academic, mathematical, and non academic interventions.
Jonily: Think about this. Are you looking for ways as a general classroom teacher [00:06:00] to increase the engagement and focus of your students? Are you also desperately finding techniques to be able to individualize for each need of students in the regular classroom without more work, without more prep, and without more stress?
Jonily: Are you striving to differentiate to meet the highest level learner and lowest level learner in your classroom with the same lesson, with one lesson?
Jonily: Today's session is going to be very different than the other Tier 1 intervention sessions. We've been on a good roll. You come to Tier 1 interventions, we expose a task, and we talk about what it looks like.
Jonily: The areas of deficit that are increasingly Making Tier 1 Core General Classroom inaccessible to students. One task can do that. We call these tasks reference tasks [00:07:00] because we reference them throughout the year when we're teaching our typical, regular instruction with our textbook resources that we would always do anyway.
Jonily: The questions that we're going to answer today are, how does Jesse and Kay increase focus and engagement for students?
Jonily: A picture is worth a thousand words. The two things that we're going to focus today content wise are visuals and counting.
Jonily: That's it. Jesse and Kay is going to do that. We are going to see dozens of examples today that you can take back and use as one offs. The first thing we need to do when we go back and implement this session today is expose students to what the general Jesse and Kay situation is. And actually any of you on here could tell me, and I'll tell you in just a moment, what it is.
Jonily: Once we expose what the general Jesse and Kay situation [00:08:00] is, then we just leave it for a while. What I'm going to share with you in each of those four sections, in each, with each of those four ideas, each of those four improvement areas, are examples of one offs, one example, one math problem, one lesson that you could use corresponding with your textbook to refer back to Jesse and Kay to give kids access to this higher level, rigorous, complex mathematics.
Jonily: , stop talking, Jonily, and just tell us.. Part one is increasing the focus and engagement of our students.
Jonily: The strategy for that is to gain student perspective. How do we increase engagement and focus of our students? We are constantly trying to gain their perspective. We need to expose how and what students are thinking about. We need to expose [00:09:00] how students are making sense of a situation. We need to tap into their brain and have them articulate it to us.
Jonily: The only solution to increasing focus and engagement in the classroom is to gain student perspective. The way we do this as a teacher The number one way is my favorite three words, tell me about. We can also prompt with what do you see, what do you notice. So let me model this. The Jessie and Kay situation is, I got my two friends, Jessie and Kay.
Jonily: Actually I should do Jessie and Kay. Because for some reason, Jessie is always on this side and Kay is always on this side. So for no sense making reason, just. That's just how it works in my brain. My friend Jesse starts with 50 and gets 5 a day. And we're going to [00:10:00] leave it as simple as that. Jesse's not going to lose money, Jesse's not going to go buy something, Jesse's not going to, make more money one day.
Jonily: Kay, on the other hand, starts with no money. Kay gets 7 a day. I simply share that with my students. I could share it verbally, like I did with you. I could write it. But I'm actually not. I'm going to start auditory because part of what I want to assess is what kids can make sense when I just say it. I need to know these things and I need to collect data on this multiple times throughout the year.
Jonily: Part of what I'm doing is I am not giving them every intervention they might need at first. But what I'm doing is, I'm starting with one sense, and that is the hearing, auditory, I'm telling them, and then I'm assessing who can gather from that. [00:11:00] I'm also looking out across the room to see which students Pick up a pencil and start writing down the information.
Jonily: See, because we're trying to create habits of mind. We're trying to create habits with these students. A good habit of a successful high school and college student is when you hear a situation like that and when the professor or the teacher says, I'm going to introduce you to this situation today. It's going to be a simple situation, but we're going to come back to it again and again.
Jonily: That should be a trigger for a student. You know what, I'm going to jot down the information here. This must be important. Many of our students don't have that executive function to be able to pick up on that skill. So I'm purposefully facilitating this. to see who initiates the next best step as a student and who doesn't.
Jonily: See, Tier 1 [00:12:00] interventions is about more than just the mathematics. When I introduce this, what is the next thing I'm going to do? I'm going to say my favorite three words. Okay, y'all, I just told you about my friends, Jessie and Kay. Tell me about the situation. Now, I don't have them turn and talk right away.
Jonily: I want you to listen to this very carefully today, step by step. I want us to dissect and break down every individual process and exactly how I do it. I'm not going to have them turn and talk yet, I'm just going to ask the entire class, tell me about my friends Jesse and Kay, tell me about this situation.
Jonily: Then I wait. A couple of you put in the comments in the chat today, What I know, what you notice about your intervention specialist or your cooperating teacher, or if you co teach, oftentimes, if you haven't had [00:13:00] enough training in this, You won't give enough wait time. I'm going to ask, tell me about, and I'm not going to give any other prompt, I'm just going to wait, and I'm going to be patient, and I'm going to start walking around the room, and I can repeat, tell me about the situation, tell me about Jesse and Kay.
