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Today, we’re joined by Lisa Carey and Alexis Reid for a discussion centered around their book, Supporting Executive Functions: Insights & Strategies for Educators.
We talk about:
- The most important thing to know about executive functions
- How they generally develop over the PreK-12 years
- Signs that learners are struggling with executive functions
- What makes UDL an effective strategy?
- Most meaningful supports at different stages from elementary through high school
- How teachers can “go smaller” with their adjustments
- Metacognition and reflection at different stages
- Learning climate and class agreements
Find Supporting Executive Functions: Insights & Strategies for Educators from CAST Publishing or wherever you get your books.
About today’s guests
Dr. Lisa Beth Carey is a teacher educator and researcher with a focus on improving educational experiences and outcomes for students with neurodevelopmental disabilities. Alexis Reid is an educator, educational therapist and learning consultant in private practice (Reid Connect, LLC) in Boston & Falmouth (Cape Cod) MA, USA, adjunct professor, educator, author, and CAST UDL Faculty member. Learn more about them:
- Listen to the Reid Connect-ED Podcast
- Visit www.ReidConnect.com
- Follow @AlexisAnnReid on Instagram and Twitter
- Follow @dr.lisa_b_carey on Instagram and @EquitableAccess on Twitter
About the host
Ross Romano is a co-founder of the Be Podcast Network and CEO of September Strategies, a coaching and consulting firm that helps organizations and high-performing leaders in the K-12 education industry communicate their vision and make strategic decisions that lead to long-term success. Connect on Twitter @RossBRomano or LinkedIn
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Ross Romano: [00:00:00] Welcome, everybody, to the Authority Podcast and the BE Podcast Network. Thanks for being with us for today's episode. We're going to be talking about executive functions, UDL, and a variety of strategies that can be done in the classroom and school levels to support learners.
So my guests today are Alexis Reid and Lisa Carey. They are authors of the book, Supporting Executive Functions: Insights and Strategies for Educators. Welcome to the show.
Alexis Reid: Thanks for having us.
Ross Romano: So in this case, I wanted to, because of the story behind how you both got involved with this work and then connected to write the book, wanted to give you both the opportunity to sort of tell your own stories in that regard. And we'll start with you, Lisa, and so yeah, what was kind of generally your professional background?
How did you first get involved with the executive functions work and UDL? And then how did you and Alexis connect and start to work on it?
Lisa Carey: Well I started off as a special education teacher and I worked in Baltimore County Public Schools and St. Mary's County public [00:01:00] schools in Maryland. And then I was given the opportunity to go to a seminar about executive function and had never really heard that much detail about it before and was just blown away by how much it explained where my students were really struggling.
And then I had the opportunity to go to Kennedy Krieger Institute and Johns Hopkins School of Medicine for an internship, or fellowship rather, at that was called the Center for Innovation and Leadership in Special Education, and got to work with doctors and clinicians and researchers to learn about the neuroscience of learning and behavior change and research and really just started to dive more and more into the concept of executive function because it seemed like such a linchpin for helping students with all kinds of disabilities, but also kids without disabilities.
And got just really invested in that and along the way was also interested in universal design for learning and it is a guideline on [00:02:00] the, or a piece of the guidelines rather and so that interest kind of brought me to meeting Alexis.
Ross Romano: Now you come into the story, Alexis.
Alexis Reid: Yeah, so it's ironic, Lisa and I probably were studying in the same place around the same time because we both went to college down in Baltimore, where Lisa currently is. I was down at Loyola College, now University, in Maryland. And You know, through the Jesuit tradition, really thinking about teaching and educating the whole student.
They like to use the Latin cura personalis, thinking about how do we tap into and understand all the different aspects of a learner. So I had the great opportunity to be able to work in Baltimore County when I was down there during my teaching training. And similar to Lisa we talked about a lot of the.
different cognitive processes and aspects of learning, but never really touched too deeply on executive function. And across the board, whether it's a [00:03:00] learner who has attention deficit disorder and challenges or any kind of attentional characteristics that get in the way of their learning or any other kind of learning disability There's always this factor that can get in the way.
How do we become strategic learners? How do we navigate through different challenges and new complexities in content that gets presented throughout our learning careers? So when I was in the classroom down in Baltimore and then later, in New Jersey and then in Boston. I had this really great opportunity to kind of zoom in on some of the challenges that the learners I was working with were facing and it helped me to better empathize and understand their struggles.
And I ended up in Boston through my graduate work at Boston College. Focusing on Applied Developmental and Educational Psychology, where I dove really deeply into the cognitive sciences and understood more about what was happening that might have been getting in the way, that it wasn't [00:04:00] just necessarily about the behaviors that were limiting the students and their access to being able to do the best kind of work that they could, but really thinking about what else was going on behind the scenes.
