just briefly say to start the by names edge of mouth freedom the executive director of basic and we like would like to thank again as we have for each of our parent series workshops belmont savings bank who has very generously funded our entire parent's series both this year and last year i am a as you've probably heard me say before if you come to any of our of our workshops a huge fan of belmont savings we use them basic uses them for all of our banking they are truly a community organization that cares what was happening here in belmont and that's really evident on that like tonight  where they're again funding our series to help make us all better parents better teachers and better supporters of our of our youth you're going to pass off to our academic director trevor for introductions all right you andrew like interest said my name is trevor donahue and the academic director for the belmont after school in richmond collaborative three years ago basic established an academic program known as the branch program with two intentions  first we wanted to provide our upper school students with a consistent workspace where they could receive academic support and our second intention was to develop individual routines designed to promote executive function skills some of the categories within this framework that we wanted to focus on included organization time management task initiation planning and prioritizing homework assignments and other things at basic we found that developing these executive function skills has been extremely valuable to our students we also see the skill set becoming increasingly essential in higher education as well as in life outside of academics i'm very excited to introduce our speaker today who will be discussing the impact of these skills both in the classroom in the home she's working on her doctorate in school psychology from northeastern university and is a school psychologist at the institute of learning and development in lexington massachusetts thank you all so i'm the lady who has the mind it's my turn now does everyone can everyone hear me because i i'm i'm going to move as i talk and probably won't be standing right back so before i begin i just want to acknowledge the time and effort that everyone here puts in on behalf of children some of you are here for your own children and some of you are here because of your interest in the children you teach and i know how busy lives i myself i'm a mom of two teenagers i work i'm a full time doctoral student and i'm here so i think it's really important to take a moment to a knowledge your effort and your interest on behalf of children our children collectively will just be that much more prepared and more likely to be happy and successful because of the hard work we do to take a moment and congratulate yourself on the back again so now that the technology has been sorted out i want to just introduce myself a little bit more to because this term executive function can be explained in different ways by people who do different types of work depending on your training it means something different to you neurologists use the term developmental pediatricians use the term occupational therapists use the term autism specialists use the term speech and language pathologists use the term and of course everyone knows what a c e o is executive is a term that you use in business so depending on one's background one can understand and describe this in different ways i want you to know who i am so i am a school psychologist at this point in my life i also have a degree in linguistics i have a master's degree and then with sticks i speak many different languages and that sort of informs a little bit informs my way of understanding how the brain learns i have a degree in learning disability some also a learning disability specialist here we go in lexington which is a clinic where we provide individualized services for children and children adolescents and adults and we work with people who are struggling because their ability to learn is blocked for one reason or the other they might have a learning disability they might have an attention deficit hyperactivity disorder they might have anxiety or they might just have a whole bunch of subtle things going on that get in the way for them and so in our work at the hopes look at that it just zoomed along but that's all right so at the institute for learning and development we provide evaluations and what we call educational therapy i'm going to move this a little bit if it goes off please don't worry we'll figure it out here we go i'll just get my remote attachment now we have a sister organization called the research institute for learning and development and there we do research i'm fine we just need to research to operationalize the things we find in the clinic and we've published multiple books we do all kinds of programs in the schools many years ago we didn't school based programs to look at strategy instruction in the classroom called drive to thrive and our most recent research initiative is the smarts peer mentoring an ok thank you and so we look at our work from many different perspectives we're also parents which is a whole nother story so what do you thing a thing i'm good ok and here we go is it going to work on my remote doesn't want to work ok so today we're going to talk about some foundational concepts from my perspective as an educator and a psychologist and a researcher who is interested in empowering kids to become independent successful learners so you won't be hearing a medical model if you hear other people talk they'll be talking a lot about deficits and what doesn't work i'm going to be talking a lot about how do you figure out how to make things work how do you figure out what is  working we're going to talk about the rationale for teaching executive function strategies because i know there are some teachers here and as parents sometimes you want to be able to advocate for your children with teachers so this will give you a basis for thinking about and i think we have a student here right fantastic welcome we're going to talk about broad pedagogical principles but that's also means principles for managing children so parents can use the same principals and our kids the kids have executive function difficulties life is easiest for them when all the adults in their life speak to them the same way when the structure and the routines are uniform across contacts i'm going to do conclusions and question and answer ok great but really doesn't want to listen to me ok i'll walk over so what i want you to do now is to think about a time in your life andrew this thing is doing things to me it's wants to ok when you have to overcome a major challenge it wanted me to endorse the keyboard ok think about a time when you had a big thing to conquer this is actually a cartoon depiction of mount everest some think about a time when you had to scale your own mount everest it could be anything it could be getting the lead role in the school play when you were in seventh grade it could be yesterday maybe you made a self way for the first time and it didn't collapse but think about a challenge that you overcame right and you succeeded is can everyone connect with one memory in their life when you did something very difficult in your overcame it and then remember remember how like that with a huge personal challenge it's very satisfying because we probably used a solution that was unique to us that tapped a personal strength ok or maybe  we used or the problem that we solved had something to do with the tremendous passion that we have or may be a talent a unique talent that we have to solve the problem now it turns out that strengths passion and talent are in a cyclical reciprocal relationship so we are drawn to activities that sort of tap our personal strengths and we also are likely to develop a passion in that area because there's something about that activity that we are uniquely wired for it's very satisfying so it makes you know it taps our positive emotions and because we do it a lot we become very talented we develop complexity annoyance in the way we behave in that domain does this make sense so if you take myself for an example so talking comes very easily to me i started talking when i was nine months old i'm told i speak nine different languages i don't have any stage fright so i do this a lot so i apparently have gotten really good at giving talks and so my passion has become teaching i love to teach i teach all ages all the time