Darius: Welcome to the Executive Function Brain Trainer Podcast. I'm Darius Namdaran with Erica here. Erica, what are we going to talk about today?
Erica: I'm excited about this because we've been talking a lot about AI and I thought it might be nice to talk a little bit about the crisis that I'm seeing with teens, executive functioning. I see this huge increase of parents seeking executive functioning help, schools seeking executive functioning help, professionals wanting additional training, and a lot of kids, I think these are a lot of the kids that are kind of post Covid. Right. And a lot of them are really having a hard time with executive functioning skills.
Darius: Do you think it's got worse, or do you think they've just become more aware that executive function is like a key performance enhancer, an easy win in terms of improving outcomes?
Erica: I think it's a perfect storm. I think we've got post Covid. Covid was a really, really difficult time. I think we're also dealing with the change of technology. I mean, even things like Google Classroom and Canvas and all of these different measures or ways of recording assignments and stuff like that, where the kids have to do all their homework online now. So there's this big move from paper to doing everything online. And then every teacher has a different way of how they organize their online classroom and the assignments. In the olden days, everybody had a planner, and the teacher said, write it in your planner. Everybody wrote it down. Beginning class, everybody turn in your assignments. The teacher took on a lot more of that load of collecting assignments, giving the assignments back. It wasn't so virtual. And a lot of kids are struggling with that virtual piece and the fact that each of the teachers have a different way of doing it. Oh, this teacher uses Canvas and this teacher uses Google Classroom. And this, this teacher has seven different folders and organizes it this way. And this teacher has three different folders and organizes it this way. And, oh, I thought I turned in the assignment, but I turned in the wrong assignment. Or I thought I turned it in and I didn't. There's so much onus now on the child. The child is the executive functioning person that has to coordinate everything. It's not like the teacher is in charge of everything. And the teacher and the students receive it. The students have to search for it actively.
Darius: Yeah, I think that's a really powerful kind of insight and framing, because if you're in a classroom, there's also a collective exploration and executive functioning. It's like you're looking at what someone else is doing, and Mary beside you saying, hey, Darius, we're doing this now. Oh, right, yeah. And it's over here. Or you see someone else opening it up or whatever. Every person's playing to their strengths, and then between the group of you, you get it done. Whereas when you're just isolated into you, your digital space, the window to your learning and to your class and teacher, when it comes to your own work, that's really hard. You've got to be really switched on.
Erica: It's really hard. It requires an enormous amount of management. And I think that they're also. That there's this situation, too, where there are students that don't get their homework done, and then they'll blame it on technology and they'll say, oh, no, I turned it in.
Darius: Oh, so it's like the dog ate my homework.
Erica: Right, right. I turned it in. Or they purposely turn in the wrong assignment. And then the teachers don't know whether the kids are doing it on purpose or they're not doing it on purpose. And those that aren't doing it on purpose are blamed for being careless and lazy.
Darius: And, gosh, that sounds like a dyslexia nightmare for me. You know that all that procedural learning and procedural memory and so on, I just don't have that.
Erica: It's really intense. And I have had situations where I've worked with students where it's literally, I work with them typically once a week for an hour, and there have been situations where it took us a whole hour to figure out what their homework was. You know, Erica, it was all over the place. It
00:05:00
Erica: was like 52 pickup.
Darius: Oh, gosh, yes.
Erica: And, oh, these poor kids. And then they're spent. By the time they figured out what their homework is, they're so frustrated and so annoyed and so shut down that they don't have the cognitive space or energy to do their homework because they're just absolutely. They've had a meltdown, like multiple meltdowns, and their parents are having meltdowns, and their parents can't find things either. And they're like, I can't figure it out. So how do they expect my child to figure it out? But the teachers are just like, not my problem. If you didn't turn it in, you get an F. It's pretty intense.
