Quite simply, teachers have a lot of “juggling” to do with the many tasks in the classroom. Research indicates that teachers make more than 3.5 decisions per minute during a school day (Shavelson and Borko, 1979). Further, elementary teachers engage students between 200 and 300 times per hour (Jackson, 1968). Charlotte Danielson suggests the rate is actually double these estimates (1996). To add context, researchers at Carnegie Mellon and Temple universities indicated that the range of choices among evidence-based, academic options exceeds 205 trillion choices (Koedinger et al, 2013). With numbers this overwhelming, where do you begin to manage the demands of teaching?

Avoiding overload isn’t easy, but employing some management tools can help. We will explore them one at a time. Teachers must always multi-task, or if you don’t believe in that sort of thing then call it task-switching at lightning speed. As you learn how to use these tools for yourself, consider how they could assist the students in your charge. After all, no one studied how many decisions students make in a school day, but the number is significant.

What is Executive Function?

According to Dr. Sucheta Kamath of ExQ, executive function is “getting the ‘boss’ brain and the ‘worker’ brain working together.” If you are interested in a deeper exploration on the topic, please consider viewing her Tedx “Can strengthening executive function help us be our best selves?” from TEDxAtlanta Women, Nov. 21, 2022 (click here). While the initial definition seems simple, executive function involves many and diverse skills. These include: 1) mental flexibility; 2) self-awareness; 3) problem-solving; 4) focus; 5) working memory; 6) perspective memory; and 7) the combination of organization and planning. In short, executive function means simultaneously managing all these skills.

As teachers, the complex nature of self-management and the orderly planning of integration with the surrounding environment is what we do. However, these “soft skills” are seldom explicitly articulated to students, which makes it necessary for them to learn and grow them on their own, without scaffolding and guidance. Essentially, this means they are learning such important practices through a trial-and-error method.

Research indicates the following principles:

• Executive function is independent from IQ (Garner, 2009; Buckner, Mazzacappa, & Beardslee, 2009).
• Executive function challenges present more frequently in boys (Samuels et al., 2016).
• Executive function does not correlate to race or socioeconomic status (Samuels et al., 2016).
• Executive function is associated with reduced academic achievement (Willoughby, Wylie, & Little, 2019).
• Executive function is NOT fixed, but can improve with maturation and treatment (Sung et al., 2021).

With all those decisions and engagements to manage, we must have skills to do so effectively. What about our students?

I began addressing executive function explicitly in the summer of 2020. It had become clear that certain scaffolds for learning success were present in classroom and school environments that students didn’t employ independently. My focus was to coach students through some success strategies over the summer, but it didn’t make sense to create a content curriculum simply for the purpose of exploring the how-to-learn lessons. With that in mind, I created a program which won student approval from the beginning because I allowed them to set their own curriculum. I have called it EmpowerED Camp every year since that time. Campers begin by expressing at least ten things that they would like to learn. Among their selections were: how to do a backflip, making perfect pasta, speaking Spanish, learning sign language, recognizing military aircraft, how to sew, and learning about frogs. It honestly doesn’t matter what they choose to learn because our focus is HOW to learn.

EmpowerED Learning Begins with Key Concepts

1. Choosing a Direction – The first step for students involves a choice, which equates to a commitment. The truth is that students don’t always get choice in the classroom, so they don’t really know how to manage it. Making a decision involves considering outcomes and weighing them for maximum gain. Projecting forward in time is an abstract technique. Considering consequences thoroughly involves awareness of connected factors. This may sound simple, but decision-making can be paralyzing.
2. Carving Out Time – Considering and allocating time is painful for students. They are notorious for underestimating the time it will take to complete a task and for procrastinating. When you put those tendencies together, there is nothing but trouble — needing more time and pushing it to the extreme so that “more time” is not available. It’s a recipe for disaster. With learners, visual models are a great method for making the demands of the task clearer. Enter Google Calendar.
3. Finding Incentives – Teachers know about burnout. When tasks are difficult, it becomes necessary to create strategies and incentives for crossing the finish line. Although students also know about giving themselves a treat, they don’t always hold themselves accountable for completing the task in order to earn it. The first incentive strategy I teach students is the Pomadoro method, which can be 25 minutes on a task followed by a five-minute break or 50 minutes on the task with a ten-minute break. The critical discussion comes to what “on task” means and what to do if you haven’t honored that commitment. Foregoing breaks is a tough consequence, but learners must develop the self-assessment skills to recognize when they have reached a place of accomplishment and when they have shirked. Google Tasks can help.
4. Making a Plan – Much like the idea of choices, students seldom get to make a plan for themselves. They are told when they are allowed to work on something in class, where to find resources, when it is due, and what the consequences are for not meeting the deadline. In EmpowerED, we talk about the time it takes to learn something, as opposed to becoming generally familiar with it. We discuss the importance of practice for a better outcome. Among the hardest things for young people to do is take a large task and break it into equivalent or key components. It is important for them to work through that task first, but I also share Goblin Tools (click here), which is an AI-powered taskmaster for deconstructing topics. This is a great follow-up step because it can serve as a double-check for missed items.