it really annoys my children because i say everything to them in three different ways and they get very upset with me but you know that's who i am i'm a teacher so this is how my life has come together things i cannot do but they kind of don't interfere with my day to day life because i live in my strengths ok so talents effort and success also go together on my way here i was listening to the radio how many people heard the little bit on eighty nine point seven on the great today did you hear that ok so great apparently the effect size was small angela duckworth overplayed it but anyway you know we're all thinking about the emotional foundations of learning so talent you know when you when something when you have a lot of skill in an area you tend to also work harder at it because it's very very reinforcing and then you become very successful so what this means is really that we exit cute tasks successfully when these tasks are within our area of strength it seems pretty straightforward right when i put it like that it makes complete sense so if you're doing something that you're good at you're going to execute effortlessly you're going to look like a superstar and the flipside is also true because we struggle to when we are in our area of weakness so i would say that by any standard i'm a very competent person you know i left my home country at the age of twenty four with two suitcases i came here i started a teacher's college i didn't like it i transferred to northwestern i've made a life for myself here but there are certain things i cannot do i really have a very poor sense of direction and i rely heavily on a g p s on a map even when i've been somewhere multiple times i won't remember how to go there unless i've talked my way through it so i don't execute very well in that domain it's the same for all of us you put those in in a circumstance that taps our weaknesses and we don't execute is that does that make sense yeah very straightforward so how does it feel when you're not exit kidding when you're constantly being placed in an environment that is tapping your weaknesses how does it feel well i actually asked some students to to draw from me how it feels and this was made by the eight year old sister of a little boy who at the time was who it must have been extraordinarily difficult to live in his body because he was thrice exceptional he was gifted he has a d h and a learning disability to know how difficult that is it's really difficult to be gifted it's very difficult to have a deity it's very difficult to have a learning this body but when you have all three you just don't fit anywhere and this is what his little sister had observed that homework was torture he was miserable there was always this pressure to produce on a deadline and the clock was his worst enemy so this is how it can fail and this is what the little boy produced he said this is how's life feels to him you know and many years later he read the the myth of sisyphus and identified with it so when when we are placed in a situation where we are constantly batting up against our weaknesses we get into a chronic situation where we cannot execute and that's what we kind of observe in our students who are struggling we're go talk about what to do about this but i just want to connect the dots a little bit so so what happens is all of our students who have these difficulties they actually also have all these capacities to learn but because they are in situations where they can't access these trends because they can't access their intellectual strengths all of this gets shrouded and they look like they can do it but in fact it's the placed in and it's like taking of fish and saying you need to fly to be successful that fish is always going to look like you can do anything and this is really important to recognize because there is no connection between intelligence and executive function in a if we think about it we all know very very smart people who can't organize their way out of a paper bag i'm actually married to one i caught him one day staring in the refrigerator in the freezer you know what a long time ago we had that the two door divided thing and he was staring in the freezer and i said what are you looking for in his i'm looking for a spoon and i said i just moved them into the drawer last week this is a very very very bright man and he does incredible research he does all kinds of things his group is developing something called the luke skywalker hand that will allow soldiers to control their prosthetic hands with their own brains but he forgot where the spoons were and we also know of people who are extremely organized and don't have an origin or thought in their head right so there's no connection between the two but what happens is when kids over time are consistently unable to access their intellect they begin to believe that they come out and they lose faith in themselves and they stop trying that's what happens actually this is something that pavlov described many years ago does anybody remember who pavlov was the guy who got his dog to salivate to a bell so he did another mean the into the dog afterwards he started  the pair the bell with a circle and he would show the dog a circle when the dog started salivating to the circle and then he slowly transformed the circle into an ellipse and the dog got really confused and started to get depressed and just stayed in its kennel  wouldn't come out because it just didn't know how to respond it couldn't interpret the situation any more so that's actually a condition that we know about ok so in fact what happens is this is a metaphor what is the one most important thing right going to take some of those loads off and that's directly related to some of the interventions we're going to talk about so what is this thing what is this executive function what where is it and what do we know about it well turns out that the part of the brain that's right behind your forehead is responsible for executive function processing it's a very very thin layer of cerebral cortex that's right behind your forehead it's called the prefrontal cortex those of you who remember something about or if you've studied the brain the front part of the brain as the frontal lobes and the prefrontal cortex is in front of the front very front part it is the most modern part of the brain to develop it allows us to think and hypotheticals to have hindsight and foresight to imagine situations we'd never been in and allows us to plan for situations we've never been and you know i never been on the space shuttle but i could plan for a visit to mars i can imagine and then i can think about what i might want to bring and i can i can do something i can exit cupid because i have a prefrontal cortex that's functioning so it's the most modern part of the brain and when you think about technology new technology is always glitchy so this is also sort of a little bit glitchy thing and we're trying to figure out how it works in contrast the emotional part of the brain is very very ancient it's extremely refined extremely well organized and very quick it's also it develops very early in life the prefrontal cortex develops really late in life some aspects of executive function actually come fully on line when they're forty and they start to develop in pre adolescent and throughout adolescence this part of the brain is rewiring itself here's another thing to think about the because the prefrontal cortex and the executive function processes come online so late what this suggests is that these processes are required for adult living and for the most of human existence on earth the adults of the species decided the planning organizing they made decisions they just they planned for contingencies they employed hindsight and foresight the children just lived under the protection of the adults so executive function processes rely on all the other development to be in place if other parts of your development haven't quite kick then it's going to be really hard to exec you i'm going to understand why in just a minute is everyone with me so far great so what are these functions now when you read the literature or when you go hear people talk they'll say well there's all these things and you heard trevor say you know organizing in time management and prioritising it is true that when you think about executive function these are the kinds of processes you're thinking about however when where are you going to draw a line and say now i stop planning and at this precise juncture with the