This week's article summary is Supporting Executive Functioning Skills By Asking Questions, and it's an apt follow-up to last week's summary on the top educational research studies of 2021.
Last week’s summary explained why schools need to directly connect social-emotional development to academic achievement. This week’s highlights how student executive functioning development and its practice and use in the classroom buoy academic success. In fact, the article specifically states that executive function development (planning, organizing, and self-regulation including managing attention and emotions), “boosts academic performance, since grades and assessments rely on executive function as a baseline for demonstrating mastery.”
For parents who are skeptical of social-emotional development in schools unless it supports academic achievement, educational research consistently illustrates that success within and beyond the classroom results from a combination of intelligence and character, i.e., both IQ and EQ.
The article recommends that we can stimulate our students to be more active in their learning by asking them questions rather than always providing directions. By getting students to think about what and how they can do to prepare, focus, review, and demonstrate, teachers are helping them to be more responsible and to think metacognitively, another research result from last year.
Joe
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Executive function (EF) skills are brain-based management abilities that encompass a wide range of future skills like planning, organizing, self-regulation (including managing attention and emotions), learning, and memory. These skills are also learned at home when children do things like household chores.
Reinforcing executive function at school helps students’ brains understand the cueing system that activates the use of a particular skill. For example, a student needs to understand environmental cues in order to engage with self-regulation tools, and these cues will differ at home and at school.
Self-management skills are often the secret sauce of school success. Kids who soar at school are often those who have the most honed EF skill set. Being an excellent writer, for example, isn’t enough. It’s important for students to demonstrate that they can manage time to write, chunk writing tasks into parts, manage attention to see an essay through, and remember editing strategies. Empowering students with these skills can boost academic performance, since grades and assessments rely on executive function as a baseline for demonstrating mastery.
REPLACE DIRECTIONS WITH THOUGHT-PROVOKING QUESTIONS: If you’ve ever heard one student coach another, you’ve probably realized that they’re parroting you. As teachers, we give lots of the same directions. Replacing these directions with mid- and then low-level supportive questions can help pass the onus of navigating the day to students, developing their future-skills executive functions. For example, the directive “Please take out your book” could be replaced with mid-level support questions like “What do you need to be ready for reading?” or “What do you picture on your desk during this time?”. There’s no single right way to do this; the idea is that you’re planning and adjusting the levels of support you offer so that students are gradually assuming the responsibility (similar to gradual release strategy for academic skills and tasks).
TEACH STUDENTS TO QUESTION AND COACH THEMSELVES: Whenever I design a lesson, I hear the voice of my mentor teacher coaching me to consider, “What’s the biggest takeaway you want every student to learn?” It’s an automatic audio track that plays whenever I’m planning a lesson. Like coaches and mentor teachers, classroom teachers can coach students to prompt themselves with questions or reminders for repeating tasks. For example, in planning a longer project or essay, a teacher can show students how to do the following:
- Question what the steps will be, by either visualizing or noting each “scene” as a step
- Consider what materials are needed
- Identify when to do each step
- Offer tips for how to remember what to do
USE 6 PROBLEM-SOLVING ‘MAGIC’ QUESTIONS: There are some great go-to questions for teachers who want to help develop learners’ executive functioning skills but aren’t yet automatic in their questioning techniques. These magic questions include:
- What do you notice?
- What parts do you understand?
- What do you think you might need right now?
- How can you tell?
- Where could you look for that information?
- How will you remember to use that strategy or take that action?
When teachers ask these questions regularly, students get used to hearing them, and they can be applied automatically as students solve problems throughout their day. Teachers can also reply with these questions when students ask things like “Where is that assignment?” or “What do I need to do?” Think of how many times the students’ questions for us are related to processing the task, rather than the task or its content. What a gift for students to be able to tackle that type of thinking on their own.
This isn’t one more thing on your ever-growing list. These skills can be supported and extended by making small shifts, not additions, to your instruction. Replacing directions with questions can help increase students’ awareness of patterns and routines, releasing the onus of self-management to the students. Coaching students to notice the executive function demands of assignments can empower them to independently seek strategies when approaching their work. If all else fails, you can lean on those function magic questions, which are sure to get students’ brain “muscles” flexing. Empowering our kids with multiple tools for executive functioning will reduce their barriers to growth and smooth out some of the bumps of getting through the school day, for students and teachers.
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