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It is the responsibility of educators to be aware of executive functioning and to create environments that support all students.

Educators should also teach executive functioning language to all classroom learners, not just those who show deficits. When educators assist students with identifying their executive functioning strengths and areas of need, they also teach them how to advocate for their own needs in the classroom and beyond.

Executive functioning comprises both the skills that involve thinking, or cognition, and skills that involve doing, or behavior. Here’s a breakdown of these skills and how some might look in the classroom:

Educators should strive to create supportive atmospheres and equip their students with tools to independently express their areas of EF need. Educators can use what we call the “Four Tiers of Support” to set up this system in the classroom and beyond. They include: Teaching common EF language Identifying strengths and areas of need Setting up a classroom to support all students Teaching self-advocacy skills

Stress isn’t necessarily a bad thing—it can mobilize us and allow us to function well.

our bodies and brains are designed to handle small amounts of stress.

“toxic stress” and it has a myriad of negative implications for the body, brain, emotions, and relationships. Examples include inattention, poor emotional control, decreased memory, difficulty learning, poor frustration tolerance, irritable bowel syndrome, and even a compromised immune system.

For education at present we face a deluge of reports that the pace of change shall only accelerate and its scale become more absolute.

The resistor is that person or even group of people who are seen by advocates of change to be habitually irrational and averse to change.

Displays should serve three functions.  Firstly, they should act as memory prompts for the knowledge, concepts, and ways of communicating and thinking that children are currently learning or have been learning. 

displays should set a standard for the extent of knowledge and the quality of work expected of children. 

Thirdly, they should make the classroom an inviting place that stimulates interest in the subject content to be learned

ProfHacker has written quite a bit about the app and their post “GoogleDocs and Collaboration in the Classroom” is chock-full of links to various tips and useful ideas. Getting Smart’s “6 Powerful Google Docs Features to Support the Collaborative Writing Process” provides an excellent step-by-step guide to using Google Docs especially for collaborative writing. And for a basic overview of Google Docs’ features and potential uses, you can browse through this slideshow:

I have asked my Basic English Skills students to keep a daily journal (which can be on anything they wish to write about and functions to help them build their writing muscles) in Google Docs, which they’ve only shared with me. Besides alleviating any anxiety students might have felt about making their journals public, Google Docs allows me to easily monitor new entries (whenever a Doc is edited, the title turns bold) and to verify when students are completing their entries (by using the revision history feature).

I decided to have the students write in teams of three, with one team member serving as lead editor each week. The lead editor is in charge of each week’s blog post, which includes coming up with a focus question and locating 2-3 sources to help them answer their question, which they share with their team before the week’s first class meeting (I have had the teams indicate each week’s lead editor in a spreadsheet in Google Docs so that I am aware of which students are in charge each week). But it gets really interesting when the teams come together in the week’s first class meeting. The lead editor creates a Google Doc, which they share with their team and me, and type in their focus question and a brief summary of how they plan to answer it. What follows is a 30-40 minute session in which the team discusses the question, the lead editor’s sources, and their plan for answering the question completely in writing in the Google Doc, observing a strict rule of silence (I adapted this activity from Lawrence Weinstein’s “Silent Dialogue” activity in Writing Doesn’t Have to Be Lonely).

It’s an open secret in the education community. As we go about integrating technology into our schools, we are increasing the risk and potential for plagiarism in our tradition-minded classrooms.

But when does collaboration cross the line into plagiarism, out in the digital frontier of education?

At the same time, many of us want to put up barriers and halt any collaboration at other times (during assessments, for example). When collaboration takes place during assessment, we deem it plagiarism or cheating, and technology is often identified as the instrument that tempts students into such behavior.