When students have a strong foundation of executive functioning skills like planning, organization, and time management, it can help their school year start a lot smoother. On the other hand, when a learner struggles with these very skills, it can cause a rocky start. Just take time to imagine the student who loses all his papers or the student can’t figure out which class she’s supposed to be in. These experiences can be stressful and challenging for everyone involved.
The good news is that educators can intentionally model, build, and strengthen executive functioning skills from the start of the school year with just a few simple steps and strategies.
Why Do Executive Functioning Skills Matter for Back to School?
Executive functioning skills are the skills we use for daily and complex tasks everyday. While it’s true that executive functioning skills are important all of the time, the back to school season plays an important role in setting the stage for success. By implementing strong executive functioning-focused strategies from the start, teachers can provide the foundation kids and teens need to be successful.
Having a strong foundation of executive functioning skills during the back to school season can:
- Help students learn more effectively. Many executive functioning strategies are learning strategies! Students ultimately become better learners when they understand how to focus, organize, and work through challenges.
- Improve student academic performance. In addition to becoming better learners, executive functioning skills can help kids and teens perform well academically. Strategies can help them study, take tests and quizzes, and complete daily assignments.
- Reduce behavioral challenges. A number of behavioral challenges come up because learners are struggling. When we put strategies in place that help them be successful, we eliminate behavioral challenges before they happen.
- Help kids make good choices. In order to make the right choices, kids and teens have to know how to make the right choices. Teaching routines and healthy habits creates the groundwork for those positive choices to happen.
- Help kids learn to advocate. Executive functioning skills can help learners understand what they know, what they don’t know, and what they need to be successful. In turn, this helps kids learn how and when to self-advocate.
- Build a stronger community of learners. When kids feel more comfortable learning, trying new strategies, and making health mistakes, it ultimately creates strong community of learners.
- Provide critical interventions for struggling learners. While all kids can benefit from executive functioning strategies, this is especially critical for learners who are struggling with basic EF skills like organization, attention, and self-control. For these kids and teens, executive functioning strategies truly are important interventions that can make a huge difference.
Executive Functioning Tips & Strategies for Back to School
Develop and practice routines for everything.
Starting off the year with solid routines helps create structure, set expectations, and give an outline for how activities are supposed to go. After all, learners can’t follow through with expectations they don’t know or understand. To start, make a list of all the activities you expect students to do on a regular basis. Then, come up with a simple step-by-step routine for how you want each activity to happen. A few examples include:
- Morning routine or first arrival
- Attendance
- Bathroom breaks
- Turning in work
- Classroom jobs and responsibilities
- End of the day routine
The key here is practicing those routines again and again until they become second nature for kids and teens.
As a bonus, a strong foundation with routines also builds important skills like organization, planning, self-control, and attention.
Teach executive functioning skills explicitly.
Many students walk through the doors of the classroom still needing guidance and support with executive functioning skills like planning, organization, attention, self-control, and perseverance. Just like we would teach math or reading strategies, it’s important to explicitly teach executive functioning skills too.
Use a full-year executive functioning curriculum to lead you and your students through activities to teach about all these skills and more. It has everything you need to help empower your students for executive functioning success.
Integrate executive functioning skills into everyday content.
Executive functioning skills are not separate from math, reading, and writing. In fact, they’re in everything we do! Specifically look for opportunities to practice, discuss, and integrate executive functioning strategies into your existing lessons. For example:
- Before beginning a writing assignment, practice brainstorming and creating an outline together (planning and organization).
- Before an independent assessment, discuss specific strategies students can use if they get stuck (flexibility and perseverance).
- During group work, provide time checks and questions for students to ask themselves to make sure they are on-task (time management, self-monitoring, attention).
Practice calming strategies from the start.