So I, in my graduate studies. got connected with CAST and did an internship there and learned all about universal design for learning. I was just reflecting on the fact that I think it was right after the first version of the UDL guidelines came out, which is wild that now that they're being transformed again now in 2024, and just constantly thinking about the evolution of how we think about learning and learners and executive function for us is so important.
kind of like at the core of everything. So if we can understand how to solidify and develop these cognitive skills, I think we could really help learners to unlock a lot of their potential and really think differently about how they navigate through all different kinds of contexts and challenges.
Ross Romano: Excellent. So, we've talked about executive functions on the show before, [00:05:00] so we won't get into the entire background and definition of them. I encourage listeners to especially check out our episode with Dr. Karen Dudek Brandon and also our episode with Mitch Weathers if you want to kind of get more of the background and it all will connect to this conversation we're having today.
But I do want to give each of you a chance to highlight one And we'll call them the two most important thing for educators to know about executive functions. If they're not super familiar, maybe they've heard the word before or have a little familiarity, but like, is there one thing you want to highlight that's just If you understand this, it's a good starting point.
I'll start with you, Alexis, and then Lisa, you can chime in from there.
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Alexis Reid: Yeah, I think I mentioned it before that a lot of the struggles we tend to see in the classroom often stem from something more than just a student not wanting to participate, not having motivation, or probably my least favorite word being as a lot of people might dump them lazy because they just don't want to do the work.
And oftentimes. I [00:06:00] currently work in private practice as an educational therapist now, and I work with a lot of struggling learners who really are trying to figure out what gets in their way. And oftentimes it's this interplay between their affect emotionality and their executive functions, the front part of their brain and the prefrontal cortex that is still developing for a lot of younger learners.
That once You know, they get emotional about something. They might be uncertain or unsure. Oftentimes that could directly impact their executive function skills, whether they're fully developed or not. It can get in the way of pursuing any goal in an efficient manner. So whenever we see different struggles, the things that most of the students I work directly with, What they tell me is that they wish that educators or other adults in their lives just ask them better questions to figure out actually what was happening to be able to find the right support to be able to access whatever was going on in the classroom and in [00:07:00] their learning and their life.
So investigate what might be happening and think about these executive function skills to be able to provide supports for strategies that get developed over time. I love to say that. The reason I love my work so much is that this is a set of cognitive skills that you're not just stuck with forever.
We can develop, we can strengthen, we can build these skills and I think it's a beautiful opportunity to be able to see whatever potential each individual is able to work towards and achieve.
Ross Romano: Lisa?
Lisa Carey: So the skill be of the executive function skills that I like to highlight the most is inhibitory control, because I feel like it's the one that gets left behind the most or forgotten and we're all focused on the higher ones like the organization and whatnot. But inhibitory control is what's necessary for everything else to fall in place.
And so when we see kids in any circumstance where they can't do that pause. to then come up with a better response to [00:08:00] what's going on. We tend to chalk it up to behavioral problems instead of thinking about like, developmentally we need to work on this inhibitory control piece. And it's that stop and wait and think.
Piece that I think is just really critical for kids at all levels, particularly younger kids need to be taught this explicitly, but we definitely see even adults struggling with that inhibitory control. And it's something that we can practice. So that's always the big one everyone goes straight to The cognitive organization and all that piece, but inhibitory control is my favorite thing to focus and talk about.
Ross Romano: Yeah, and how do Lisa, the executive functioning skills generally develop over the pre K 12 years? Whether we want to kind of look at maybe three phases, like kind of, early elementary, late elementary to middle and high school, or primary versus secondary, but like, what are the kind of big things that are happening at those different phases [00:09:00] that kind of educators should kind of be looking out for?
Lisa Carey: So that inhibitory control piece is really, like, initially coming online with really young kids. So when you are in, if you've ever been in a kindergarten classroom, everyone is working on that. They are simultaneously working on their working memory. And the big piece is that cognitive flexibility stuff really starts to come in later.
So that perspective taking, whether it be with social skills or with math, or even with blocks like you turn a pyramid around for a young child and you're like, look, it's a square on the bottom, mind blown because they're that cognitive flexibility is not quite there yet. But what's interesting is that executive function skills are so context dependent as are all skills, but Because, like, how demanding the environment is around you, that you could have great, EF skills as a fifth grader.
You're just like, I am rocking elementary school. I am the king or queen of my domain. And then you go to [00:10:00] middle school where there's so much more demand on you and all of those skills are now pushed to a new limit. And so, I think the biggest thing with development is thinking about how we boost these demands for kids at different points, like entering middle school, entering high school when you have to switch classes, you have a locker, so thinking about how we've added all of these demands and that kids need time to get their skills back up rather than just being like, what's wrong?
What's wrong with you? Why can't you get it together? So just kind of thinking along the path of it's not just about development, it's also about the match between the environment and the development.
Ross Romano: Yeah, I mean, and that's a good, I think, context to look at what are some of the signs of struggle at different kind of age cohorts, different parts, especially when it may right, manifest from seemingly out of nowhere, perhaps, or that it's not [00:11:00] static, right? That, that as the skills change or the the expectations of the skills that a student would have developed at a certain point shift that there may be signs of struggle that appear.
And so what are Some of the things maybe at those phases, Alexis, that are good things to keep an eye out for to maybe identify a little earlier to provide a little more focus toward,
Alexis Reid: Yeah, I think Lisa hit on a lot of really important points that oftentimes in elementary school, there's a lot of support and scaffolds that are naturally built into the learning environment that the teacher is supporting and probably explicitly teaching and modeling more frequently than once you get to middle school.
And a lot of the students that we work with in particular, and that we help to support educators to better understand, are these really Right, kids who sometimes didn't have to use these skills to be able to do well, [00:12:00] so that, that transition from elementary to middle school, and then middle school to high school is a really important point to kind of focus in on and think about, okay, What are some of these new expectations and responsibilities that the students are going to be asked to do independently and how can we actually build in more of those scaffolds and supports, regardless of their age, regardless of what they've been able to do before, so that we can help them to feel empowered and know that they have some agency in accessing what they need.
So in the book, we talk a lot about. You know, what are these potential signs of struggle? We have a whole chapter kind of dedicated to thinking about that, because as a lot of our colleagues and friends in the psychology world like to say you don't really know what executive function is until you see when students and kids don't have it.
Like, they don't have those skills yet. You can understand it when they're not just coming online naturally. where there are these [00:13:00] signs of struggle. So we talk about how we need to pay attention to that. And we also need to build in these scaffolds and supports. Cause it's not just a have or have not, it's really more about like, how do we build the structures proactively, especially through a universal design for learning lens to be able to allow for learners to learn about their own learning.
Because like Lisa said, across contexts, things might look a little bit differently, and a lot of these students. that are developing or struggling with executive function skills, they might have some really great contempt compensatory strategies that they've been compensating for a long time and relying on their strengths or their intelligence to be able to get by.
And then they're asked to problem solve or do things differently. And sometimes we see even more of a drop off in their ability to access and utilize and develop these skills.
Ross Romano: So a lot of times I think we talk about The variability, [00:14:00] right, with students and certainly identifying certain number of students who may be struggling or behind, but let's say, hypothetically, if particularly as a result, I think of disruptions during the pandemic, right?
And kids that were at certain ages and were not in the traditional school environment during key developmental periods. Let's say you have an entire classroom of second graders who are lacking in fundamental you know, executive functions. What might that approach look like? Is that where UDL comes in as an effective strategy as far as being able to address it?
at that type of skill versus saying, okay, what types of interventions do we need for this kid and this kid? Yeah, Lisa, how does, what does that look like? And then how does UDL start to play into it?
Lisa Carey: So I was working with a [00:15:00] Baltimore City school, shout out to City Neighbors Charter School and we, as, like, all the teachers decided they wanted to work on executive function supports for the school year and we really thought through each other, like, all the different classrooms, we went into other people's classrooms and said, all right, where are the supports that need to be in place and what does that look like at each grade level?
And so, In the fourth grade classrooms, we actually wound up making these executive function solution stations for kids where it was thinking about like, where am I stuck? Because we're trying to teach them how to think through that. And then there were examples and there were like organizing the materials.
Here's how you like, here's the stop, think, wait, and like come up with potential solutions to your problem. So we're teaching all of those different skills and there was this phenomenal board of resources that was created and different guides to help kids through different portions. And then as they were working together on projects, they would prompt each other to go use those [00:16:00] resources.
So it was really taking that universal design for learning concept of having. A lot of flexible resources and tools available for executive function and then letting kids pick which ones that they needed in that time and guiding and coaching them through that process so that they could take ownership of when, where, and how to use those different strategies and tools we were giving them.
Ross Romano: And so, as you referenced earlier, right, the UDL guideline here is to provide options for executive functions. That's concise, but what does that mean? I mean, generally I mean, it sounds good, right? But I'm thinking of, When I read like a ballot initiative that says should the county spend 40 million on parks and recreate?
Yeah, that sounds good. But I, in the context of everything, I don't know. Yeah, sure. It sounds great. But Alexis, like, what does this guideline mean in, in reality?