Darius: I just had an experience like that a few hours ago. I'm, part of this Edinburgh University AI accelerator where they get a cohort of 12 companies together and then work with them for six months in the university. And we had this customer journey workshop with an amazing company. Okay, Niall. And they go through this process, understand your customer journey and help them deal with their pain points and so on. And it's about helping you with your product. We turned up on Zoom, and we were using Miro to do it. Now, I love Miro and I meet on Zoom very often, but my wife and I, who both were on different channels on this, just got totally stressed out by it. We were like, oh, my goodness, we just can't do this. And it was like night and day because we'd had the same workshop. This was a follow-on workshop from two months ago where we were all in person. We were sitting around the table as a group, the presenters were there, we had our post it notes, we had pieces of paper. There was a flow to it. It was hard work, but, you know, but here it was like, oh, have you got this technical thing done? Oh, are you over there? Oh, you're here. And here is this and there is that. And. And we're now doing this. And let me show you this slide. And now enter your information here on Miro. And now go off into breakout rooms. And now do this. And we were. I'm like, oh, my goodness. I have been doing Zoom workshops for eight years before it became fashionable. And I was like, this is horrible. And, I was like, what is going on here? But what was happening was the cognitive load of switching all the time between this screen and that screen and no real frame of reference and the person speaking over here, then they've gone, and so on. Whereas if you're in a meeting room, you can see where they are, you're looking down at your piece of paper. There's a flow. You can talk with my wife, my business partner, chief operating officer, we can have a quick discussion about something. None of that sort of hidden infrastructure, social infrastructure was there. It was all stripped away. And then all those little cues of, oh, we're doing this right now. Oh, right, yeah, great. Oh, we're doing that right now. And point to each other and support, help each other and so on, what you do in a classroom or whatever. And also the coordinator can see what people are doing, moving and so on, and respond and so on. It just became so clunky that I ended up saying, I'm really sorry, I have to leave, I can't do this. And my wife did the same. They're great hosting and so on. But we just said we cannot spend our time, waste our time on this. This will become a tick box exercise. It's too valuable every single hour of our functioning time during the day. It's too valuable as chief executive officer and chief operating officer of a growing company and to put all of that onto kids after school is finished and then you've got homework and you're tired and all the rest of it. Oh, my goodness.
Erica: Yeah. The other thing is some of these things are very clunky. You're absolutely right. Or they're not working properly, or they can't get on properly because their family members are playing video games and it's just kind of sputtering out or things aren't turning in properly. It's a really awkward time because technology isn't consistent enough and clean enough and they're really taking the brunt of it. I had one student, it had to laugh because I started working with him in January and I was like, well, why don't we go onto your school platform to see what your homework is? And he said, I don't even know what my password is.
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Erica: I was like, what? What? He's like, oh, yeah. He showed me the beginning of the year, but it was so confusing and I just got so sick of it. I just. I'm like, how do you find out your homework? Oh, I just text my friends. You've been making it through this whole school year that way?
Darius: Yes. Because tell me, does he have dyslexia?
Erica: The other way.
Darius: Does he have dyslexia or ADHD or something like that?
Erica: Nothing formal, but no, it's just the frustration of. And you have a password for this one and a password for this one, and they can't be the same passwords and, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And then, oh, you can access this on this computer, but not on this computer. Because the schools have all these rules about how you can't go on your computer. Are you using your school computer or your home computer? Oh, I'm using my school computer right now. Oh, well, that's why we can't access NoteBookLM. Okay, can you switch over? I mean, it's just the amount of having, of switching moving pieces and.
Darius: Incredible.