firing of this neuron i'm going to start organizing or here for this microsecond you're on prioritizing and then at this precise moment i'm going to start planning it doesn't work like that when you really think about teaching these processes or how we employ them ourselves they flow together you can tease one apart from the other and that's one of the problems we ran into in education because if you start with an assumption like this how do you test planning without testing flexibility i challenge you to do this is relatively impossible so any task that assesses planning is also assessing prioritizing and flexibility and organizing and self monitoring any task that assesses organizing assessing prioritizing and planning and self monitoring and working memory you just can't tease them apart so it becomes a really really difficult to design a test that only measures this thing reliably and validly and it's really impossible to tease that one thing out and say we're only going to teach this because this is the area that's weak and in two thousand and thirteen some goldstein who along with bob brooks wrote all these books about resilience some goldstein and his colleague published a huge volume called the handbook of executive function and what they did was they gave executive function tasks to i think thousand five hundred subjects and they did a factor analysis when you do a factor analysis of the ton of data like this you can see what clusters you know what are the elements here and they found only one factor so there is only one factor an executive function and it expresses itself in these different ways depending on what the task is requiring of us that's how we're understanding it now well so for our purposes then as parents and teachers it's much  better think of executive function as what the conductor does it's kind of a central command and control facility and this is why i said how can you exit cute if you have trouble with language or you have trouble with memory or you have trouble with motor processing or you have trouble with attention because if you want that conductor and you're saying ok temple any come in and there's no temple you're not going so if you're writing and you have a word retrieval problem and your central executor is saying ok tell me the word for the thing you know the thing the round thing that you kick on the soccer field and you can't come up with a ball you're not going to be able to execute doesn't make sense so executive function gets disrupted when we're asking kids to do too much too soon when other underlying systems haven't kicked  everyone with me so far so think about what the conductor does right to read used executive function compromises any task that requires the integration and coordination of multiple skills so the kids we know who have trouble with executive function they can do isolated tasks but you ask them to do three things at once you ask them to do a complex task that requires them to integrate multiple things they're going to have a lot of difficulty like in reading comprehension math problem solving all right they also have a lot of difficulty with tasks that require independence so a lot of times they can do something when they have a partner sitting next to them because now they have frontal lobes they can borrow they have trouble with studying and long term projects they have trouble with test taking but you put them in a cooperative group where they are working collaboratively collaboratively with other people and now they can do more and these kids can really confuse us a lot of times teachers will say to me this is a question of motivation this child is just lazy because he could do it in the class and then you went oh man you couldn't do it all maybe the parents aren't supervising enough but actually has happened is in the class this student had cues from the teacher he had cues from his classmates who was sitting around him and working he had i'm sorry i made a mess he had visuals all around the classroom that by reminding him of mnemonics of strategies and he could execute he goes home and he's sitting at the kitchen table and none of those structures have walked into him so when he came home from school he didn't bring any of that with him so now he can do the work at the kitchen table doesn't make sense ok so executive function emotions of very very very important because one of the reasons i suspect that you all are here is because the one time of the other you might have had a meltdown at home maybe the homework got wrapped up maybe someone slam the door and stormed out so emotional regulation is a very important part of executive function and it's really really important to understand as many of the teachers i consult with and i work with feel really burdened and overwhelmed that they have to deal with emotion because that's not part of their training and i think we do them an injustice by not training them in ways to help children to calm down and manage their emotions because these things are intimately linked so let's talk a little bit about emotions in the that's where you have memory and language and concepts and thinking and all these good things and where the peach pick might be is where most of the emotional processing happens in reality the brain is much more complex than this but this is helpful for us for our purpose now so the little part down here the red little orange circle is where self regulation and emotions generally are seated although they can be process throughout the brain are red while your legs red with your reds running sorry well maybe but it's because the blood is feeling those muscles because blood is bringing oxygen to those muscles that are firing that are to move you right so the way a body works is whatever part of the body is functioning that's where the blood goes and that's why when they do a functional magnetic resonance imaging the f m r i studies they give somebody a task and they look at where the blood is going in the brain because blood has iron and at the magnet can see where the blood is and they'll say oh this part of the brain is working when this task happens so whatever part of the body is working the blood goes there so when your emotions are inflamed remember the blood is coming up from your heart is getting pumped into your brain and it has to go through the emotional centers before it goes up to the thinking part of the brain right because it's cut sort of set up hierarchically when those emotions get inflamed you are feeling brain your emotional brain and your thinking brain do not communicate you know why that is well because that's how we protect ourselves when we are threatened so all of us are sitting and the d n a that's in our bodies survive from our ancestors because way back when has out of his natural habitat and look his stripes a changing i wonder if he's going through evolution they don't stop to think the emotions fueled their response so we have one emotion that we're very very interested in is motivation so most people that i know believe that you know they'll say things like if only this child was motivated he could do this have you that have you said it maybe you have and that's fine it's ok so i'm going to offer you a little bit different model of motivation ok because the way i've learned to understand motivation it comes at the end of a long series of things it is not the first thing that happens unless it's motivation to quench the thirst or find shelter you know what do you remember  basically built the pyramid and he said that at the bottom of these foundational needs those were all motivated motivated to find sleep to find shelter to find food but when it comes to higher order cognitive things like doing a math facts all studying for a test or whatever else that we ask our kids to do the motivation to do that actually is not inborn for the majority of us and here's how motivation develops so that x up there is actually a multiplication sign so if either of the two boxes either the expectancy of success or the value is zero motivation will be zero because you know anything multiplied by zero zero right ok so what does this mean it means if you expect success with a task and you value that task now you're motivated to do it if you expect success of the task but you do not value it you're not motivated to do it so an example from my life i am not motivated to fold laundry but i do know how to fold it because i'm a very busy person i have very little time in my life now if i have a half hour i'll spend it with