A calm mind and body helps learners stay focused, make the best choices, and learn their best. Simply put, we cannot learn optimally when we are stressed, upset, or overwhelmed. The biggest challenge here is that kids and teens don’t know how to regulate and calm themselves in health ways. With this, it’s important to prioritize teaching and practicing calming strategies from the very start of the year. Give these evidence-based calming strategies a try:
- Mindful breathing exercises – Have students sit in a comfortable position. Practice slowly breathing in to the count of five and slowly breathing out to the count of five. Students can tap their fingers together or on the desk quietly as they count their breaths. Learn more mindful breathing exercises like “Cool Off the Pizza” and “Shape Breathing.”
- Mindful coloring – Gather some mindful coloring pages (or any old coloring books). Play some calming music and color the pages quietly. Encourage kids and teens to just relax and breathe as they color.
- Stretches and exercises – Stand up at your desks or in a circle. Lead with some simple stretches or yoga postures. Come up with your own set of stretches or have a student helper lead the group.
The idea is that students can use these calming strategies anytime when they need a quick personal break. And as a bonus, all of these activities can be used as a brain break between tasks or activities. Use this free coping strategies list to remind learners about their calming strategies.
Design and keep an organized classroom.
An organized classroom space helps students organize, focus, and get started on tasks more easily. It also helps model the skills we want to see in learners! To get started, create a space for everything and remove clutter. Involve students by teaching where materials go and practicing putting them back after using them.
Focus on building relationships.
Building relationships isn’t just about teacher to student relationships, but also student to student relationships too! Having a strong community of learners helps kids open up, try new things, take healthy risks, work through challenges, and accept critical feedback. All of these points are critical when it comes to building up executive functioning skills.
Start focusing on relationships with these free relationship-building questions.
Start the day in a predictable way.
Having a structured and predictable mourning routine helps reduce stress and frees up cognitive resources. When kids know how the day will start, they don’t need to waste mental energy thinking about how to begin or what to do first thing in the morning. In turn, this becomes a “jump start” for success. While there are countless different ways to start your class, here are some predictable morning activities to consider:
- Morning Meeting – Begin the day with a semi-structured morning meeting session. To get started, just gather as a group, discuss an important topic of the day, discuss some questions, and share ideas. Ultimately, this time can be as short or as long as you’d like.
- Homeroom – Start the day with a simple and calm morning check in during homeroom time. This is an ideal time to let students get organized, review schedules, and just mentally prepare for the day.
- Word of the Day – Introduce a new vocabulary word and explore its meaning through discussion questions. Encourage students to use the word in a sentence aloud or in their journals. Get started with a yearlong set of executive functioning word of the day to make this time really count.
- Exercises – Get learners moving with some basic group exercises and stretches. Lead the class through the exercises or have a student helper take on that role.
- Trivia – Engage minds with a trivia question or brain game of the day listed on the board. Encourage students to think about the puzzle, but don’t give them the answer right away! Allow them to think and ponder throughout the day, and review the answer before students leave.
- Morning Work – Provide a short task or prompt for learners to complete independently as they come into the classroom. This serves as a warm-up before beginning the rest of the day.
- Quote of the Day – Share a meaningful quote of the day posted on the board for students to think about. Choose your favorite quotes or use executive functioning quotes of the day to spark meaningful conversations that will last.
Keep a predictable schedule.
Just like starting the day in a predictable way, a regular schedule helps develop a sense of structure for kids and teens. Post your daily schedule somewhere for students to review each morning and refer back to, as needed.
When your schedule changes (due to assemblies, activities, or anything else), make it a point to preview those changes as early as possible.
Give time for strategy shares.
A strategy share is an intentional time where students can explain, discuss, and share the strategies they’ve used to solve a problem. In a way, it’s an opportunity for kids and teens to share their own tips and tricks with each other. Not only does this foster a strong sense of community, but also empowers students to take control of their own learning. Some examples for strategy shares might include:
- Letting students share strategies for how they’ve organized their desks, binders, or lockers.
- Having students come to the board to explain how they solved a math problem step-by-step.
- Giving time for students to discuss techniques for working through challenging problems on an assignment.
Integrate movement.