Alexis Reid: So it's really interesting because there's a big conversation [00:17:00] going on about exactly that because it is in its own kind of lane on the UDL guidelines, but really it touches upon every aspect of it. So UDL guidelines, right? So like Lisa was talking about, this really important skill to be able to inhibit, to press pause, is so closely related to emotional regulation and self regulation that those two things come together.
And self regulation and executive function As the guidelines stand right now are kind of in their own lane, but they're very related. So when we think about providing opportunities to support executive function, we're really thinking about it from Lisa and I, from our perspective, especially to be able to think about how we.
Teach learners to be able to understand how to set a goal, how to create a path, and how to figure out what resources and different approaches are available to be able to work towards that goal. And goal setting in and [00:18:00] of itself is kind of, A charged term, right? We talk about SMART goals in the book, and we talk about not only setting a SMART goal, but helping students to really understand what it means all of us as educators in our careers have probably heard students say, I want to get A's.
In my, on my report card, or I want to do really well and my question and to be able to activate executive function skills is to say, okay, well, what does that look like? Right? How are we going to achieve that? How will anybody else outside of you know that you're working towards that? So a lot of it is about making some of these internal processes and points of reflection more explicit, more seen and more tangible so that students have checkpoints to be able to monitor how they're doing to be able to think about.
Do they have different resources, different approaches, different example, examples maybe even different ways of showing what they know [00:19:00] to be able to activate their executive function skills and really not just achieve a goal or complete an assignment, but really learn about how they're learning through the process of completion of working towards something new that they're learning or creating?
Ross Romano: yeah. Yeah. What is looking at some of the supports, I guess, and we can break it down kind of to To some different stages, right? Whether we want to start like. Pre K to elementary or kind of early elementary, like, I would love to hear about some of the types of supports that are most meaningful, most appropriate at those stages.
And so, and those younger years, what are some of the ones that are really applicable there? Lisa, we can start with you.
Lisa Carey: okay, well I'll start with the younger ones. I feel like Alexis, I've been hanging out with younger kids a lot lately, and I have a six year old and Alexis has become an expert on our high schoolers, so, the, when I think it's what's really [00:20:00] helpful is to think about where in our world are we used to getting information about these skills that fall into executive function in a younger childhood kind of environment.
And the number one source of really great information is Sesame Street. Cookie Monster has really struggled with his executive function skills. And he actually has a really great song about executive function, which is one of my favorite songs. But in general, they do break down the different skills.
Like they, they have a whole stop, rethink protocol that's on their resources page. It's in multiple videos. It's in things all the time. And that is an evidence based practice for teaching kids. inhibitory control. And the fact that it's just embedded in the show over and over again is wonderful. Now that strategy starts to become, like if you have it with all the Sesame Street characters, the older kindergartners and the first graders are like, I'm not touching that.
So you have to rebrand it a little bit for a lot of them, but it's that same protocol [00:21:00] of stop, breathe, think, that's just so powerful and that you can continue to adapt as kids get older. And then I think also for the early elementary students, just thinking about how much executive functions play into anything that's not automatic yet.
So any skill that you're still developing, which is everything when you've just started school, you need to use your executive functions for. So if you're learning how to read, you have to use all of your executive function skills for reading. Even more so if you're struggling with reading. So for example, I have dyslexia.
I have to, I can read because of my executive function skills, right? So I'm holding things in mind. I'm checking to see if that sentence made sense. And I'm like, that didn't make sense. That was the wrong word. I'm going to go back. Right. So it's those skills that really drive our ability. to learn to read, to learn to problem solve with math.
So it's not just that behavioral universal piece. It falls into all of those [00:22:00] different academic skills that we're learning too.
Ross Romano: What's this? Middle school, high school.
Alexis Reid: go backwards to go forwards for a second because I'm working with this really amazing school in Cambridge. It's actually a public Montessori school and they have some really beautiful examples at the early childhood level, thinking about how they have like visual examples of like, what do you need to be prepared when you start your day?
What do you need to do to pack up? And they have visuals and checklists that are very clear and concise. And I mentioned this because when we have some routines and some predictability that are built into the school day, regardless of your developmental level, it's always going to be helpful, right? When you're constantly guessing, or unsure, or worried about what's going to come next.
It makes it more difficult to show up and be engaged, especially in learning or learning complex or new skills. So I wanted to go backwards to go forwards because a lot of these skills, especially that [00:23:00] Lisa was mentioning too they kind of drop off once we get to middle school and high school.
Cause we're like, Oh, these kids are older, they can do it, or they've been exposed to it for so long. And one of our greatest. pieces of advice is to keep things simple, predictable, and consistent, right? Even with the older students, we don't want to have that expectation or assumption that they have all these skills yet or that these skills are going to immediately come online when they're changing context.
