Mentoring the Art of Executive Functioning: Tales of Transformation and Triumph

Executive Functioning is a hot topic in education today. Sometimes, it feels like everyone is talking about it, yet no one knows what they are talking about! When parents ask me how I help students develop their executive functioning, I find the best way to explain it is with examples. 

First, parents need to understand the basics of executive functioning. Some people say there are seven executive functions. Others break it down to twelve. If you want to dig into the minutiae, this is a great read by trusted professionals.

Sometimes, it is good enough to broadly understand what we mean as education professionals when we refer to the executive function. According to the Center of the Developing Child at Harvard University, “These skills underlie the capacity to plan ahead and meet goals, display self-control, follow multiple-step directions even when interrupted, and stay focused despite distractions….” Some people liken our EF to air traffic controls; others say it is the CEO of the brain. 

It is important to note that some people are born with a stronger capacity for developing these skills quickly with less support, and some people need more time and support. However, no one is born with these skills intact. They grow through the careful instruction of parents and educators who scaffold these skills for children. It is also good to know that the part of our brain in charge of EF skills is the youngest part of our species’ brain. It is the least developed and likes to succumb to the parts of the brain that want to take over: the ones that helped us survive. Sometimes, we ask a lot of our new brain when the old brain is just trying to keep us alive in what can feel like a complex and scary world for teens!

When teens struggle with executive functioning skills, the problem can take many forms. Sometimes, we see students doing “fine” in school when we look at their grades, but they are always overwhelmed and stressed. Other times, we see a child lost in video games or social media scrolling to the detriment of all else. Or sometimes they just look like incredibly bright students who forget they have homework and feel pretty awful when it doesn’t get done - yet have no idea how it escaped their mind.

Because everyone has so many skills that make up good executive functioning, helping a student increase their working memory, mental flexibility, and self-control requires substantial diagnostic skills from the coach. We have to tease apart the behaviors from the causes, and that can take a multifaceted approach.

For me, the first few EF coaching sessions require a fact-finding mission. What are the behaviors parents see? What does the student report? What feels hard and sticky when it comes to schoolwork? I do this through interviews and questionnaires. Once I understand what is going on, I go after the 2-3 weakest EF skills by setting some goals and teaching students about why they might be experiencing the difficulty they feel. My initial goal is to normalize the difficulty and make parents and students realize this is all very normal, even if it feels pretty yucky.

Once I establish trust, I put a plan into place, inviting students to the path we are about to take. However, I am not always fully transparent about the whole plan. I am discrete  for two reasons:

  1. Students with weak EF skills are overwhelmed by too much information. I don’t want to lose their trust and attention now that I just gained it.

  2. I often need to recalibrate the plan, and if I set goals too high at first and divulge them, everyone is disappointed, creating a negative feedback cycle that I am trying to break. 

After the initial trust phase, each student’s plan can look very different. Because the plans vary from case to case, I have shared a few below:

Case #1: Janet

When Janet came to me, she attended our sessions via Zoom with her hood up and her lights off. The message was clear. I was not trusted, and she would not reveal too much. As we began talking, the hugest hurdle in Janet’s way was a terrible sleeping and eating schedule that made it impossible for her to take part in her life outside of school. Sleeping had become her strategy for avoiding the discomfort of doing homework. After a day of school, Janet, who has ADHD, did not want to do more work. “Needing” to sleep became a way not to feel bad about “choosing” not to work. My job was to untether sleep from avoiding HW. We are still in the process, but Janet is now attending sessions with her lights on, hood off, and a very forthright demeanor.


Case #2: Jacob

Jacob came to me as a sophomore in college after he had experienced a couple of rocky semesters in which his grades suffered. He is an articulate, capable, and curious young man who often looks unmotivated due to his choice of behaviors. He was often seen doing things like scrolling on social media, playing video games, or hanging with friends rather than doing his schoolwork. Some might have said he was lazy, but Jacob wasn’t lazy; he was simply disorganized. He never knew what to do for school, so everything else took priority. Over a single semester, Jacob used our time to learn how to map out his week and time block assignments between his competing obligations. At the end of his first semester, he had already put his classes, music lessons, and performances into a Google calendar for the next semester.


Case #3: Lily

I wasn’t sure if Lily had EF issues. She seemed like an overachieving senior who hit the end of high school and simply burned out.  She was spending too much time on her phone, and her grades were slipping. If I had not done a questionnaire with her, I would never have realized that she had been overcompensating for weak EF skills and that her senior year was as about burnout as her chickens had come home to roost. She was burned out because she had been task-mastering high school with few skills around working memory, sustained attention, and metacognition. She had been taxing her strengths, such as goal-oriented persistence and response inhibition, to get through school. With her first AP class that required actual studying, Liy’s weak metacognition was taking its toll. A few weeks spent learning how to study for true understanding, she left better prepared for her college courses. 


Case # 4: James

James is a case in which the EF tutoring can feel more ongoing as the habits are more entrenched in other emotional triggers, like low self-esteem. James came to me feeling terrible about himself as a student. His internal monologue was always negative, making him avoid any work that might trigger a barrage of negative feelings and thoughts. I quickly insisted James see a therapist while seeing me as I feared his negative feelings would increase as we tried to dig into some of the self-sabotaging behaviors around avoidance. James’ path was somewhat circuitous as it involved responding to feedback at home about not only school work but also family obligations. The first task was trust, and the second was getting James to own his avoidance and see his triggers. I would like to report that this only took weeks or even a few months. I cannot. It took a year, which is common when dealing with EF deficits that have compounded to create emotional obstacles. At the same time that we needed to unpack the triggers (exploring the ways his low self-esteem was derailing his school work), we got right into time management skills. That doesn’t mean James always used the skills. We would plan his weekend down to the minute some weeks, and he would still find ways to leave things to the last minute. My progress with James was often hindered by anxiety, but I also suspected the anxiety was compounded by a tinge of ADHD (inattentive type), making things harder than they needed to be. The feedback loop of work feeling more arduous than it should (maybe due to ADD) and his constant comparison of himself to others (schoolwork seemed less demanding for his peers) almost always amped his anxiety. It was hard to unwind what was anxiety due to low self-esteem and what was anxiety due to a legitimate overcompensation for ADD. But there was no way around this. The therapist and I agreed that the anxiety was very real. The ADD was likely present, but the parents were comfortable pursuing medical intervention. Our work would need to proceed without all the tools available in the arsenal for alleviating ADD and anxiety, but James still made progress. After 1.5 years of coaching, he can now manage his own time: making lists, assigning time to tasks, and always doing the work, sometimes with a bit of procrastination. His bedtime is not always what others would want for him, but his work gets done, and his grades reflect the work of a  more engaged student. He is college-bound with new EF skills and an increased confidence that can take him through the next four years of his education.  Will James always be a bit of a procrastinator? I would put my money on yes. However, I think James understands the mechanisms behind his procrastination much better and, with his increased metacognition, feels less anxiety, dampening the depth and severity of those procrastinations.


My work with students around EF skills is complex but gratifying as this work will help students live a more balanced and fulfilling life.


Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash