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Part I
Executive Functioning: The Basics
There was a time when the term executive functions brought to mind men and women in power suits, carrying briefcases or sitting in conference rooms. Now the term has become part of the vocabulary of educators too, when they talk about students and how they manage the many tasks of school life.
Although the term has gained ground in education, exactly what it means seems a little fuzzy sometimes.
The goal of Part One is to clarify the terms and concepts associated with these critical foundation skills for learning and performance in the classroom. Grounded in the growing body of sound research, we define the terms and how they apply in an educational setting. We also review some of the factors that can affect the development of executive functions.
As you read about executive functions in Part One, you will notice that these skills have to do with more than just the details of tracking paperwork, juggling timelines, and keeping track of “stuff.” (Not that those are unimportant!) It is important to remember that executive skills are the basic tools for organizing, retrieving, and coordinating the information in our own heads, all while dealing with new material and prioritizing it in light of the learning goals.
The understanding that you gain in Part One is designed to lay the groundwork for Part Two, where you will find strategies to boost executive skills in your students and ways to design new strategies for your classroom and school. You will find ideas for helping kids organize their stuff, track due dates, and monitor their workload. Perhaps even more important, you will learn about routines that facilitate students’ internal organization and a more systematic approach to their own learning.
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Chapter 1
What Is Executive Functioning?
In the Introduction, you learned that students with weak executive functioning have trouble negotiating the world of deadlines and paperwork and that they may have difficulty juggling multiple sources of information. In order to proceed in building a working model of executive functioning in the classroom, we’d like to offer a more specific definition of the term.
DEFINITION
There are many different definitions out there, and we have tried to boil them down to their essence.
Executive functioning is an umbrella term for the mental processes that serve a supervisory role in thinking and behavior. It incorporates a number of neurologically based operations that work together to direct and coordinate our efforts to achieve a goal.
The specific operations that contribute to what is collectively known as executive functioning are referred to as executive skills or executive functions. These terms are synonymous.
It is executive functioning that allows someone to create a master plan, initiate the steps in a timely manner, react effectively to changes and challenges, and keep the goals in mind over time.
Smooth executive functioning is like riding a bike. You need to have the foundation skills in place (for example, pedaling, steering, braking, and balancing), but no single skill alone accounts for the magic that happens when you put them all together.
An experienced bike rider is fluid and sure as she navigates her path. She makes numerous adjustments to her pedaling, steering, and balance as she rides, dealing with internal challenges (“My back is getting stiff; I need to change body positions”) and external challenges (“That ball is rolling right across my path!”) in what appears to be an effortless manner. In addition to immediate challenges, our bike rider is considering long-term goals, perhaps monitoring the output and timing needed to meet various self-directed targets. (“I need to do a vigorous ride today to stay on my training schedule for next month’s race.” “I have to pick up the pace so that I can complete twenty miles and still be back home in time to shower and be ready to leave for dinner at six.”)
Like bike riding, executive functioning seems misleadingly effortless in students with typical development. As most students mature and their neurological development advances, they are able to rise to the challenges caused by ever-increasing demands for independent academic functioning and long-term planning in school.
Consider for a moment, however, the students who lag behind. Although they used to get their homework in on time when the teacher required everyone to keep everything in a single bright-yellow homework folder, they may have more trouble when faced with multiple binders, rotating classes, frequent classroom and teacher changes, and daily and long-term homework to manage.
Let’s return to the bike metaphor.
Like these bike riders, some kids and teens have delays or inefficient executive skills. Jessie is weak in two of the basic skills required for bike riding, so she falters when she tries to increase the complexity of the riding task. John has a different problem. He has all the foundation skills, but he runs into difficulty when he must fluidly coordinate all the components to meet the higher-level demands of racing.
We count on the fact that with time, targeted instruction, and practice, both of these cyclists will develop the skills they need. However, sometimes we have to simplify the task or offer additional support until the components come together.
CORE EXECUTIVE SKILLS
To understand executive functioning more fully, let’s take a closer look at the specific skills involved.
Researchers agree on the overarching concept of executive functioning as the process of engaging in “purposeful, goal-directed, and future-oriented behavior.”1 However, there is less agreement on how to break those skills down into component processes.
Our list of core skills (see Table 1.1) draws heavily on the work of Drs. Gerard Gioia, Peter Isquith, Steven Guy, and Lauren Kenworthy and their widely used scale of executive functioning, the Behavioral Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF).2 We also take into account here their later research, which identified a slightly different breakdown of skills than the original formulation.3
Table 1.1 Core Executive Skills
| Executive Skill | Definition | Impact |
| Planning and Organization | The ability to impose order on thoughts, tasks, play, and storage spaces | Students with poor planning and organizational skills have difficulty breaking down a task into smaller steps to reach a goal. They also have trouble creating a cognitive schema to organize information. Rather than organizing new information into a hierarchy or categories in their mind, they tend to hold on to a collection of facts. It is as if they have a file cabinet, but they just open the drawers and throw things in rather than creating files and placing information into an appropriate file folder. They may take the same haphazard approach to organizing materials as they do to organizing information in their heads. |
| Working Memory | Memory in the service of an action;* a dynamic process that involves reviewing new information and retrieving, holding, and manipulating stored information in our minds for the purpose of completing a cognitive task | Students with weak working memory may have difficulty holding on to multiple bits of information long enough to complete a task, such as remembering a short grocery list long enough to buy what they need or completing all the steps in multistep directions. Working memory is also critical for more complex tasks that require students to retrieve information from their own long-term storage, hold the information in mind, manipulate it in their head, and perhaps coordinate it with new input. There is evidence that visual working memory and verbal working memory are not always evenly developed in an individual. |
| Initiation | The ability to begin a task or activity and to independently generate ideas, responses, or problem-solving strategies | Without a good ability to initiate, a student may seem to procrastinate about starting tasks. |
| Task Monitoring | The ability to monitor one’s own performance and to measure it against a standard of what is needed for any given task | Task monitoring allows someone to consider his own progress toward a goal and to adjust his plans if he is going off course. In the absence of effective task monitoring, students may not adjust the content or the pace of their work in keeping with changing conditions or feedback from the environment. |
| Self-Monitoring | The ability to observe one’s own behavior and to determine whether it conforms to explicit behavioral expectations and unwrit... |