Erica: It's incredible. It's so intense. It's so intense. And yeah, I mean, even when I'm working with families figuring out what computer we're going to use, is their son or daughter able to access all of the different things that they need to access from that? Computer. It's a bit of a technology nightmare and it's extremely taxing on executive function. So getting back to that kind of executive functioning crisis in teens, that's a piece of it. Another piece of it is they split their attention more than any other generation that I've ever experienced. They're used to having two screens open, so they might have you open in one screen and then they have a game going in another screen or social media or something and you can kind of tell. You're like, wait a minute, are, you multitasking right now? Oh, just a little bit. No, no, no. Can you turn that off, please? But. And some kids are, okay, you can reach them, you've got them. And some parents are like, is technology going to work? Well, in some ways technology is better because they have to be on their technology if they're with you in a zoom session. Sometimes it's not, it depends on the kid. There's some kids where I just have to say, you'll have to work with my colleague. That works one on one with people because it's not working. There are other kids where they hyper focus on the screen and they're fine, they're better. A lot of it is just, you just have to figure it out. But there's usually the loss of one or two sessions just figuring it out because it's so complicated. It's a shame. It's a real shame. And it's my concern is just that so much of the load is just on navigating all of this stuff. I guess with AI agents, it's going to get better. It's definitely going to get better because it can't get much worse than what it is right now. I'm just frustrated that schools don't insist that all their teachers do it the same way and that they have the same exact platform so that it's really crystal clear and easy to access. Because these kids, they don't want to use planners. They're like, nope, nope, it's all on the computer. It's all on the computer. Yeah, yeah. But can you find it? Well, even if they want to use a planner now, they still have to find all the information. And the teachers will sometimes like, they'll say like, oh, okay, I'll post the assignment. And then they forget to post the assignment. Or they post it like at 9 o' clock at night. It's just bizarre. It's just bizarre. But the interesting thing is, when I was in school, the teachers really were the managers of executive functioning. That we received, we were always coaxed. Did you write it down? Let's write it down. Did you turn it in? you didn't turn it in? Give it to me now. You didn't get or you didn't get it in or you're staying after school and you're going to do it right now. There's none of that. It's all the students responsibility to navigate this highway of just bogged down traffic.
Darius: It's more like being at university then because that's. That sounds like a university student goes into their university email, their university profile is responsible for finding their information, turning their work in. And you know that level of independence was hard enough at university.
Erica: At least at university you have a syllabus. They won't give you a syllabus. They only drop the assignments in a day or two before they're due. So there's no way of seeing the big picture really.
Darius: I mean there's, you're saying everything is just in time, right?
Erica: So it's really not teaching kids.
00:15:00
Erica: Like so many of my students. I'm like, well they'll say oh, I don't have anything today. I'm like great; we'll study for a test. But I don't have any tests. M. That's fine, let's start to create all your study materials. But I don't know what they're going to be. Well, let's just take the slides maybe from your classes and we can put that into NoteBookLM, and we'll start to create some content. And they're like oh, but no, I don't want to do that because my teacher gives me a study guide one or two days before the test and I'm like yeah, but that's not a great way to study. We really want to be practicing spaced repetition. And they're like yeah, but I don't want to do that because what if I'm studying things I don't need to study? It becomes an argument because they become, they've become addicted to the last minute, which is terrible. Which is actually then also doing the opposite of what we should be doing because we don't want to be creating last minute students. It's not effective, it's not efficient. But that's why I'm calling it a crisis because it feels like a crisis. Not for all students. Some students can navigate it. They're just super tech savvy, they've got good executive functioning skills and they can hack it.
Darius: It's kind of like what's happened with a lot of kind of companies who used to have like telephone help desks, you would phone up and they would go, oh, right, yes, I've got your account. Right, I'll go in there, just tell me what you need. Okay, right, yeah, yeah, I've updated it. You're all sorted, off you go. Done. And now they' oh, right. Could you please log in? Oh, you'll have to go to the website. You'll have to go and do this; you'll have to go and log in yourself. Oh, do two factor authentication, do this, do that and oh, right, yeah, I'm looking at it now and they're like, oh, well, you need to go up there. And you're like, oh, right, yeah, okay, go do that for half an hour and call back through the help desk. And you're like, my God. In the past it would have just been a quick few minute phone call and done. But they're offloading that administrative load that costs the company time and money onto you as a customer as a cost saving exercise. And this is offloading executive function to the children as a time saving exercise, is that what you're saying?