Jonily: Now, some hands are going up, but I'm not calling on students right away. I'm making them wait. I'm making them be patient, and then I might say, you know what, give everybody a chance to think, keep your hands up if you want to tell me something, but let me say that, let me say this again, tell me about the situation.
Jonily: And so I'm walking around the room, and I'm just repeating this, and I'm being patient, and then I'm waiting. Slow down, kids. Slow down, friends. Come on now, put the brakes on. Most of your kids can't do what you're asking them to do because it's all happening too quickly. [00:14:00] And they can't even process what's going on.
Jonily: As I'm walking around the room though, I am making a note. of which kids wrote the information on their own. I didn't ask them to. I'm also making a note of which kids have their hands up to participate. I'm documenting all of my observations. Now, if you struggle with wait time, it's because You are not using a formative assessment approach because if you are formatively assessing informally, assessing your students during class, there's plenty of wait time because you have so much to do in that wait time as a teacher.
Jonily: As you're walking around the room and making notes, you don't have to think about what to ask next. You're just observing and you can repeat. You are gonna tell me about Jesse and Kay in just a moment. I'll call on you guys in [00:15:00] just a minute. Keep your hands up,
Jonily: give yourself time to assess and document. This is assessment and actually it's one of the best forms of assessment.
Jonily: Then what happens next is I will start calling on kids to then share their perspective.
Jonily: Sally, what do you think? Tell me about Jesse and Kay. First question I always get. Is Jessie a girl or a boy? I'm like, whatever you want. Whatever you want. Some of the comments I get are, Jessie starts with more money. And some kids, right away, even in my second grade classrooms, will say Kay's gonna pass her up.
Jonily: There's just this intuitiveness. And this actually comes from My most struggling math students typically, and from my ADHD students. One of the greatest traits of an ADHD [00:16:00] students, of an ADHD student, is creativity and curiosity. And what we're doing right now is we're serving our ADHD students because we are tapping into what they are best at.
Jonily: And that is their own perspective, their own thinking, their brain. Their brain is their biggest asset. But we think it's their biggest deficit. It's all about perspective and a shift in perspective. Now at this point I might want to back up with my students and I might want to say, You know what I noticed when I was walking around?
Jonily: I noticed that Amber and Frank and Jenny all wrote down On a piece of paper, Jesse and Kay, and Jesse and Kay's information. That is a model student right there. I didn't ask you guys to do it. Now, next thing every kid's getting out a piece of paper and writing it down. I'm not making them feel bad [00:17:00] about it, but I'm just like, that is huge initiative and independence.
Jonily: That is a key trait of success right there. So if you didn't do that, don't feel bad. But I just wanted to tell you what I noticed. And how impressed I was with that. How are you able to make decisions on your own without being told what to do? That is the greatest asset that I could teach you this year.
Jonily: Look at all of the teaching in the general classroom that has happened, and we haven't even talked math yet. I haven't written anything. I haven't used a visual, but let's reflect. Now, what was the essential question for this segment of Jesse and Kay? It was, how do we increase engagement and focus of students?
Jonily: [00:18:00] Let's unpack what just happened in part one. Talk to me about what just happened. You're
Speaker 4: relying on student input.
Speaker 4: Excellent.
Speaker 7: This , is Dawson Guare's Interpretation of Executive Function. They have identified these 13 areas of where executive function occurs. I've talked to you in the past about where executive function Is generated. Does anybody remember where executive function is generated?
Speaker 7: . In the prefrontal cortex. , what's unique about their model is , that blue section, , those are the first executive functions that come into play.
Speaker 7: for example, a toddler puts their hand on the stove. And you pull it away. No, you're not supposed to do [00:19:00] that because that'll hurt you. That inhibition of impulse to put their hand back up on the stove, even though you have told them no, that's what they're learning. And that's where the temper tantrum and the fight that occurs inside their own brain.
Speaker 7: Happens with that inhibition of impulses? Are they going to follow through with what that thought says or are they going to inhibit it? Built on that, the things that happens next in executive function is they build the Working memory, which is one of those big key phrases with , kids with dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia is working memory isn't working efficiently.
Speaker 7: From there, we get emotional control. That's when the temper tantrum slows down a little bit with an inhibition of impulses, but not necessarily. And I also want to say this is [00:20:00] even for us today, if we, our executive function goes haywire, emotional control is going to be the thing that goes , bizarre ky first.
Speaker 7: ? That blue section is that toddler into preschool age group. That second area , doesn't occur until puberty. When we're looking at sustained attention, those 5th graders that are hitting puberty and trying to sustain longer, sustained attention is only emerging.
Speaker 7: Initiation of task. Jonily talked about which kids are going to pick up the pencil and write down the problem. That initiation of task is only going to come into play effectively as they are maturing through puberty. Planning and prioritizing is separate than organizing. [00:21:00] Planning and prioritizing is , how long is it, am I going to need to do to plan out this paragraph that I'm going to write and the spacing and organizing.
