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Thoughts on making a real difference in the lives of learners...

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Honing your Executive Skills

1/27/2014

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Last Saturday I took my son Quinn to karate. I checked the time and we set out on our usual route. A few blocks away from our destination I found that the road was closed. I turned at the next corner, made a circular detour and arrived on time for class. Coming home, we avoided the closure and arrived in plenty of time to pick up my other son Morgan and head back for swimming. I dropped him at the corner and avoided the problem altogether.
Sound like a typical Saturday at your house? As parents we are often on "auto-pilot" as we manage the routines around work, school, activities and errands. This management skill is called executive functioning. It allows us to set goals, plan, initiate, monitor our progress, review our successes (or failures) and learn from our experiences. In short, executive function is the set of mental processes that helps connect past experience with present action. We use it to perform activities such as planning, organizing, strategizing, paying attention to and remembering details, and managing time and space.

Needless to say, school success is highly dependent upon executive function. It enables students to regulate their behaviour and to perform those tasks that that facilitate learning. EF allows students to plan; keep track of time; multi-task; build on past experience; evaluate and reflect; make mid-course corrections; ask for help; and, exercise self-control.  
However, unfortunately, many of our students have challenges that get in the way of their executive functioning skills. These problems manifest themselves in a number of different ways. Students who struggle with executive function have difficulties with initiating projects; predicting how much time a task will take; relating a story in a sequential fashion; planning and prioritizing; adapting to changing conditions; or retaining information from something that they have read while trying to answer questions about it.


Often when educators think about executive function, they focus on organizational skill development such as time management, developing organizational systems or planning and prioritizing. While this works for many students, there are clear barriers that prevent some children from easily mastering these skills. For them, this traditional approach does not work.

A key EF challenge can be a product of  working memory, which is the ability to hold information in memory while performing complex tasks. It incorporates the ability to "draw on past learning or experience to apply to the situation at hand or to project it into the future". 

Students may also show a weakness with working memory, which is like “seeing in your mind’s eye.” This is an important tool in guiding your actions. Working memory is your brain’s Post-it note, says Tracy Packiam Alloway, PhD, assistant professor of psychology at the University of North Florida in Jacksonville, Florida. “It makes all the difference to successful learning,” she says. You can think of working memory as the active part of your memory system. It’s like mental juggling, says H. Lee Swanson, PhD, distinguished professor of education with the Graduate School of Education at the University of California, Riverside. “As information comes in, you’re processing it at the same time as you store it,” he says. "A child uses this skill when doing math calculations or listening to a story, for example. She has to hold onto the numbers while working with them. Or, she needs to remember the sequence of events and also think of what the story is about" .

Other executive functioning skills include: response inhibition which is the ability to think before you act including the ability to resist the urge to say or do something before you take the time to evaluate what impact your behaviour might have on a given situation; emotional control, that is, the ability to manage emotions, controlling and directing your behaviour in order to achieve goals and complete tasks; and, sustained attention which is the capacity to maintain attention to a situation or task in spite of distractibility, fatigue or boredom.


At our school we devote the first part of each day to working on developing and enhancing executive functioning skills with our students. Our academic division core teachers work in partnership with our Social Emotional Learning counsellors to support all of our students in this process. 


What sorts of things do we do?


Working memory supports include: cognitive orthotic devices such as written agendas or organizational apps; posting daily schedules, weekly calendars, "to do" lists; giving directions that prompt reference to past experience; breaking tasks into manageable chunks; organizing student workspaces to minimize clutter (at home this could mean having dedicated spaces for certain tasks); and, making sequentially stepped process checklists ("first do this, next do this, etc.").
For response inhibition and emotional control issues you can: provide distractions; set time limits; model delayed gratification; reduce or eliminate triggers; remove the child from the situation; and, teach and rehearse coping strategies until she or he have internalized them.
To sustain attention you can try: reducing distractions; modifying or limiting the time on task; using peer coaching; providing active exercise breaks; and, reinforcing successful focussing.


In the final analysis, success in school, like everyday life, demands that you not only effectively plan and implement tasks in a logical, sequential fashion but also learn how to self-regulate as well. After all, we all know drivers who have their destination, route, and timing all planned out in advance but cannot cope with any variation that might get in their way. So next time you see someone gripped by "road rage", you are probably witnessing a breakdown in their executive functioning. Probably a good idea to just get out of their way!