Erica: Yeah, and it happens with adults too. Since my surgery, I have to deal with insurance companies a lot and it's just unbelievable how overwhelming it is to get in touch with anybody. And you go through at least 50 different like stages of press this button, press that button. And the funny thing that happened recently was I was speaking to this one woman in the insurance and she's like, well, I'm stuck here, I need to reach out to my manager. I was like, well, why don't you just let me speak to the manager? Oh, no, we can't do that. I'm like, but how do you speak to your manager? Oh, I have to email them. Oh, oh, you have to email them while I'm on the phone. And it took them an hour before their supervisor emailed them. And the supervisor just said, I can't help you. and I was like, wow. So it's like they just, they've slowed. Yeah, I think it's a passive aggressive thing. Right. Where they've slowed things down so much, they're thinking, well, well, maybe this person will just say, this is so frustrating, I'm just going to pay for it myself out of pocket. And I think, that's another piece that's happening. But let's get back to the students because the poor teens. But I think this technology piece that we're talking about is a bit of an executive Functioning nightmare for everybody, and particularly the elderly. Again, when executive functioning skills start to diminish and they're expected to be going on to all these technology tools that they don't understand and they just want to cry. When you even say sign into our website, they're like, I don't know how to do that. It's pretty intense.
Darius: Can I. Okay, this has all been a bit negative, hasn't it?
Erica: But, yeah, it's highlighted. We're talking about the crisis. This is crisis.
Darius: So something that I found really, really helpful is I open AI if I've got something like this technologically, okay. The cognitive load of trying to figure out where it is on the website for the next step. You've got like a six-step process and you're like, well, obviously it's on the left-hand panel, right? Where on the left-hand panel. Okay, fourth down, right. I click that and then it opens up a new window and then where do I click on this window? And it's lots of words and blocks everywhere. And you're like, okay, what do I need to click on here? I've got to read everything. I take a screenshot, give it to my agent
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Darius: Roy. I call my AI agent Roy. I give it to my agent and Roy looks at it and says, right, you need to click on this button that is there underneath such and such. Oh, right, got it. Screenshot, Roy, what do I do next? That one done. next, next. And all it's doing is saving me the cognitive load of reading it, finding out. Because I've got to keep my attention focused on what I need to achieve, not the individual procedural steps to get there. Because my working memory will get completely overwhelmed after I've gone through three steps. Each one of the steps need four different decisions to work out. Is it this one? Is it that one? No, it's not that one, et cetera. And so the joy of taking a screenshot, dropping it and say, which button is it? And it's like, oh, it's that one. Okay, great. Again, which button? Which button? Which button? And it's done.
Erica: What's. What's next? What's next? That's what I say. I did the exact same thing. Screenshots. But I'm going to go back to our sweet teens because guess what? They're not allowed to use AI.
Darius: Ah. right.
Erica: So. So it's like they're thrown into this executive functioning position when they're not development ready and then their hands are tied. So it's tough. And then all these, all these Kids are just getting diagnosed with all these executive functioning problems and they need an executive functioning coach. And I just wish the schools would do something about their system so that it could be more simplified. Because honestly, college is so much better than middle school and high school because they've been doing this for a while.
Darius: Right.
Erica: Whereas the schools really haven't had.
Darius: So what's the answer for these students?
Erica: I'll often ask the parents to advocate, get together and say, look, this isn't good enough. The system is. It doesn't even work for us, and you expect it to work for our kids. So I sometimes will ask the parents to really fight, back with the school districts and say, no, this isn't working.
Darius: Other times, get the systems working.
Erica: I think it's anytime we're in a shift into something new; there's a certain generation that kind of falls between the cracks. And they're just a lot of cracks right now with technology and particularly in education. We were forced into it too quickly due to Covid, and that was a big crevice that most students fell into. But even like yesterday when I was working with a student, it turned out that at the last minute they had a snow day, but they didn't have any snow days left. So they had school online, but none of the teachers were prepared, but they still had to do school online. And I said to the little girl, I said, well, how was it? She said, it was a nightmare. But that's the problem is sometimes were pushed into using tools before people are fully trained on them, before people know how to use them and they're just offloaded onto somebody else or there isn't that cohesive use of technology in a standard way, which would make it easier for the students. Students need to embrace technology. I get it. But the way the schools that I've been witnessing, how they've been using it, has been not good enough, not good enough, and putting too much of a load on the kids. And it's heartbreaking when you see kids that are not doing well in school. And it's primarily because of the executive functioning load of just how to get your assignments in, how to access them, and how to get them in. So I work a lot with kids. That one student that didn't know how to get into a system in five minutes we were in, he was like, oh, that wasn't so bad. A lot of it is you just have to kind of hold their hand. And when you hit those roadblocks, you just say, it's okay, we're going to do it together. And we're going to figure it out together. And I'm not going to leave your side until we've got it done.