So Lisa mentioned in middle school when you're switching classes or you have different teachers who have different expectations, being incredibly clear with your goals and expectations goes a long way. So far in the world of a student developing their executive function skills or an individual who has more vulnerable executive function skills due to perhaps anxiety, depression, a learning disability, or any other kind of chronic illness that might be impeding their ability to activate [00:24:00] these cognitive skills consistently.
So really being clear about your expectations And your goals is so important. And we do a lot of when kids get older saying, okay, can you just write an essay about even like your favorite experience during the summer? Right. It seems like it would be pretty easy to access students might be excited to share what they've experienced.
But in reality, that often triggers like a whole series of like, just spiraling out of control. Like, where do I start? What actually was my favorite experience? What would they want to hear? What's appropriate? How do I organize this? What do I keep? What do I not keep? All of these kind of open ended points of expression that we think are really accessible sometimes can trigger a lot of emotionality for a student.
They can often lead to a lot of this cognitive disorganization. So like Lisa was saying before, to be able to [00:25:00] inhibit and pause, that's oftentimes where we have this behavior related to executive function of like organizing your thinking, being able to be planful, being able to like, develop and establish steps to completion.
All of that can go awry, especially as we get into the middle school and high school age groups, because at this time, as we all know, if you work with pre adolescent or adolescent students, there's also a lot of like, social interactions going on, a lot of worries, a lot of understanding who they are as people and learners, and all of that affect and emotion can often trigger, I say it either activates or deactivates our executive function skills, which can make it more difficult to be planful, to be efficient, and to know actually what the expectation is that the teacher is asking for.
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Ross Romano: Executive function [00:26:00] skills developed more or less linear, linearly or sequentially, or in other words, can I be really skilled at what's expected of me as a 12 year old, but not very good at the things that would be expected of a six year old. Does it work that way? Does it not work that way?
Lisa Carey: Sure. It can work that it can be everyone's really variable, right? So, our brains are all developing differently. We're all having different experiences all the time, and you can have different spikes in your pro like, if you were going to like reduce all of your skills down to numbers and we put them on a graph they would be jagged.
Yeah. And go up and down. And so there's certainly skills that you can have that are above the norm, and you can have skills that are below the norm, and just be a totally, like, you're kind of going through the motions of life and nobody's really noticing. So you can have excellent [00:27:00] inhibitory control skills and weak working memory.
You could have a great Ability to think about three dimensional shapes and spin them around in your head and think about things from different perspectives and then a really hard time taking other people's emotional perspective, right? So there's even parts of that same skill set that could be broken apart that you maybe don't have consistent ability to use.
And then because so many different things influence our abilities, you could be really solid with all of your executive function skills Unless you're not feeling well, right? So it like, it kind of just goes up and down, it's context dependent, and then you can have strengths and weaknesses that are just all over the place.
Ross Romano: How How preventative are executive function deficiencies, like, toward academic learning and how does this indicate maybe the [00:28:00] importance of having a district wide strategy and emphasis, right? Or school wide, but also district wide to say, look, we need to be focusing on this at every level because we can't just have you know, these teachers who are doing a great job with it, these other ones who are totally ignoring it, or at this elementary school it's an emphasis, at this one it's not, and then when those students are moving to the next level, the teachers are receiving them, and having a classroom full of kids whose executive functioning hasn't been a priority, and some of them may be in good shape, but there's others who could have received better support earlier, right?
I guess what happens in that case, right? What does that look like? And because even though there's practical strategies here for individual educators my assumption is that relying on each individual teacher to make their own [00:29:00] decisions and develop their own strategy for how to teach this is going to create some issues when they're, supposed to be working in symbiosis, but Alexis, what do you think about that?
Alexis Reid: I think you touched upon it earlier in thinking about the pandemic that shall not be named, right? Thinking about COVID and that a lot of things got very much Automatized, right, where you could just push a button and food will show up at your door, or you could access a lot of things digitally, which has really great benefit in some aspects of learning.
And also I think it also impedes our executive function skill development because we're not actually thinking about, okay, I'm hungry. What food do I have access to? How do I prepare this meal? When will it be ready? How much time do I need? Like all of these different aspects of putting the pieces of things together.
So the automaticity that kind of has [00:30:00] come up in a lot of the world. The worlds of young people, that this is the way that they've grown up is everything is very digitized and automatized. I think it has impacted executive function skills. So like Lisa was saying, there's so much variability in the way in which these skills get developed.
And. They are most closely related to individuals who are diagnosed with ADHD. So a lot of experts in the field will say that ADHD is more of an executive dysfunction than an attentional dysfunction, right? Because it's harder to be able to hold your attention and focus when you can't inhibit, right?