my daughter or i will read or i will watch frankie and grace or i will make myself a cup of tea and stare out of the window but i will not fold laundry i bought a seventy five dollars steamer from amazon and my life is good the reverse is also true if you value something greatly but you do not expect success you don't want to do it so i think ice skating figure skating is the most beautiful thing in the world and i always watch it when it's on television my own sense of balance is terrible i can go down the stairs without looking at my feet i have never once had the desire to go learn how to ice skate my first winter here i was in new york as i said in a good friend of mine said you have to go ice skating at rockefeller center it was the worst experience of my life i have never had a desire to overcome that i just don't want to do it and you cannot pay me enough money to get back on to little skinny blades and go out on ice i will not do it so no man no motivation you can do any kind of sales  what we adults still whether our children are motivated to do difficult things are not is up to lies it's not up to them because who sequencing learning so there are carefully sequenced experiences of success before the more difficult task is presented are you teaching this child strategies so the child is learning how to do the task it's entirely up to the adult whether a child is motivated to do something difficult or not all our children are motivated to learn i have never once in my twenty years of doing this work met a child who wakes up saying i don't want to succeed there are kids who have in their ability to succeed who no longer want to experience the pain of struggling and struggling and struggling and bashing then walk don't want to be humiliated don't want to fail again they're all motivated to avoid pain they're not motivated to do those things because it's just out of their reach so we have the power as adults to set up life experience for our kids so they learn how to do the in the human race who just can't learn to do something there are people who i know of the students who are dyslexic for example who just cannot learn to break the code then they go on to high school they learn how to use books on tape and they move on but that's a different story that that is also a question of figuring out under what conditions can this person succeed in and giving them the tools to succeed what about valuing you  know my children have gone through school my daughter sixteen my son is twenty and every year in elementary school the teachers would ask them what their passions were in the beginning of the school year and a getting to know each other project they would ask what do you love to do n of those offerings included in the curriculum never i've participated in transition meetings with students on i e p's nobody asks the kid who are you what do you value what's important to you what's your vision of the future i have started now to ask all the young people i work with what do you think success means how will you know you've been but we don't we don't ask them we don't help them to figure out what is the value in this task i've had kids tenth graders i don't know what the two what were thinking when we designed curriculum i had one student in tenth grade who had to read ordinary people and antigone's and three or four other books that were absolutely depressing there was not one spark of joy in that english curriculum and this girl came to me and said component of a basic education when you don't even know i'm asking them to do this well i want to tell you my interpretation i think you have to read literature to understand the human condition because otherwise only experience of life that you have is your own and if you can only see life through your own eyes you cannot be a citizen of the world so you have to read about other people's experiences so you know what it is to be a human being this is why we have decided that you have to have humanities and school this is why we need literature when when my student diana and i talked about this and i said gee a no maybe a teacher is really wanting to from you know experience or some insight into the hard things that have happened in people's lives and maybe this is why she's doing it at least those girls could gain some perspective on her experience but we never tell kids why they have to learn the things they have to learn so then it becomes this boring tedious thing that's hard to do there's no value why would anybody be motivated w you wake up and go to a job like that i certainly wouldn't so it's in our hands whether our kids are motivated to do school or not we've got to make sure that they have a reasonable expectation of success and we've got to make sure that there's some value that they can find in the task particularly for the kids who are struggling there are lots of kids who are wired differently who just go through the motions and they'll just do it because they're to do and they can just whip it out we don't have to worry so much about them but it's always the kids who are struggling that we have to worry about there's all this makes sense ok so so we know that if your emotions are inflamed you have trouble exit getting right you also have trouble executing if you have a learning disability you know why that is well the hallmarks of a learning disability is an uneven processing profile that means you have great strengths and unexpected weaknesses in the same brain right and to me it's a lot like driving in india has anyone who had driven in india ok i'm going to tell you what that's like it's crazy so you have all bumpy roads because the infrastructure is kind of old and you have very high performance modern cars that can just you know german engineering the whole bit sharing the road with very old overcrowded enough fission public transportation buses bullock carts dogs human beings bicyclists and older vehicles everyone's on this road trying to go where they're going just like a child who might have very superior verbal comprehension and very very weak fine motor skills so you have one process along and another process that's just not happening and overall what happens is you get this clogged funnel so all these people driving on this road eventually get where they're going but it's a really extraordinary inefficient frustrating stressful process so they can't execute so kids with learning disabilities unless you manage the processing weakness unless you accommodated take it out of the equation they have trouble executing well another population that has trouble executing is kids with a d h d so there are some researchers in the field who actually consider a d h d as a disorder of executive function because the two are linked so closely but this i can tell you that there is a really good longitudinal study that was published by and i age that shows that individuals with eighty h d are delayed by about three years they do catch up but it's just slower it's slower developing so what do we see we see more childlike enthusiasm we see spontaneity we see goofy and as we see generosity we see creativity these are all the gifts of having a t h d but they really get in the way of exit kidding smoothly efficiently queenly these complicated  multilayered tasks that we give our kids in high school middle school even elementary school now what about autism spectrum disorders well children with autism spectrum disorders have difficulty with executive function and one of the reasons they do is because they have a lot of difficulty integrating parts into the whole so autism is a disorder of integration and so what happens when you can't see the big picture if you can only see in little pieces at a time can you organize can you plan you know if you're trying to plan a trip with a friend who's very scattered and is just throwing bits and pieces of information and you will you know how to pack and know because really in order to exit your successfully we need to be able to do a top down processing which means we know the big picture and we need to do bottom up processing so that we know what the parks are that fit into the big picture and if you have difficulty with this then it's going to be hard to execute it's going to be really hard to interpret implicit because an implicit structure there all the secrets people are assuming you can figure it out they haven't told you what the big picture is like my student diana nobody told her why she had to read all these sad books in fact nobody told her why she had to