 Hi everyone. Thanks for joining us for Executive Function, the missing piece to puzzling problems in the classroom. I'm Steph Wannick with Tammy Cheatham here at ESU 8. We've all heard or been that teacher that thinks or says, what can I do with a student who turns in half of his or her homework? Can't remember what we've covered the day before and insists on being the class clown. I have tried everything. Has that been you? Well, we're kind of talking about what are executive functions. And this term has been around for quite a long time. Now we're being more focused on having things with like trying to give people more of an idea of what's going on. The executive function are the queuing systems for the processes in our brains. Executive function rather than IQ are the best predictors in reading, spelling, and math. When you have the brain processes that drive our ability to focus, solve problems, organize ourselves, remember the information, learn from those mistakes, and then manage impulses. This leads to learning efficiently and developing important social skills when kids get along with others. Understanding how executive skills develop help adults figure out best responses to academic and behavior problems. And we figured too that we've heard 89 to 98% of our kids that are diagnosed with ADHD or ADD have deficits in multiple areas of the executive functions. So sometimes we as teachers can confuse this with laziness, carelessness, that lack of motivation, lack of concentration, lack of organization. So sometimes we blame the child's behaviors on some of these things, but actually there's some executive dysfunction at play. So executive functions actually affect the way that students can concentrate, organize, the way that they express how they feel, the way that they solve problems. It can affect how they relate to others and process information. So I think that that probably sparks memories of several of your students in your mind as you read through some of these skills and really think about, oh my gosh, maybe that was what was going on with that student that I was so puzzled about. We really need to look at the next one is I can't versus I won't. If a student feels like they can't do a lot of these things that we've talked about before, we need to have the discussion with our colleagues that maybe the students need to be taught these skills effectively. They might be missing some of these skills. So if we put these skills in place for them, they will be more successful along the school, their school route versus I won't. That seems to be more of the student being defiant, maybe having other behavior issues. So we really need to focus and take a look at this with each student as well. So there's five basic steps of problem solving that we can follow when we're talking about executive function. And step one is to identify the traits of the student or that group of students that are going to be supported. So what are your concerns with them and what are their strengths already? Step number two, analyzing the root cause. And this is really where the most time needs to be spent. And sometimes people overlook this and they rush on to try to solve it. But you really need to look at the five ways. Why do you think the student does that or this? What would cause the student to think that way? What skills do you think the student lacks that other students the same age understand and use? What is keeping the student from learning these skills? What should we concentrate on first? And this is also the step where we really need to have all the teachers involved and have the student themselves involved because sometimes we can lay out the best laid plans. And if the student says, no, that's not what's going on. So we really need their input in this step. On step three, we set clear and measurable goals. And we really create an action plan. So that's important to get all members of a team on board. Maybe you're working with multiple teachers who all work with the student. We want to just lay out this action plan and know where we're headed and how we'll know if we reach our goals. And step four, determine how to monitor and chart student progress. The results will guide your decisions later on. So if you come up with that action plan, you need to check back and decide how you're going to monitor that. Maybe you and a teacher team this up. They can come in and do some observing. And then you decide, are we going to keep this action plan in place? Is it working? Is what the student wants to accomplish, is that going forward? Do we need to adjust the action plan? Do we need to maybe change some things up a little bit? Or do we need to fade out the action plan? If things are in place and not have that so much in the student's life anymore? And step five is compose intervention options and select a plan. So we need to think about those research-based accommodations and intervention. Also getting the parents, the student, and the faculty all working together. And on step five, too, we really want to make sure that we have fidelity to those interventions. We know that their research to work when they are done in a very prescribed way. Research has shown, hey, they are proven to work with these this much time every week. Or this much time every day, that kind of thing. We need to follow that intervention the way it is set to be enacted. So what's going to move us forward? We need to focus, minimize, and train and monitor. So when we focus, we really determine what is blocking that student learning before we concentrate on which intervention to use. And again, like Tammy said before, we need to involve students with this stage and really be sure that we're talking to them about what's going on in their life and why this might be an issue. When we minimize, we want to take the guessing out of this situation by staying really informed on current brain research. So if we know all that we can know about brain research, it's going to help us from that guessing game that we often play. And then we also want to train and monitor. So we need to make sure we are trained in how to use those interventions. If we just pick one up and start to use it, we might be making mistakes that hinder the student's success. So really, we need to educate ourselves, educate ourselves about the student, educate ourselves about brain research and about our individual interventions. We're kind of looking forward to what's next. What's going to happen now that we've given you a little bit of a preview about executive function? So next year, we are going to be offering a training series, a three-day training series on executive function, and each will explore a slightly different topic. So you can see the dates, September 7th, October 6th, and November 2nd, all of 2017. We're really focusing on asking SAT teams to come to this training, as well as individual teachers or administrators. But we feel that SAT teams often find that they get these questions brought up to them, and so we want to help them work through the problems of executive function and behaviors. So in September, we'll work on poor planning and problem solving. October, we're going to look at students with issues with attention, comprehension, impulse control, self-monitoring. And in November, we're going to look at memory, math, organization, and writing. And we're going to take a real look at the root causes and those effective strategies. So we're going to really maybe just put your student in place, see what do you think is happening, and then give you effective strategies to use with that student. I guess we'd like to thank you for taking time to listen to us. If you have any questions, please go ahead and email us or call us here at ESU 8 anytime. Thanks for taking the time to better understand at your students.