Thinking about how all those pieces go together. So. I don't know about you all where you are, but in Massachusetts and other school systems around the world that I've been in touch with over the past few years, I've been hearing that there's been a huge uptick in referrals for students who teachers and parents and caregivers are noticing have [00:31:00] a lot of attentional difficulties and are lacking what we describe and call executive function skills.
So I think that there is an uptick in that, and there are a lot of different hypotheses as to why that might be. I definitely think COVID and the anxiety and stress levels that have increased. It's kind of like overarchingly for our world have definitely impacted it. And as we mentioned before, there's a lot of vulnerabilities in these executive function skills getting activated because when we have any kind of emotional response to something, it could directly impact the activation of the prefrontal cortex and the skills that are related to executive functions to come online.
So whenever. There are these experiences of high stress or high anxiety. It could definitely impact the way in which learners are getting engaged in the learning that they're doing, figuring out how to be strategic in learning, or taking on new [00:32:00] challenges. So. This is actually the reason why we wrote this book is that we think that all educators, all school systems should really have at least a foundational knowledge of what executive functions are, both from the neuropsych perspective, but also thinking about, like, what are these signs of struggle that we can intervene proactively rather than just waiting for students to struggle and to fail.
So really thinking about some of the aspects that we have control over in learning environments, instead of just. like seeing what pops up and doesn't work. So, especially from a universal design for learning perspective, like we can actually build in a lot of these strategies and supports into how we just teach and learn, rather than only accommodating the individuals who are presenting as having challenges with their executive functions being developed.
Ross Romano: Yeah, so and so from the UDL perspective and in introducing and implementing that in the [00:33:00] classroom, right, and having students understand what that's going to look like you know, with respect to teaching and learning What are some of the key elements of creating that learning climate generating those class agreements, right, with students about what, here's what we're going to do here, here's what learning is going to look like, that, that dialogue piece what should that look like for teachers so that so that we do have learners, right, who really understand what type of teaching and learning they're going to be engaging in.
Lisa Carey: Well, I'm a big proponent of teaching kids about executive function directly. and teaching them about it in a way that developmentally makes sense for however, whatever grade you're teaching, but making sure that they understand that it's a skill set that you can develop, but also that can be supported and that you can ask for additional assistance when you need it. Because it's, I'll go back to a question you asked earlier. It's what the research has shown is that [00:34:00] Executive function skills are more predictive of academic success than early reading or early math skills, right? It's those how do you get stuff done that really influences how well you do in school in the long term.
And so making kids aware of this skill set and then Showing them what you can do when you're stuck, or when you realize you need some help, even just realizing that you need help is part of building executive function. So having this really explicit conversation about it, and not having the way we think be a mystery is really important.
And then taking different strategies and embedding them into instruction. So, researcher Adele Diamond, who we're a big fan but she's really talked a lot about like, you don't develop executive functions in isolation because they're the skill that you use to get stuff done. So you can only practice them while you're getting stuff done.
So you have to think about how they play into all the different activities that you're doing. [00:35:00] Rather than trying to say, all right, from 10 to 1030, we're working on our executive function skills. It just has to be built in just like emotional regulation needs to be built into what we're doing. And I think thinking about it in that more holistic way of these are the skills we use to get things done and then being Very making that thinking visible to the students, I think, is just how you set the groundwork for having that be a strong component of your learning environment.
Alexis Reid: And we were super intentional about not just writing out like procedural cues or curriculum to teach executive function for that exact reason. You know, there's a lot of really great teachers out there who have integrated in these strategic thinking skills points of check in for organization and planfulness and going back to reflect on their work to be able to improve it that do that so beautifully.
And for instance, like in a lot of the schools that Lisa and I work with. There's a school in particular where a lot of the teachers are doing things really beautifully, but they're doing them [00:36:00] differently. They're focusing and targeting the same set of skills, but they might look a little bit different.
So in the book, we actually suggest and recommend some different options that could seamlessly fit into your classroom rather than feeling like you need to bring on like a whole new curriculum or a whole new protocol to be able to focus on and target executive function. We're big proponents of like speaking the language and slowing things down to actually focus on the process rather than adding more into what's already happening.
You know, we are educators ourselves and we have such empathy and Pride for the teachers that are out there in the field, in the classrooms every single day. And rather than wanting to give them more that they need to balance on their plates, we really want to help them to just kind of tweak their approach a little bit and think a little bit differently to be able to do the same for their students too.
Ross Romano: Yeah, I, that I think there's a piece in the book where you encourage slash challenge features in a [00:37:00] sense to kind of go smaller with their adjustments and don't think about this as overhauling everything and doing everything totally differently, but find where those opportunities are for strategic adjustments that will make an impact.