Speaker 7: Think about that. If we are not , capable of initiating a task, and we're asking that of a kindergartner, We're trying to push their executive function beyond its developmental level. , the green section, Organizing, Time Management, Cognitive Flexibility, and Metacognition. I don't think I've ever reached that one yet, Cheri.
Speaker 7: There's a reason for that. Those four areas only happen in a mature adult. See what I mean, Jonily? I hear you loud and clear. Goal directed perseverance is the last thing that comes into play, and that is a mature adult. Usually a well educated mature [00:22:00] adult to boot. So are we well educated in this crowd?
Speaker 7: I hope so. Hopefully your goal directed persistence, because you're here every month, is intact. All I'm going to say to conclude about executive function is it takes until you're about 35 to reach goal directed persistence. Let's think that through a minute. If we were not getting our cognitive, our frontal lobe to be in full capacity until age 35, what's happening in college?
Speaker 7: Meanwhile, those cycles that we've talked about before, flow, are happening on a daily basis and helping build the executive function piece by piece.
Speaker 7: Does that make any sense to everybody?
Jonily: Beautifully said. I've seen this from you, Cheri, many times. [00:23:00] And I don't, remember we say we learn by interactions over time, multiple exposures, sometimes it takes 40 exposures to something before we truly learn it. I don't know if that's it, or I don't know if it's the way that you articulated it today, but it made a perfect match for me, if that makes sense.
Jonily: And I want to stick on executive function for just a moment. I want to make a couple of other points about executive function. And I'm going to make a statement also that may be very controversial. We are expecting too much of our kids. We are expecting too much of our kids.
Jonily: With those expectations. We, as the adults, as the educators, as the therapists, as the parents, are often frustrated and disappointed. [00:24:00] Now, the solution is not to lower our expectations. We want high expectations. But in reality, we have to be graceful. We have to be supportive. We have to be nurturing. on how we're getting kids to those expectations.
Jonily: We can't just say it once and they've learned it. We can't just do it with them once and they're experts forever. We have a very warped sense of child expectation and of teenage expectation.
Jonily: And we are the ones with the problem. We as the adults are the ones with the problem. I'm going to go even further. I'm on a soapbox now. There is no [00:25:00] stopping me now. If you are a parent and you are struggling with your toddler, your fifth grader, your teenager, the only way the child will change is if you as the parent and the adult change first. the only way the child will change is if you as the parent and the adult change first.
Jonily: I relate this to tier one interventions because we have to make the changes in the core one, in the core tier one general classroom.
Jonily: My kids will only change if I change first. And if you are fighting the change as the adult, your kids are going to fight it more. That's all I can [00:26:00] say about that.
Speaker 7: That's all I challenge you guys to tweet that. I put it in the chat. Tweet it. Get it out there. Share it as soon as you can today. Tag at MindsOnMath.
Jonily: And Cheri Dotterer.
Jonily: The other thing I want to say is we are not born with executive functioning skills. I talk in math all the time about we are born with a certain level of number sense. Number sense is an innate, intuitive, inborn understanding of the size of number. We are born with a certain level of that, some high, some low number.
Jonily: Sense can be improved. It can be learned, but it cannot be explicitly taught. That's a conceptual cognitive statement idea. Math ability is like executive function. Math [00:27:00] ability is what we learn in school. We're not born with math ability. Math ability are the symbols, the notations. The processes, the procedures, the algorithms.
Jonily: A long division procedure. We're not born knowing long division procedure. We have to be shown that. We have to be taught that. We are not born with executive functioning skills. And so we have to be explicitly taught. executive functioning skills. And what was the example I gave in part one with Jesse and Kay?
Jonily: That was that formative instructional practice where I give a prompt, tell me about, I wait, I walk around the room, ask, I look at which students took that initiative to write down. I'm assessing who's got some of those executive functioning skills, wherever they picked it up from. And then I pointed out [00:28:00] And then I do a little teaching on it.
Jonily: After that little 30 second teaching, it doesn't mean the 18 other kids that didn't have it now magically have it. See, that has to happen over time. Maybe 80 times kids have to , be exposed to that mini lesson. It takes time. And we are the only providers of this. Now, if our students parents have never been taught executive functioning skills and they don't have executive functioning skills.
Jonily: Not only are these kids not learning it through modeling, those parents aren't explicitly teaching it either. So it is up to us as teachers. And we can, even without the parent involvement.
Jonily: So our first question, how do we increase focus and engagement?
Jonily: It's by gaining [00:29:00] student perspective, by giving the situation, today's situation is Jesse and Kay, asking them to tell me about.
Cedric: If You like what you heard today, click the subscribe button and get notified when our episodes release. Tune in next week for the next segment of Jesse and Kay.
Cedric: Be sure to order your Holiday Box before December 15 for Christmas arrival.
Cedric: Our next live event is January 18, 2025. We hope to see you there. Get started for $97 per month.