read literature so she was going one book at a time and nothing was building nothing was integrating in her case it's not because she was on the spectrum but it was because there was a lot of implicit unspoken rules so if you have a hard time interpreting that kind of structure you're also going to have a hard time executing it doesn't make sense obviously that's not the whole story but we're not going to be here all night so that's part of the story what are some other factors other things that interfere with executive function all of these things system is overburdened or emotions are inflamed legs a kitchen is difficult so we've all had this experience you know it's not just our kids it's just with our kids it becomes chronic and they're not able to get out of it else causes executive function i've already alluded to this a little bit so it's a biological thing right it's determined by brain wiring so any biological trade up maps onto the normal curve so if you take a chunk of people at any age you'll find a bunch in the middle who kind of can do it you'll find a bit on this and there are superstars and a bit on this and that just can't do it at all but as a culture if we really value it and everything we do is loaded in that direction we're increasingly excluding people from the process and think about what's happening to education right now so we are valuing out of the box thing web valuing application where valuing independent and novel problem solving these are things that human beings can do but these are all weighted to one end of the cognitive spectrum and so in my practice i even see typically developing kids who are just perfectly average kids looking like they have disabilities because somehow we've lost our way and we're asking a lot of arc things that they're not yet ready to do their brains aren't there yet but somehow we've placed a lot of value on this and we're just saying no no no you have to do this without this how we're going to move forward and just to give you an example you know human evolution happens there is very slowly right these things happen very slowly ten years ago i could not get a child in first or second grade diagnosed with the eating disorder i would be sitting in a team meeting saying look this child when you make awareness is really really weak if you don't provide the child with services this child is going to develop a learning disability and i was told no no no she's still learning to read how can you diagnose a reading disorder when she's still learning to read fast forward ten years now we're asking kindergartners to do book reports the brain really hasn't changed our expectations have changed so now is the first and second graders in the office with parents who think that they have a learning disability because they can't do the monthly book report but their brains were never why did to do that at that age a small percentage of them can do it so if we say oh these three kids can do it to everyone should be able to do it that's not how development works development is not an equal opportunity it we develop at different rates that's how human beings are we can't legislate average devil up and it's just not possible to do that but apparently we want to do that so that's one of the problems so what is the state of the research well i said executive function involves throughout childhood much of adolescent risk taking is associated with rewiring of the cortex because one day the connection is there the other day the connection is not there's a lot of adolescence there are definitely times when they really do not self monitor they really do not plan they are impulsive executive function and i q have nothing to do with each other and good teaching can have an impact so why is adolescence such a critical time well how many people have dissected a chrysalis what did you that's right the caterpillar is dissolving to form the butterfly we should be very glad that our teenagers on walking around like blobs of goo but in fact every major system in their bodies being transformed transition there is there are so things happens adolescence is a period of tremendous transformation in fact it's a time of life when we should be holding our kids closer it's just when they start to wobble in their development because their brains are turning into goo because we send them to schools where they have to manage a locker where they have to manage five different teachers all have different ways of doing things they have to get up at six o'clock to catch the bus at six forty when their brains are not ever overweight and we say to them this is your work you need to do it by yourself and don't ask your parents for help fact that's precisely the moment when we should be saying here's how you ask for help here's why you ask for help here's how you'll learn to ask for help because this is how you learn but somehow model for educating adolescents is not consistent with the development of adolescence ok so we need to think about you know where is this child in development because every child develops at a different rate we need to think about development we need to think about an individual differences because even within one hundred five year olds they're all going to be different and that's ok that's all human beings are and we need to think about the context so like i said we have typically developing kids  developed or there was a better fit with any kid we need to be thinking of these three things when we're wondering about why they're not executing and here's the real problem you know when it comes to traditional things we know how to teach them in school but we really don't know how to teach kids to organize we really don't know how to teach kids to manage their time not in a systematic way think about how far we've come with a rating more kids to read now than they were than we ever did before we're not there yet in our ability to teach these organizational skills these exact executive function skills because we've only started demanding them very recently and when you go look at schools of education and you look at what are teachers being taught to do they're still being taught to teach reading writing spelling math they're still being taught to manage behavior in the classroom to develop curriculum they are not being taught how to do this because technology pedagogical technology hasn't caught up and that's why we are in the mass where an in some some ways ok everyone with me so far so let's look at some solutions so what  principles for management well this is very very important the three cs whether you are a teacher or a parent you have to be compassionate curious and collaborative you have to ask those do you have to you have to allow the child to understand that you know they're hurting all you have to do is think about going to the m v stand in a long line just before you get to the window the woman goes on break and if she just smiles at you and says i'm so sorry i know you've been waiting i'll be right back you're fine you're not mad anymore the child is having a fit about shows some compassion it will deflate the emotion once the emotion is out of the question now you can start thinking about it so it's very very important to empathize and become passionate  what is it about this that's difficult for you it may not be what you're thinking it could be something entirely different and if you don't ask you will be treating the wrong problem solving the wrong problem and it won't be productive and if you ask you're also teaching your kids to reflect and talk to you about what's going on then solve the problem collaboratively a lot of the strategies we use with kids don't work because we're imposing our adult brain strategies on children children don't think like us then not there are their own people they're not like incomplete adults we can impose our ideas and our strategies on them so a lot of agendas for example that we go off to staples and we buy and we bring home and hand off to little johnny and say look i brought you this this will help you do your homework that was designed put up for it by an adult for an adult asked the kid what do you need so you can remember your homework so we have to start here we have to m power our kids to talk about what's going on and to be part of the acknowledge their weaknesses they have to first know they have struggling how can i say i'm here in front of you and tell you i can do math and i don't have a sense of space and i have bad balance how can i do that because of accomplished