Darius: Yeah.
Erica: And it's okay. And you're right, this isn't okay. And this is not your fault. And you're not careless and you're not lazy. It's just a faulty system, but it's going to get better. That's a lot of what I do in my coaching sessions.
Darius: What's interesting is how often we internalize that it's our fault that we haven't done X, Y or Z. The piece of technology. Because the technology's not gone. Right. Actually, technology's fault. I'm so surprised. I watch people and I watch myself and I'm like, hold on a minute. This is actually not well designed. This is really bad UX
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Darius: user experience. This is really bad UI and I'm blaming myself. Hold on a minute. No, this is just poorly done.
Erica: But you know what? When you're a kid. No, yes, it's your fault. You didn't get your assignment in, and you lost your points. you know, and sometimes I have to call schools or teachers and just an advocate. Have to advocate and just say, you know what, no, this isn't working, this isn't working. Or is there any way we can get somebody to work with this student one on one on executive functioning? It's funny. Schools will. They'll do reading remediation, writing remediation. Fine motor remediation. They get help for this. But executive functioning? Nope. And yet my theory is because the vast majority of teachers are really good at it, otherwise they really wouldn't be teachers. And so they don't really have any compassion of how it could be hard. They're just like, how could you just not. How could you do an assignment and not turn it in? It doesn't compute. They're like, that doesn't make any sense. There's got to be something else going on. It must be that they're lazy. Must be that they're unmotivated. Maybe they're being passive aggressive. They never go to that executive functioning piece because it's so easy for them that they don't see it.
Darius: They remember their password; they know where the portal is. They know how to get in. They know. Yeah. Gosh.
Erica: Yeah. Yeah. So it's. Sometimes we have to write out the steps. Sometimes we have to have a technology book where you keep all your passwords, and you keep all your steps. I'm impressed. I would say most kids Navigate it better than a lot of the parents. They've grown up with technology and sometimes they're the tech expert in the family. Yeah, you know, it's very interesting.
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Erica: sponsored by the Executive Functioning Remedial assessment, an online tool that quickly identifies challenges and delivers targeted strategies for success.
Darius: So what sort of answers do you come up with in this process? What are the sort of, okay, it's not perfect. A lot of it is technological. You talked about this technology book. What are your techniques that you tend to turn to?
Erica: Well, if you're looking at executive functioning at large and leaving the school mish mosh out of it, although that's always a piece of it, it's really evaluating. What are the tripping points? I'll often say to the kids, like, what was hard this week? Did anything get in your way? Like, what's tripping you up?
Darius: And, before we leave, the technology piece, do you have strategies with the technology piece? You get them to write down their passwords; you write down the steps. Do you put them somewhere?
Erica: You know, if that's what they need? Every kid, what do you tend to do?
Darius: What are your go tos?
Erica: Some kids need that. It's a matter of just us brainstorming together and saying, okay, what's tripping you up? Where's the crevice? Where's the crack? Then let's address it. And for every kid, it's going to be different. It might be getting their assignments turned in. In which case, for some kids, they, I'm, done. I finished my homework. You know, that next piece of turning it in, they were like, well, I must have turned it in. I'm sure I turned it in.
Darius: Yeah. And in the past, what it would have been is you'd have written it in your homework book, you'd be done. You'd walk to school, you'd open up your homework book, and there your assignment would be.
