Intelligence isn’t all about smarts.
Without an aptitude to manage time, persevere, prioritize, plan, remember, handle emotions and reflect, learning is a challenge. Intelligence is largely irrelevant.
Worse, most who do struggle with executive functions suffer in school, especially in those with zero-tolerance policies.
All executive functions live in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, the same locale that houses identity and self regulation. During adolescence, this part of the brain grows more quickly and expansively than at any other time in life.
Ask a 9-year old if he should ride his skateboard down a moving escalator, and he’ll rightly think you are insane. Propose the same idiocy to a junior in high school, and he will visibly entertain a handful of possibilities.
We know that teenagers’ brains are hardwired for risk and intensity. We also know that our young people grapple tremendously with identity, sexuality, self efficacy and uncertain futures in an increasingly complicated and fascinating world.
This reveals a damaging assumption under which many districts operate: that all the fabulous work on cooperative learning, study skills and emotional self-regulation in earlier grades will assuredly, organically mature with the student, independent of curricular support. By the time they hit high school, kids should be able to follow the rules and just learn.
But what if they can’t?
Even though any and all of the executive functions can be understood as discrete skills, they work interdependently. Students who struggle with any of these skills are often mightily frustrated and exhibit poor emotional self control and regulation.
To cope, they distract, avoid and oppose. This directly sabotages the executive functions of sustained attention, persistence, stress tolerance, flexibility, and the ability to reflect clearly on how one feels and thinks.
This means otherwise capable students land themselves in a world of trouble. Often, this looks like a downward spiral of increasingly isolated pillory: detentions, suspensions and expulsions that never work.
School communities who believe that relationships are central to learning recognize the abject futility of traditional discipline. Restorative justice is another approach.
This student-centered philosophy begins with building relationships through effective language, dialogue and the use of community circles. Restorative approaches address negative behaviors with structured, collaborative conversations that give voice and agency to all those affected.
Consequences are determined by agreement that meet the needs of all affected, including the person at fault. By working with students on behavioral expectations that prioritize a student’s personal well-being over rules, we foster connection and better support students to become life-long learners.
Teachers and administrators who invite students to contribute to their school in this way support a culture of safety, forgiveness and empowerment. Although adopting a restorative approach does not fully provide nor promise a panacea to challenges with executive functions, its implementation does directly offer support and strategies in self regulation, stress tolerance, flexibility and metacognition.
Stress tolerance is widely understood as the ability to do a task with minimized anxiety. Flexibility indicates the ability to compromise and revise plans in the face of setbacks, new information, mistakes or obstacles by offering choices and chances to rethink, plan and take appropriate risks.
If students work in a culture of inclusion and forgiveness that focuses on a student’s agency to make things right rather than using blame, shame and exclusion, anxiety is greatly reduced. Students can separate behaviors from their emergent identity and better embrace a growth mindset in considering multiple perspectives and approaches.
Metacognition is classified as the ability to think critically and flexibly about one’s own thought process. Restorative approaches allow for the supports and time to safely objectify how one is both thinking and feeling.
We know that for most folks, executive functions won’t fully develop until a student reaches early adulthood. Nevertheless, schools can model, engage and offer inclusive support to demonstrate to students how well being rightly deserves priority.
Descriptions of strategies and approaches that keep students at the center of education provide the focus of “Student Centered Learning in Action: Portraits of Nine Classrooms,” published recently by Harvard Education Press.
How a school chooses to grapple with the very messy and human business of what it truly means to plumb one’s potential indicates how much work it’s willing to take on.
Looking to foster healthy relationships and collaboration with students to support all aspects of learning takes a lot more work than assigning a detention. But it’s totally worth it.
Christiane Cullens has taught English at Mount Desert Island High School for 16 years. She’d be happy to be reached at ccullens@mdirss.org.