so much in my life matter because they are going to succeed in life with the things they know how to do we all find our place in the world so we can do the things that we do well no one is going to go out in the world and advertise  we've got to recognise our children strengths we've got to help them recognise their strengths and we've got to showcase them and that's not like in a fake way it has to be a very very authentic does me genuine appreciation i will tell you i do walk the walk  my son who is twenty is a drummer and he plays very very heavy music he plays death core and metal core and he shutters his drum sticks and he breaks his cymbals i mean practice is in my basement he did on to a year ago i don't he moved out and i'm a jazz and blues person my house shakes many places but you know what if that's how he found out who he was it's through the drumming and through the music that he found his tribe when he was very young we knew when he was upset he would go to the piano music is his way of being in the world and if i truly believe that then i have to find a way to make it work so i'm really i'm i'm not standing it telling you to do something that i haven't done myself and i'm an outcast in the indian community mike sun played at a place in somerville called all asia which is a small coffee shop that's run by this lovely chinese woman and once a month they open up in the afternoon to these crazy kids with tattoos and gauges and my husband and i was sitting at the bar and just having a be able to watch the kids play and she came to me and said you are an asian mother how can you allow your son to play this don't you want him to be like yo yo mama so i tell you i was even bullied for it we have to recognize the strengths and our kids many of them are not like us the things that move us may not move them if you are an outdoor buff and you have a child with sensory integration problems that child is not going to go outside you may be noticed by nature but your child is not and you have to get out of yourself and see who is my child what makes my child whole and that has to be a mission and this is really really important it's extraordinarily difficult to do ok and you have to manage emotions very very skillfully acknowledge them somewhat frustrated of course they have a good reason to be frustrated i've never met anyone who gets frustrated without a good reason normalize it yes honey if i had to work very very hard all day and then come home and do more work i would be frustrated i know this is where how can we get through it together you have to normalize it it's normal to be frustrated and unhappy about things that make you keep confronting your weaknesses ok what else you have to promote self knowledge we're going to talk about how to do that you have to accommodate weaknesses remember that donkey cart you've got to take some of those boxes of other as a car it's not going anywhere and you have to build capacity building up the capacity cannot happen without accommodating the weaknesses because the system is going to be too burdened to learn new things building up capacity cannot happen without self knowledge because you might be offering your child strategies that are never going to work for him because then i'd love ridging his or her strengths so all of these things have to happen together how do you do this the self knowledge is really really are very very important you have to build in time and rewards for self reflection i say this to teachers to perfection takes time you know takes time to process your day takes time to reflect on why was i successful with this why was i not successful with this you have to build in that time you have to allow everybody to think through what worked and what didn't work and when somebody arrives at some some insight and then uses it in the future to be successful you have to reward that person you have to build in kids the belief that sel reflection is an important part of learning because it is so my son and i a butting heads because we're so different from each other or wow so this is why we irritate each other because we're both exactly alike and with finishing each other's sentences so whatever it is you have to be able to start with self knowledge so you have to know yourself once you figure out who you are and you may not have you know very few of us boss to think about who we are and and what makes us happy which is a little machines going in life once you figure out who you are now you have to learn who your child is do not assume that just because a child is born a few or raised by you that you know this child everybody has parts of them but they don't show everyone you have to get to know your child and this is something very important who knows what this is so this is called the joe hari window and this is this is what people talk about in the business world but never in the education world so all of us have four types of information or four types of information exists about each of us so the one window is open to the self so it's information about me that i know about me and that you know about me too and that's good it's all out in the open than there is the hidden self information about me that i know but you don't know and that's ok you don't have to know everything about me but i need to know about me the most problematic window is the blinds stuff that i don't know about myself but you that you have to give that knowledge to me when teachers know things about their kids they need to share that information that student our job as adults in our children's worlds is to reduce that blind self window that window has to disappear and knowledge has to come to the child at the same time if you are an important adult in this child's life and you're trying to guide this child forward support the child you need to know a lot about this you don't want in a young child who's struggling for that hidden self window to be very big because then you don't have information that you could be using to help this child so if you just go and google joe hardy window you'll get this actually there's a sheet of paper out front if you want the slides just please write your name and e mail and i'll share them with you we thought there might be one hundred people here and i didn't know how many copies to make that's why you don't have handouts but you can absolutely have them but this is called the joe hardy window because and this is a meme that's everyone's seen this you really want to see the possibilities you don't want to be limited by temporary obstacles you really want to see the possibilities and you know this is i made the slight a long time ago i was trying to show different kinds of smarts and they're all different ways of being successful in the world and michael jordan is there because i went to school in chicago and so did my husband and he said you have to put him there because that is intelligence anyone who uses their body like that is got to be intelligent so it is there's so many different ways of being smart in the world and i think we just sort of have to get out of the rat race that everyone has to do it the same way and you know all the other things right you know everything that's on your so that's fallingwater by frank lloyd wright that's a beautiful painting by renoir poverty and that's so flay that i was talking about earlier do you do this this here is a very simple thing you can take a piece of crayon on a piece of paper and draw it it's kind of say a corruption a democratization of power just gardeners multiple intelligence it's just different kinds of smarts and and you and your child or you and your student or if you're a teacher you can have every child in your class color it in to show you what kind of smarts they have so notice i'm not  everyone does it it's not it's not prejudicial you know it it doesn't diminish and one but it is a description this is who i am when kids do th they really explore who they are then they recognize different people have different strengths and weaknesses very young children can do this but even for older kids it's very empowering and as i said i've had parents do this i've had parents do one for themselves and do one for who they think their child is and i've had them take the papers home and have the child do one for himself or herself and do one for who they think their parent is and you find out that there's all these misconceptions everyone's had all along so this is one way you can start the conversation of who are you another way those we develop