If you would like to explore EmpowerED Basics for yourself, here is the link to the guiding website (click here), which collects answers in a passive Google Form and creates a working notebook for organizing the project components. The guide is embedded with a primer in using the Google Tools that we will explore the weeks ahead. I welcome feedback. The site even includes resources for independent learning like GCF LearnFree, Google Applied Digital Skills, Khan Academy, and Ted-Ed.

During the eight minutes it has taken you to read this post, the teacher in the classroom made 28 non-trivial decisions. While pondering the magnitude of teacher decision-making, consider how well or how often we are teaching our students about making meaningful decisions and planning for their own academic success. Consider getting more explicit in your methods for doing such things so that the next generation has the excellent model of teacher decision-makers to guide them.

In the weeks ahead, I will be exploring the use of Google Tools to improve executive function and efficiency for both teachers and students. These are suggestions only. Consider the ones that work for you, and discard the others. If you have not explored the Google Certified Teacher endorsement (click here), I recommend it highly. Certification is effective for three years. Content material is specifically designed with teachers in mind. They even provide the content learning modules to assist (click here). If you’re not interested in taking the test for the certification, the learning materials are great on their own.

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Teacher Takeaways

Knowing about and managing the dynamics of executive function applies to all subject areas, but it not explicitly taught in any of them.

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References

• Buckner, J. C., Mezzacappa, Enrico, & Beardslee, W. R. (2009). Self-regulation and its relations to adaptive functioning in low income youths. American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, 79(1), 19-30.
• Danielson, C. (1996). Enhancing professional practice: A framework for teaching. Alexandria, VA: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development.
• Garner J. K. (2009). Conceptualizing the relations between executive functions and self-regulated learning. The Journal of psychology, 143(4), 405–426. https://doi.org/10.3200/JRLP.143.4.405-426
• Jackson, P. W. (1968). Life in Classrooms. New York: Holt, Rine-hart and Winston. Inc.
• Koedinger, K.R., Booth, J.L., & Klahr, D. (2013). Instructional Complexity and the Science to Constrain It. Science. DOI: 10.1126/science.1238056
• Samuels, W. E., Tournaki, N., Blackman, S., & Zilinski, C. (2016). Executive functioning predicts academic achievement in middle school: A four-year longitudinal study. The Journal of Educational Research, 109(5), 478–490. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220671.2014.979913
• Shavelson, R., & Borko, H. (1979). Research on teachers’ decisions in planning instruction. Educational Horizons, 57(4), 183-189.
• Schmidt, LeAnne. “Building Empowered Learners Daily.” EmpowerED Basics. https://sites.google.com/view/empoweredbasics. 30 Jun 2020.
• Sung, M. C., Ku, B., Leung, W., & MacDonald, M. (2022). The Effect of Physical Activity Interventions on Executive Function Among People with Neurodevelopmental Disorders: A Meta-Analysis. Journal of autism and developmental disorders, 52(3), 1030–1050. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-021-05009-5
• Willoughby, M. T., Wylie, A. C., & Little, M. H. (2019). Testing longitudinal associations between executive function and academic achievement. Developmental psychology, 55(4), 767–779. https://doi.org/10.1037/dev0000664

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