And how does that, I guess, Take that same concept and maybe explain it to an administrator who wants to see more of this happening in the school in how they may speak with teachers, some of the opportunities they might point out to be mindful of. Practicality and Effectiveness, and saying, look, if we can do this, we can be effective, but we have to do it in a way that, that is sensible and not just think that we have to change everything we're doing.
Alexis, do you want to take that?
Alexis Reid: Yeah, I think we've talked a little bit about this already and in thinking about [00:38:00] the importance of it. And we are also big proponents of just not doing things in isolation, right? It shouldn't just be a teacher doing the executive function skills at this particular time or through this content area.
We're really. Big on building community because executive functions just don't reside and need to be activated in school settings. Right? They also need to be happening outside of school. So really making more of a community effort to have students, teachers, administrators, and families come together to think about how you can practice and build these skills.
And a lot of times, and we mentioned in the book, you could do that through playing games. Right? So something as simple as like holding on to directions activates your working memory skill to inhibit, to be able to pause, to sometimes not show your cards, right? No, to have a little bit of a poker face, inhibit it, and then use your skills in your mind to be able to manipulate what needs to happen next.
Like there are [00:39:00] so many different ways to be able to integrate and build these skills. And it is to the point that both Lisa and I were making before, there are a lot of families who are really worried about their children being able to press pause, to be able to be aware, to be able to think critically about situations, and to be able to activate their skills in ways that are going to allow for them to take on jobs that in 10 years, we might not even know what they are right now to be able to prepare our students for, right?
And the content that we're teaching may be helpful, but this set of skills will definitely be helpful, right? I try to think forward about like, what are the core capacities and competencies that students really need to leave school with? And when I think about it across the board, and this is why I love focusing it on, building and developing executive function skills is because these aren't just skills for today.
These are [00:40:00] skills for ever. These are skills that are going to help to make more productive, passionate, competent citizens of our world who hopefully will think critically about different situations. And we could talk about this for hours about how the executive function skills also help to understand differences, right?
And we think in society, how we need to be more open to understanding differences and perspectives and learning new information and figuring out what makes sense to us. Like all of this is all a part of. Building and developing these executive function skills. So for administrators to think really critically about a skillset to develop, this is probably the most bang for your buck that you can get if you focus in target executive function skills.
I would say, I don't know what your pitch is, Lisa, though,
Lisa Carey: I think you covered a lot there. Yeah I just think that being aware of it and then making it visible, even as adults, any, anybody that's a stake in raising [00:41:00] or teaching or teaching kids. Just making it visible that like how you're thinking through your strategic thinking is really important and helping kids realize that it's not just magic that you are able to get a task done.
Because sometimes Even adults who struggle with executive function are just left feeling like, I can't get this stuff done, and I don't know why, and I don't know how other people are doing it, and then there's almost a pattern of shame that comes in of being like, I'm, there's something wrong with me.
And there's nothing wrong. Everyone is variable in their executive function skills, but if you make it visible to others. This is my process. This is how I'm doing it. Then everyone else can learn from each other too. And when we share those strategies and how we're thinking about things, we learn from each other too.
So even if you're someone who's you tend to be really strong with strategies, you hear someone else's strategy and you're like, that's better than mine. I'm going to use that one. Like you you go anywhere and you hear teachers [00:42:00] talking and they're talking about strategies in their classroom.
They might not be labeling it the same way we are being as explicit as we are in the book, but they're hit, that's where they're headed. They're looking for shared strategies. What are you doing? That's working. And so we just need to build upon that already like human instinct to share what we know and then do better and just be more explicit about it with executive function and teaching.
Kids how to do that too.
Ross Romano: Yeah, and in that piece that, that visibility, transparency, I presume would support the ability to engage learners and more meaningful reflection and metacognition about their learning, what are they, how are they evaluating it, what, where are the decisions they're making, and not only to do that while they're in class and while they're in school, but life, on a lifelong basis, [00:43:00] understanding that that these are skills that are developing and that we have to continue to use and be able to think about, okay, why did I do that that way?
Or what's the challenge I'm having with this? And do I kind of understand what skills are involved in that? What strategies there are? Right? And how can I continue to be learning and developing and figuring out better ways of going about it? Because now I have a. an understanding of what it is, what it looks like, what's working maybe for other people, what's worked for me in the past and I've also been proactively engaged in a discussion about that and given the opportunity to reflect, right?
But given that that That metacognition piece is important to this. I'm thinking it would be, it's hard to do that if it's done in isolation without any context for what's [00:44:00] really happening with anybody else or in general, right? Is there anything else that that we haven't talked about that is important particularly with regard to supporting the whole learner and what that is? looks like in our schools and what so we're looking at that as kind of a part of the approach here and what is an effective way to, to use the principles of UDL to teach executive function, right?
