I just wanted to update you all about what students are learning in Executive Functions and how we, as classroom teachers, might be able to support this learning in our classrooms every week.
1. Internal/External locus of control: I have already found many opportunities in my classroom to review this concept with students. Whether it be a student who comes late to school and blames CTA or a student who blames their group's project on one person in the group, I use these moments to remind students that they are giving away their power to make changes in their own lives. While that may serve them in the short term to help them feel less guilty or less accountable, that they are not using and applying the skill of having an internal locus of control to help them make better decisions in the future.
2. Delaying gratification: Students learned about the Marshmallow Test (reading attached if you are interested) which studied the different life paths of children who had developed this skill versus children who had not. When I stop to review homework, I talk about all the ways they are often distracted while they are doing homework and what delaying gratification might look like at home (i.e. turning off facebook, putting phone away, turning off the TV, etc). I also talk to them about what that looks like in the classroom (i.e. choosing to talk about the football game this weekend instead of helping each other complete the work and reflecting on their own understanding).
3. Resilience: The ability to bounce back after failure or early struggles is something I see as critically important to teach our students. We have already given them the "grit scale" (I attached that as well and I plan to look over my students' answers more closely this weekend), but this lesson goes a little further to talk about the importance of failure in learning and the characteristics of a resilient student (also attached). I have already started discussing the importance of struggle in learning. One of my high school teachers had a sign above his board that said: "A pupil who is never asked that which he cannot do, never does all he can." I believe it was Alfred North Whitehead who said it. When students are shutting down or giving up...I plan to remind them of the importance of this moment and how they are choosing to respond.
4. Goal setting: Each week students set goals for the week that are related to the long term goals they made on the first day of Executive Functions. Please help students know what kind of goals they might make for your class. Many students have said some version of the following on their goal sheets: "Pass my algebra quiz" or "study for Chinese" or "compete all my work for Human Geography," but, when I ask them to explain what that means or what they would do specifically when they got home, they didn't really have an answer. Let's try to help students by giving them concrete examples of what they can do at home to help them make their goals more specific.
Please let me know if you have any comments or questions about this information or about what you see as major issues with this group of freshmen that we might be able to address in EF.
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