for one of our research studies this is a word bank and you can populate those word ban words you want depending on what you want kids to reflect on and then you just give them a little venn diagram thing and they just say well this i'm good up this not so much and they just sort of you can do this at the beginning of the year if you're a teacher you can do it again at the end of the year so that you're targeting the things that you want to target that year and you're having good self assess and they're recognizing that they've grown it's a very simple thing but it's a conversation starter it's a place to start thinking about what are your strengths what moves you another thing to ask kids is when are you in flow what i mean by that is what is it that you do that makes you forget time and forget where you are and you're so engrossed in it that it you know the building can fall down but you may not notice what is it that consumes you like because that is the core of their passion and we all have something  the other big thing is collaboration i've talked about collaboration and those of you who have read ross greene's work you've heard about collaborative problem solving and if you don't know about this you can look up ross greene he wrote a book called the explosive child and he actually describes a way of working with children called collaborative problem solving and it's really this issue of saying we've got a problem can we let's talk about what this problem is i want to understand what you think of the problem and i want you to understand what i think of the problem because it's our problem and let's figure out how we can solve this what do you think needs to happen to solve this ok so where shall we start so now you're collaborating on the problem solving you're not saying there's no problem but you're opening a dialogue this is really really really important and i've put the information down the center of a collaborative problem problem solving d green let's say in school you can do self reflection like this where you us kids you know assuming that you've taught them all these strategies during the course of your lesson you can then say what did you used to study for this test and let's say the child says oh i use flashcards and the child fails the test you want to talk about this and say that that works for you why do you think it didn't work are you going to do it again how are you going to change it because remember self reflection has to lead to action you can even do something more open ended and say what strategies were helpful for you and then you build insight because it's got to go deeper and you ask why do you think this judge try to do work for you or didn't work for you you know do you think you'll use it again if you use it again are you going to change anything if this didn't work what do you think we should try next and you have to remember that self reflection must focus on strike we have to figure out what the strengths where so when i talk to teachers about giving feedback and there's a lot of research on this i always say tell the students three things that they did well two things that you'd like them to improve and one thing you're not happy about i always give them a way to fix it  think about how you want to get feedback from your employer or your spouse always start with a positive so focus on what's working a knowledge of what is working and then analyze the obstacles point the way to a solution if you're going to give somebody feedback make damn sure that the next thing you say is here's what you can do about it so that's what we should be expecting about or cells we should be expecting our children's teachers is when they point out an error right alongside there should be a solution to fix because otherwise you're leaving somebody with a red mark and no no way forward because here the prize is metacognition if we can get our kids to learn to think about their own thinking with three quarters of the way they're helping them execute because we want them to self reflect we want them to be mad to cognitive and we really want them to be able to advocate for themselves without self knowledge they're not going to tell anybody anything about themselves because they don't know how would they self  advocate a lot of teachers in high school will say well if you want to come and see me after school you need to have a question to ask what if i don't know what if all i know is i don't understand anything then i don't go for extra because i don't know i don't have a question what am i going to do so this is why ninety percent of what i've said to you today is about developing self understanding and self knowledge and developing strategies once you've done that now you can start improving the match between demands and capacity and that has two parts to it first you reduce the task demands so they're manageable and then you increase capacity through systematic teaching through a developmentally sequenced scope and sequence and through strategy strategy instruction you do this very very carefully because again i can't remind you enough without accommodations this card is not going anywhere so you know i hope that we all are in enlightened systems in our relationships with the parents we work with and the teachers we work with is all enlightened but if any one yard any point in their life encounters a system where accommodations are frowned on i fully allow you to take a picture of that and then just offer it how is somebody supposed to function when there are too many burdens i'm strategy instruction let's i've said the word strategy a lot today so when i talk about strategy instruction parents and teachers get very anxious because we're so focused on enabling our children to be successful and we take on the burden so much on ourselves that most adults feel that they have to devise every single strategy that the child is ever going to need and then teach the child th strategies actually that's not what strategy instructions about it's about teaching kids to be strategic thinkers if you teach a child how to recognize his or her own strengths and weaknesses and then you teach them a few different techniques for learning you know sort of giving them a smorgasbord and bacon select the one that works for them and if you am power to them find their own strategy or change the strategy of given them so it works for them now they're becoming self supporting strategic learners so really what you're looking for is what is that bridge that's going to connect that learn no with that challenge that's what that's the way you have to think about this so if a student is struggling you don't have to solve the problem for the student but ask some good questions what do you know about yourself why do you think this particular task is challenging for you you know what part of this task is difficult how do you think we should modify that how do you try doing this have you tried doing this other thing you know i tried this and it worked for me hello class has anybody else had this problem what are some solutions out of work for you now you have a strategies post them on a noticeboard somewhere and the kids have a compendium to look up when they have problems teachers who have been involved with our projects they've learned to do this they post a strategy board and the kids come and post their strategy somebody finds a new acronym for something they come and post it there so the class has a strategy board the teacher is basically done nothing only nailed the strategy board there and put a border around it and giving people permission to stick things on it but the point is we're saying everyone learns differently you've got to find a way that works for you come and use the strategy that works for you so this is the smarts online smarts website that i was talking about a lot of these strategies have been codified and they're available to teachers and parents it's involves you know it hits on a few different areas goal setting cognitive flexibility organizing remembering and self monitoring and in the introduction modules they talk a lot about metacognition this was designed for middle childhood which is nine through fourteen but really you can use it with anybody are six units thirty separate lesson plans i wasn't actually involved in the developing those and there are strategies sets for remembering for working memory for time management for taking notes for reading to succeed for writing for math for self checking their work and for staying calm and study