Are there other elements that Are going to be important to supporting that or its effectiveness.
Lisa Carey: So we mentioned this in the book, but this, there's a concept of joyful learning, right? Like enjoying what you're learning, enjoying what you're doing. And that comes into play with executive function because You get better at executive functions when you practice things, right? When you practice something that's not automatic and you practice it until you get better and better and better and you solve problems about it and you pause [00:45:00] before you get too upset and you really work through things and we're only willing to do that to persevere like that when we're enjoying what we're doing even if it's hard, right?
Like we will do hard tasks if we like them, if we find them enjoyable, if we find them meaningful. And so making sure that we're not removing that element of learning, that joyfulness of learning from our classrooms and our schools and any other learning environment we have going on is really critical to helping develop those executive function skills.
And Alexis and I talk about this all the time that in our society, We kind of think like hard work should be hard. And like, if you're enjoying it, maybe you're not working hard enough or we're not playing around. I know I've heard that it said in a lot of different schools, we're not playing around right now.
So there is a difference between fooling around and being off task and being joyful and learning. And we need to really focus on what does that look like in our classrooms and how do we engage students so that they are willing to [00:46:00] persevere when tasks are difficult, because that's how you build those critical skills.
Ross Romano: Yeah, absolutely. Alexis, anything else?
Alexis Reid: Yeah, I mean, to that point my brother's a clinical and sports psychologist and he and I have a podcast too where we talk a lot about a lot of these. Same things. And to Lisa's point there's this idea of we need to be really successful and we also need to take care of ourselves, especially in our American society that I think that's a really difficult thing to achieve.
And basically, when we are promoting the development and support of executive function skills, we're really saying we want all learners. It's all humans, really, to be able to press pause and check in with ourselves to see what's needed and what's possible, right? And to be able to slow ourselves down just enough.
And in the education world there's so many different things that are pulling at us that we need to be able to achieve and do and benchmarks to make and timelines that we need to stick to. And in reality, we're shaping human lives and [00:47:00] human brains every single day. And I, the advice I would give to educators and administrators.
from an executive function and UDL perspective is whenever we have the opportunity to just slow things down, right, to not only find the joy, which I'm so glad you mentioned, Lisa, but also to just say, Like, how am I doing okay? Because sometimes okay is okay, but we also have this opportunity if we can proactively plan and build these supports into the learning environment to be able to say, we're doing okay, and this is what else is possible.
This is how we can continue to enhance and explore to be able to see whatever we can do. Possibly try to achieve and to do in our worlds and we want to give learners that opportunity where they feel like they have agency and that they're empowered to use and develop their skills in a meaningful way.
Ross Romano: Yeah, absolutely. So, listeners, the book is called Supporting Executive Function, Insights and Strategies for Educators. It's available [00:48:00] from Cass Publishing. So we will put the link in the description. Below in the show notes to where you can find the book we'll also link to some other resources where you can find our author guests here on social media.
Are there any other resources that either of you have available or that you recommend that our listeners should check out?
Lisa Carey: Alexis has tons of resources that I would promote.
Alexis Reid: I was just going to say the work that you do at the Kennedy Krieger Institute also offers a lot of really great resources, a lot of good information. I. I have a plethora of resources that I'm trying to be better at sharing on social media so people can just have free access to them. So, you can follow Lisa and I on Instagram and Twitter.
We try to share out, whether it's a research article or our own perspective, what we try our best to do is to try to synthesize some of this higher level, really rigorous academic. information that's going on in the field to be able to make it accessible for educators and parents and learners [00:49:00] themselves to be able to better understand and see what makes sense.
That's really what I mentioned before. My brother and I have a podcast that is really all about how do we get really. Great information out to the masses in a free, accessible and meaningful way. So, we're constantly connecting people and you will find a ton of resources through our social media and people can always contact us if you have specific questions to our information is in the book.
So we are, we love to talk about this and we could do it forever. So. So don't hesitate to reach out. And Lisa and I both also have the great privilege and opportunity to partner with a lot of different schools around the U S and around the world to be able to support efforts that are happening at that level as well.
Ross Romano: Excellent. Well, everybody, we will put those links below to where you can connect from social media, where you can find the podcast and other resources online. So please check out any and all of those that'll be helpful to you. We'll [00:50:00] put the link there to the book where you can find that as well. And please also, if you're not already, do subscribe to the Authority for more author interviews like this coming out every week.
Alexis and Lisa, thanks for being on the show.
Alexis Reid: We're grateful for you. Thank you, Ross.
Lisa Carey: Thank you for having us.