by Guest Blogger Donna Wilson
Our latest blog post for Edutopia explores the importance of the
brain's executive function and describes how teachers can help students
direct their thinking and cognitive abilities toward setting goals and
planning to achieve them, establishing priorities, getting and staying
organized, and focusing attention on the task at hand.
Entitled
"Strategies for Students With Scattered Minds," the post describes
"workouts" that allow students to practice pausing, prioritizing,
improving their working memory, and mapping their options.
As
a former classroom teacher and school psychologist, I worked with many
youth who had difficulty with various executive functions, such as the
ability to inhibit behavior, initiation and planning behavior, working
memory and the ability to selectively maintain attention on information
needed to complete a learning task, as well as cognitive flexibility.
Based
on this experience, I found that explicit instruction about executive
function and how to improve it is especially useful for students with
learning challenges.
