This is Jennifer Gonzales welcoming you to episode 231 of the Cult of pedagogy podcast.

In this episode we're going to talk about a system you can use to teach executive functions to all your students.

Most of my teaching experience was in middle schools, so I spent a lot of time with

kids who were going through one of the most tumultuous transitions of their

lives.

As they moved from an environment where adults structured every moment to one with much

more autonomy, quite a few of our students struggled to manage their time, their attention, their belongings,

and their energy in a way that helped them do school successfully.

They would forget to do assignments, lose whole notebooks, show up to class empty-handed.

Every day after they rushed out at the end of the school day, the halls were littered with

abandoned pencils, folders, calculators, books, and papers. So many papers.

And while many of them managed to figure this stuff out eventually, we always had a group who didn't, who accumulated a series

of blank spaces in the grade book, whose lockers and backpacks were pure chaos, and whose performance on assignments regularly put them at the bottom of the class.

We would have meetings with these students where we urge them to get organized and keep up with

their work. Sometimes we'd and keep up with their work.

Sometimes we'd help them clean out their lockers or set up a system where they had to write

down their homework in their assignment book and get it checked by every teacher

throughout the day.

And sometimes those interventions worked for a while. But looking

back, I don't remember any of it being particularly effective. I also remember something else. Collectively as teachers we could be pretty

judgey about those kids. When we discuss their issues you would hear things like,

that kid is a mess and she just doesn't keep up with her things,

...