so there are curricula developing this is ours other people have their own things adele diamond has told of the mind there are strategies but i think the reason why i always plug this at the and is i feel like you can go to barnes and noble and you can buy books about strategies you can go online pinterest has a good zillion strategies with time management but nothing's going to work if you don't know who the student is and if you don't know what their strengths are and if you don't understand why this task of difficult for them you're going to run yourself ragged buying all these supplies and trying all these things and i've had parents come to me and say i've bought every calendar at staples and nothing phone and take a photograph of the home or if we had paid attention to how the child was we would have expended so much energy so this is why you know you can go buy books with lots and lots of strategies in them but if you don't get underneath to figure out who the student is it's really really hard to progress so we're going to pause here and at this point we can go in any direction i can take  questions i can show you more sly i can talk about a particular type of executive function and how you might be able to problem solve we can do anything that because i've said like the core of what i want to say keep track of how how time is passing so one of the common difficulties that all students with executive function difficulties have is they don't manage time well because time is very very str g time just disappears and it's very hard to wrap your hands around that i think you have to first make sure that the child understands how time is measured i will tell you that i have encountered fifteen sixteen year olds who don't know how to tell time because everyone uses a digital watch digital clocks there are lots of children growing up who really don't understand the structure of time how we measure time how we divide time and then i've also had students with different types of learning difficulties who don't realise that time is cyclical in the sense that sunday comes back every seven days that their birthday is on the same day every year that christmas is always and does december twenty fifth they just that the seasons follow in the same order they just don't process this information they're not noticing things d that information is not getting integrated so if a child is having difficulty managing time you want to make very very sure that they know how time works and let's say i think i have some things here i can show you we go so knowledge of time and knowledge of tasks all right so what does that look like so to teach time management you need to teach kids how to use time tools they have to understand the sweep of the minute  they have to understand that time is segmented into hours into minutes into seconds and to days they may know it intellectually but they may not actually know how long fifteen seconds is they may not know how long a minute is they may not know how long five minutes is for example i've had kids really stressed out about doing homework because i think it's going to take them the and tired evening this is a very common fear that kids have oh my god is going to take the whole day but when they actually sit down to do it and they notice how long things take it takes them an hour and they don't realize that they actually have four or five hours after they come home school so want only one of those hours the homework and the rest of time t hey can play so there is fundamental things about time that kids don't understand so here is something you can do a knowledge of tasks is basically knowing what are the different parts in this task what should what should i start with how long is each one going to take when in my life is this going to happen on which day at what time and then knowing that those blocks can move that you might say i'm going to do it at eight o'clock on saturday morning but at eight o'clock on saturday morning somebody may come and say let's go to the zoo but guess what that half hour block can move to sunday afternoon so teaching kids contingency planning these things need to be explicitly taught so what do we have years of this is a thing that i developed many years ago for kids who can't tell time and really need to understand elapsed time so this was say you have an hour to do something and you need to track how you progress in through that hour you can break the hour into four chunks that's what i did you can do anything you want so i would say to the student well you need to be done with your math by the time you get to the beginning of the yellow block instead of saying take fifteen minutes to do math because this is why we use calendars because we take time to turn it into something visual so now it can become part mentalizing and we can work with that so if the child is still doing math halfway into the yellow block now we can say well what is not going to be able to get done because you've taken longer but saying to the child you've been doing this for twenty minutes how are you going to fit the rest of it in in the remaining forty minutes that's meaningless because that kind of understanding of time had not become integrated yet for that child so i think really figuring out what does this child know about time does this child understand that time can be controlled or are they living in a way that they just experiencing time without recognizing that they can manipulate it and what do they know about the task that they know how long this task is going to take do they have any idea how long routine tasks take a lot of children don't know for example how long it takes them to empty the dishwasher they just don't they don't know how long it takes them in the shower they don't know how long it takes them to brush their teeth they don't know how long breakfast takes they don't know that most meals are only about fifteen or twenty minutes long they really don't know how far they live from school they don't know how long it takes them to get to school when they're planning they don't account for commute time so i think to figure out why the child is not managing time we have to sort of figure out all these pieces and teach each of the pieces anything else i know it's not an easy answer but time is one of the hardest hardest things i would say definitely don't give them a digital clock give them an analog clock and do lots of time estimation hand there's a sheet of paper on the table to like a pad of paper just please write as neatly as you can i am a reading teacher i can read all kinds of things but one of the girls in the office is going to be doing this for me it's for handouts if you an issue of executive functioning well if the child has a learning disability or a d h d or anxiety or autism spectrum disorders you can expect that at some point this child will have to for quality with executive function what typically developing children they can have executive function difficulties when they're excited about their birthday when they're angry with their best friend and they break up with their girlfriend when they haven't slept all night because they watched all the seven star was movies at once so typical children can also have difficulty with executive function when their system is overload but fundamentally anybody can have trouble with executive function when what they're being asked to do exceeds that capacity so you can have so another way to say th are executive skills that are appropriate for each age so for example a baby in the crib six seven month old was crying in his mother's voice in the hallway saying i'm coming and coming and calms down has a self soothing ability this is a child who is coming down who is self regulating and that's an appropriate skill for that age so if the child is having great difficulty doing tasks that are appropriate for his age so and for that you need to use norm referenced surveys of questionnaires so if you have multiple children or you have in a classroom of twenty five third graders who are all getting a developmentally appropriate curriculum if one child is standing out then there is a problem but but  function by itself is not a disorder it is a symptom that something else is not going right so if you receive a report from someone that says the child has an executive function disorder that actually is fact they were wrong so if there's any problem with executive function it's because something else is not working does not answer your question ok any other questions