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Looking for grit in all the wrong places

1/8/2014

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As I have commented in earlier blog postings, there is currently a revival of the Horatio Alger myth going on in the form of the "grit" movement. According to this "new" school of thought, what is really needed for students to succeed is for them to develop a mindset that embraces struggle, perseverance, self-reliance and endurance. If students would only learn not to give up on the often boring and repetitive tasks that we assign them, then they would become successful and engaged learners. This sense of perseverance or "grit" is not really based on any new substantive research, but is rather a more intuitive - kind of sports-based - philosophy that has overtaken the "character education" or social emotional learning approaches of many schools.
Although he is not credited in any of the recent literature about this theory, its roots can be traced back to historian Arnold J. Toynbee's Study of History which he began in 1922. Toynbee's thesis (reflected by the grit movement) is that: too little challenge results in atrophy and societal collapse; too much challenge and a society is so concerned with survival that it has no time to develop; but, that just the right amount of challenge results in the strengthening of society and gives rise to an explosion of creative problem-solving and growth. (Okay, I guess that maybe Goldilocks expounded the theory first!)

Toynbee's ideas are used by proponents of the importance of "grit" to explain why some children who face challenges do not succeed and why others who face no challenges end up quite successful. 
Paul Tough, author of How Children Succeed channels his inner Toynbee when he states:
"I do think there are plenty of kids in poverty who have lots of grit – arguably more than the average well-off kid. But the problem with focusing too much on the resilience and grit of disadvantaged kids is that we run the risk of minimizing the often quite harmful consequences of growing up in poverty. Some children do become more resilient as a result of growing up in difficult environments – but many others are simply worn down and worn out by the experience."

For students in wealthier families, he contends, the problem is not as acute because they can succeed in spite of themselves:
"The profound advantage that rich kids have is the family and neighbourhood resources that allow them to do well in material ways – to graduate from college, for instance – despite those struggles. They have a social safety net that catches them when they go off course."

At its best, character education which focuses on self-reliance, optimism, and perseverance can play an integral role in the development of any young person. Needless to say, in the past, such character development was seen as part of the role of the family or other social institutions such as the Church, the "Y", the Scouting and Guiding movements, etc. School played a different role. In the 21st Century, it would seem that all of this has been put on the educator's plate.

The downside of the grit analysis of student performance is that, although it expects the school system to foster this development, it also in many ways puts the onus back on the student. If it is all about self-reliance and perseverance, then is there any real need to engage students in the learning process or can we just set expectations? If they do not succeed, then obviously they simply did not have enough "grit" to see themselves through.

My friend Mark Brown, a Canadian educator currently teaching in Bermuda, sent me the following short article about attempts to test the honey bee for "grit".

CATCH THE BUZZ: Honey bees demonstrate decision making process to avoid difficult choices

A recent study on the metacognitive ability of honey bees suggests that they, like humans, avoid difficult decisions when they lack sufficient information to solve a problem. Researchers from Macquarie University in Australia tested honey bees with a series of trials involving visual discrimination between targets inside a two-chamber apparatus. The bees had to learn a rule to match a combination of shapes with nectar. A correct identification was rewarded with sweet nectar, but an incorrect decision resulted in a bitter tasting solution. Bees could also choose not to take the test at all and ‘opt out’.

Researcher Dr Andrew Barron says the results showed that the more difficult the challenge, the more likely the bees were to ‘opt out’. “It’s a highly debated topic, whether non-humans have the same abilities to gauge their level of certainty about a choice before taking action.”

Co-author Dr Clint Perry says, “Similar metacognitive testing has been conducted with dolphins, dogs, and rats. However this study is the first to demonstrates that even insects are capable of making complex and adaptive decisions. “The honey bees’ assessment of the certainty of a predicted outcome was comparable to that of primates in a similar paradigm.”

The size, shape, color and positions of the targets were constantly changed during training so the bees had to learn a geometric rule to solve the task correctly. The bees demonstrated a high level of learning ability to solve the tasks, but when the discrimination of the targets was made harder the bees’ behavior changed. “As we made it harder for the bees to assess the correct shape combination, the bees’ uncertainty about the correct choice grew, and we observed an increase in the decision to exit the chamber and not take the test to avoid the chance of getting it wrong,” said Dr Barron.

“This suggests that the bees were only taking the test when they were confident of getting it right.”

The full study Honey bees selectively avoid difficult choices they lack the information to solve has been published in full by the National Academy of Sciences. Clint J Perry, Andrew B Barron Honey bees selectively avoid difficult choices. National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America.

So, which is the more advanced theory? Blind perseverance in the face of an impossible task, or strategic withdrawal and choosing to pursue success in another way? Not every student needs to solve every problem. Sometimes knowing when to quit can be a greater indicator of self-awareness than continuing to beat your head against the wall!  

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    Dr. Jim Christopher is recently retired Head of Kenneth Gordon Maplewood School and Maplewood Alternative High School in North Vancouver. A parent, author and long-time teacher, and educational administrator across Canada, he has been actively involved in the drive to differentiate learning experiences to meet the needs of all learners.

    View my profile on LinkedIn

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