Erica: Your teacher would literally say, okay, everybody turn in your assignments. You don't have that anymore. So as soon as you're done with an assignment, you don't have a teacher that says, okay, now turn it in. Yes, they've got to do that. They've got to have the executive functioning skills to say like, okay, now I've got to turn it in. But this is the other thing. So because technology, as confusing as it is. They might do the homework. They go online to turn in their assignment, and then all of a sudden, they get a pop up and it's their friend. Their friend wants to know what the science of homework is. So then they start to do that, and then they forget that they didn't turn in the assignment. So there's so many things that are distracting on their way to turn in the assignment. Maybe they even made it in there. And then they look at the. Because now they can see all of their grades, which is very distracting for kids.
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Erica: Oh, my God, I got a 62 on the paper. And then all of a sudden, they don't turn in their assignment. They're just. It's too distracting. Like if they just had like one place where they went to turn in assignments. You know what I mean? Or you hit one button and that's where you turn in all your assignments. And then that puts it into the right. Gives it to the right teacher or whatever.
Darius: Ah.
Erica: like a little Dropbox. Just a little Dropbox. This is the homework Dropbox. You press that, put your homework assignment in. Done.
Darius: Yeah. It's like a post box. You post your. And then the mailman, delivers it to the right person.
Erica: Right, Right. But it's too complicated. Or sometimes the system's down. So they want to turn in the assignment. The system was down. They're like, oh, I'll just turn it in later. And then it doesn't happen.
Darius: And then they pay the price.
Erica: And then they pay the price. Or sometimes they really think, I swear I turn it in. I swear I turn it in. I saw it. It said it was turned in. And then. But the teacher's saying it's not.
Darius: Yeah. And how often have we experienced that? We've clicked continue, and then you think, continue, continue. And then it completes. And you think, oh, it's complete. But then there was a button in the bottom right hand, corner, which was confirm. And you're like, oh, I didn't click confirm. Do you know what I mean?
Erica: Yes, yes. Yeah. Right. Because it wasn't even on your screen because it was off the bottom and you didn't see it. I don't know how many times where I've, like, I've. I've ordered something from Amazon or some other place. Right, yeah.
Darius: So basically what we're noticing in this teenage executive function crisis is that it's not that teenagers themselves have significantly changed. It's not hugely about their attention and so on, although we could attribute some of it to that. But what we're saying is that it's so much of this administrative technical processes and sequences that there's so many levels of them, different teachers wanting different processes for handing in this kind of homework. Another has another process. One person uses a Microsoft system, another one uses a Google Classroom system, another one uses a bespoke system, another one just wants it done a regular way. And there's just all sorts of different ways. And this poor teenager needs to coordinate all of this on top of everything that a typical student would have to do. And it's often those final steps. It's that starting or that finishing that is the key. Really what I'm hearing is it's that huge starting friction and then it's that huge finishing friction. It's not that in between getting the job done, although just usual challenges with that. So what kind of strategies could we use to help deal with that? I know in my own experience that you really need one place where all your passwords are written down that you've got with you all the time. Whether that is a password manager, which is essential as a businessperson to have. Or a student needs the equivalent of that somewhere written down in their, or on their phone or on whatever device they've got, somewhere where it's always accessible. Because often passwords are not allowed to be duplicated, which is understandable. Passwords have to be more than eight characters long and include an unusual character and be randomized and maybe changed every three months or six months. And all sorts of. So passwords are a biggie. They need to be written down somewhere or recorded somewhere that they've always got access to. And then there needs to be a record of the processes, the key processes. It's like in one place, like you create this standard operating process geography. Step one, step two, step three, step four. The most obvious. I mean, I just had someone in my company say, Darius, where is our domain hosted? And I'm like, I, remembered a year ago. But why on earth are you asking me as the CEO of the company where the domain is hosted? I do not have time for this. Go find a standard operating procedure that will tell you. And eventually I said, look, our developer has got a standard operating procedure for this process because he's learned hard if he doesn't. And, and it's not just, oh,
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Darius: it's over here in Kajabi, it's step one, step two, step three, step four, there's a URL, there's what you do next, this is the person involved, and all the rest of it Those are in miniature is what we need like one little black book of all those key important things.