Incorporating movement is critical for focus and self-regulation skills. It’s important to not see movement activities as just “rewards” but truly part of the learning process. When possible, add movement opportunities into your everyday lessons. For example, try having students move from station to station during a writing activity or allow groups to toss a ball as they answer math facts.
Discuss executive functioning skills together.
Normalize executive functioning challenges and wins by talking about them often. Use your own real-life examples and scenarios to showcase how executive functioning skills are used in all areas of our life. Here are some conversation starters to get a discussion going:
- You have a lot of homework and you have practice at 6pm. What can you do?
- You were working hard to improve your math grade but you just failed a quiz. What are you thinking and what should you do?
- Describe a time when things didn’t go like you planned but they worked out anyway.
- How could staying organized help you reduce stress?
Need a quick solution? Put these executive functioning question cards on a ring and discuss them whenever you have a spare moment between tasks.
Plan weekly check-ins.
Plan weekly (or bi-weekly) check-ins to conference with each student individually. A conference can serve as a proactive intervention to make sure students are understanding material, using helpful strategies, staying organized, and meeting their goals. You might start with questions like: How are you doing? Are you meeting your goals? What strategies are working for you? Which strategies do you need to refine? What could you be doing differently to progress toward your goals?
Data like work samples and assessment scores can also be used to show progress over time.
Begin your day with an executive functioning focus.
Dedicate just a few minutes of your morning to focus on teaching executive functioning skills and strategies. You can try:
- Teaching executive functioning lessons and activities.
- Starting with an executive functioning quote of the day.
- Read a short story with an executive functioning focus.
- Read an executive functioning question to consider and discuss.
- Discuss an executive functioning word of the day.
Hold end of the day reflection time.
The end of the day is an ideal time to reflect on what worked, what didn’t work so well, and what we could do better in the days ahead. Best of all, it only takes a few minutes each day. Use end of the day reflection questions to help students learn, grow, build their toolbox of strategies, and improve for the future.
Schedule organization time.
Build time into the schedule for students to organize their materials. This might include:
- Daily organization time, such as the last 5 minutes of class to put materials away.
- Weekly organization time, such as 20 minutes on a Friday to deeply organize desks, binders, and backpacks.
Teach and practice self-monitoring strategies.
Self-monitoring is the ability to pause, check in with yourself, and make sure you are on track to meet your goals. This can look different in different settings – but it’s a worthwhile strategy to teach kids and teens early on in the year. Some simple self-monitoring strategies to start out with are:
- Writing out your goal
- Creating and following a checklist
- Review work before you’re through
- Checking in with yourself with questions (“How am I doing?”)
Introduce, discuss, and practice each of these strategies with learners to give them a foundation of self-monitoring techniques they can use again and again.
Integrate visuals.
Visuals are an important support to help support learners with a variety of executive functioning needs.
- Visual timer – Use to help students visually see how much time they have to work on a particular tasks.
- Graphic organizer – Use to help students organize and plan written assignments.
- Posters – Use to provide important reminders that come up on a frequent basis.
- Checklists – Use to give students a step-by-step set of directions, helping with task initiation and perseverance.
Encourage healthy habits.
Getting enough sleep, exercise, and a healthy diet play an incredibly important role in student success. Spend time discussing health habits with your learners and their families.
Remember we’re all learning.
Learning new skills, routines, and expectations is challenging for all of us – kids and adults alike. With that, it’s important to have patience for kids and teens struggling to get into the groove of the new year. Celebrate small wins and start fresh every day! And while you’re at it, have extra patience and kindness for yourself, too.
Making Time for Executive Functioning Skills
Executive functioning skills are in everything students do. They help students plan research papers, start classroom assignments, stay focused when learning new content, and work through challenges that come up along the way. These skills matter. It’s worth investing some time during your morning, study hall, or class to teach them directly. Use a complete yearlong executive functioning set of lessons and activities to teach your learners and empower them with the skills they need the most.
Need more ideas? Learn more about executive functioning skills to give your students the supports they need.
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