Essential skills of executive functioning are necessary for success in a student's academic career. They help students in the planning, and the focusing necessary to get them to their goals.
What You'll Learn from This Blog:
Executive functioning is a key factor in achieving academic success. Only a small percentage of students have the skills needed to organize and plan effectively, to persevere through long-term projects, and to inhibit impulsive behavior. These skills can be taught, however, and are being taught in DI schools, so that our students can use them to achieve their life goals.
The Foundation: Understanding Executive Functioning
Executive functioning is a term that encompasses a set of cognitive or mental skills we use to plan, organize, remember things, and make decisions. These skills are absolutely vital for being a successful student, just as they are for being a successful adult. If you think of what it takes to be a project manager and keep all of the constituent parts moving smoothly and on deadline, that's pretty much what executive functioning is.
Middle School: Laying the Groundwork
Developing executive functioning skills in students is a middle school endeavor. This is the time to start working on it. Students can focus on:
Crafting a Structure: A schedule can help students grasp the concept of managing time if they are to do it right and not become lost in the world of deadlines. We guide students in creating a daily routine that works for them. Practicing the Art of the Checklist: To-do lists make such good sense. We encourage students to make them. The best time to make a list is when one has already spilled over into the next zone of an unstructured day. Even a five-minute list-making session can yield a zero-stress path from one hour to the next.
Including relatable anecdotes—for example, a student recently managing a science project successfully—can help illustrate how these strategies play out in real life.
High School: Expanding and Refining Skills
The challenges intensify when students enter high school, pushing them to refine the very skills that got them through middle school. The way we see it, the following areas are most affected:
1. **Shifting tasks.** When students move from one subject area to another in a short time, they build up the speed necessary to tackle the big project that is life after high school. If we ask a student to complete an essay and a set of math problems for tomorrow and then move to the next part of our lesson, we can see how task shifting and the need for speed work together in some high school routines.
Placing Tasks and Goals in Order of Importance: Instruct the student to tell the difference between tasks that are not very important yet need to be done soon and tasks that are essential both now and in the future. Using a visual place marker that shows content's proximity to the top in order of importance can help with this. Enhancing Focus and Adaptability: Concentrating for long periods of time may be a challenge for the student. Dashing off in other directions may be hard to avoid, too. Part of the solution is having a method with which to help stay on course.
Learning can be reinforced by using real-life instances, like when students must balance after-school responsibilities with the homework that they also must complete.
College: Mastering Independence
Being on time and meeting deadlines. Accepting the consequences of poor choices. Knowing how to ask for help.
Building Skills for Long-Term Planning: Guide students in segmenting goals for the semester into easy-to-handle, small-step items.
Using Campus Resources: Make sure students know that time management workshops, counseling, and various forms of academic support are readily available on campus.
Establishing a Work-Life Balance: See that students understand the critical role that relaxation and doing nothing play in effective productivity.
Hearing accounts of other college students who are balancing coursework with internships can help make the aforementioned lessons concrete and inspire more realistic and relatable forms of goal-setting.
Developing executive functioning skills is a journey that takes place across all stages of the education landscape. When students start cultivating these skills around the time of middle school and then continue through the college years, they are stacking the odds in favor of success reaching well across the decades of a lifetime. You can begin to assess your current level of executive functioning and then make plans for improvement. Know what you are able to do and what you need to work on, and then do it.