Erica: Right. Or somewhere, whether you keep it on in Google keep or whether you keep it on Apple notes, whatever. But having a systematic way of doing things and teaching these students systematic ways of doing things and ways of managing it, breaking things. But that's part of executive functioning training is teaching people how to organize, how to sequence, how to use mind maps, how to break difficult tasks into smaller steps. It's just that technology has made it for some, in some situations more difficult. It shouldn't, and it shouldn't be this difficult for long. But because everybody was thrown into technology a little bit too quickly, we were kind of all thrown into the deep end and told to swim.
Darius: Well, you've mentioned this before, Erica. and it really stuck with me, and I hope it sticks with people who are listening right now. Yeah, this friction that's created with all these online portals and you know, recently since we won the BET Awards, so if he notes my software, we put it forward for the British Education, Training and Technology Awards for send, and to our incredible surprise, we won it. It's like winning the BAFTAs or in your country, the Oscars for EdTech. And it's kind of made us think that actually we really want to go into schools now that we've got this kind of endorsement from bet. Every teacher in the UK knows what BET is and if you've got the BET award winning badge, then it's like the seal of approval from experts in the field and teachers. And you mentioned something about this that's really stuck with me. And all this technology confusion is often solved by someone saying something to someone else. Oh, Darius, this is what you need to do, Billy, go there and remember, you need to go to Google Classroom and remember you need to do such and such. But that goes in one year out the other with working memory issues, processing, you don't write it down. If you don't take a note of it, it's gone. So if he notes, takes notes of lectures and records the audio, transcribes it and turns it into a mind map. And at the moment it's really focused in on university students recording a whole lecture, turning it into a mind map so they can structure what they're learning. But what we're thinking of doing next is solving part of this problem you're talking about, which is if we could get IVI miniaturized so it could go onto a device offline, no Internet required, no sign in required, no login no Internet issues. So if Ivy was on device, completely on device, all the data was stored in the school's cloud, not in our cloud, then what the students and teachers could do is they could say, why don't you just Ivy this and you just do a quick audio recording of the instructions. Okay. Or the explanation of what to do. And if he doesn't, just record the audio and transcribe it. But it also creates a mind map of the steps so you can see what the teacher is saying. I'm not saying this is what Ivy does right now. I'm saying this is what we're thinking if he could do in the future for students and teachers. And a lot of that's come from what you've said in the past. Because I thought how would I be used in a school? Because often children don't sit down and listen to a lecture like they do at university. How do they take notes in that? And they've often got their workbooks that they're doing and they're taking, typing out workbooks or drawing in workbooks or whatever instead of creating.
Erica: We don't even really have workbooks anymore. It's strange. I mean they don't even have books anymore. It's weird. It's like they have some PDFs they have, but so much is just all online where they never are able to have a hard copy of anything. It's all virtual. And when you have to scroll back to find your answers and it's not like you have a piece of paper where you can compare two pieces of paper and you can put them next to each other, you can't do that. And talk about a working memory nightmare. Being able to hold all that stuff and scrolling back and forth and sometimes
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Erica: you have split screens but it's not really working. It's really hard.
Darius: So I think, and I know this isn't a short-term answer, but I'm thinking longer term. I think what we all need is a place where our personal notes are stored. Not all of our documents, but just our personal thoughts, our personal reflections, dictations, voice notes, conversations. We've had all of that. Kind of often that verbal realm is the realm that glues everything together. Like the teacher says, Billy, remember to do such and such. And Billy goes oh gosh, yes. And they're going out the classroom, and they remember but then it goes out the other ear parent says what did the teacher say? Oh gosh, she said something but. And it's not in the system. We often rely on this Kind of verbal conversation to glue, fill in the gaps of these chasms. And when that conversation has disappeared and there's no record of it and no one else has overheard it, for example, because like in a classroom, a teacher could have said to Billy, I could have said to Billy, look, Billy, remember you've got this test tomorrow at 4 o', clock, okay? And the worksheet, I've just handed it out to you. Put it in your bag. Okay? Now obviously we don't do that so much anymore, but I'm releasing to me everyone else who's listening. Now, Billy has got the worksheet, and he gets distracted for a moment and he just forgets. What did the teacher just say? He's got often Mary. Okay, let's say Mary beside him. And Billy goes, Mary, what am I meant to do with this, by the way? Mary goes, oh, yeah, yeah. You put it in your bag, take it out. We're doing a test on it tomorrow. Oh, right, okay. It's being repeated by this sort of community and we support each other. So many children during the COVID years with dyslexia especially had great difficulty with this disease, executive function things. They didn't show up for screen conversations and so on. They didn't go to the right place because they got lost. When often you pick up on social cues. Someone has just stood up. Mary just stood up. Oh, I know. Mary always remembers the right place to go. So I'm just going to follow Mary. Mary gets up. Oh, I'm going to get up. I'll follow and chat away to Mary and then walk into the next classroom and I'm there on time. Do you know what I mean? And so you use your social skills to compensate for maybe executive function challenges. Do you see what I mean?
Erica: Yeah.
Darius: Whereas when you're in this digital environment, you can't necessarily use some of these social skills or compensatory strategies.
Erica: Not yet. You know, I don't think agents aren't going to be there for students for a while, but they will be eventually. And it's just going to be an uncomfortable, bumpy road until we get to that point. And then it's going to be much easier in many ways. But, but in the meantime, what ah, we've got to do is we've got to be more explicit in our. How can you use the tools of working memory? How can you use your inner voice? How can you use visualization? How can you use spatialization? What is metacognition and how can that help you to think? We just have to be a little bit more acceptable, explicit, and then apply it to some of these challenges that kids are. I would get with executive functioning.
Darius: I would get, even as a main takeaway from today, the importance of taking notes in all.
Erica: Yeah, that's really important for you.
Darius: The important importance of taking notes or
Erica: the importance of just having something record your reality.
Darius: for me, right, for me, that's a note, an audio note, a video note, a text.
Erica: They're not allowed to have devices.
Darius: Oh, God.
Erica: They're not allowed to have devices.
Darius: They're not allowed to have devices. I mean, what's it like in America, in high school? Like, I know in the UK, nearly every single student has got one kind of device, either an iPad, a, Windows computer, a Chromebook as their working computer or device in the classroom. Nearly every student's getting it now. I would say 70 to 80% of students have got this sort of school device. Is that similar?
Erica: It depends. Some schools give students devices that are on lockdown and you can do very little with them. I was just on Zoom with a teacher yesterday that just said, I can't let my students use their computers anymore to type anything because they've all figured out ways to cheat.
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Erica: I can't trust any of them, not even AI but they could put the answers to the test on their computer or whatever. it's just amazing how clever they've gotten at cheating. And she said, the only way I can really see if they know how to write is they have to pull out a piece of paper and a pencil. And of course, now you're dealing with. These kids haven't ever really used paper and pencil. And their handwriting skills are so bad because they were never taught script and they spent too little time on print that the teachers can't read their handwriting and the kids can't read script. So, it's a really tricky time. It's a tricky time. We're just. It's clunky because we're in that shift from moving from paper to digital.
Darius: Okay. They don't have a device, some of them. But how will they take notes? How do they take notes?
Erica: Many of them tell me they don't take notes, but.
Darius: Okay, I.
Erica: Yes.
Darius: If you told them to take notes, how would they do it? How, would they.
Erica: It depends on what school they're in. Every school does it differently. Some kids. Some kids have iPads and they take notes on OneNote. Some schools don't allow that. Some kids have never used anything like that. Some kids, they are just told by their teachers that if they want to, they can just download the slides. But I'm surprised at how many kids. Tell me. How many. Most of my kids tell me I don't take notes. Isn't that weird?
Darius: If you ask. Okay, that is crazy. But if you ask them, I mean, taking notes is the number one way of dealing with executive function difficulties. Because for something, everyone. For everyone.
Erica: Not everybody.
Darius: All of history, okay? Since writing was established, we've used writing a note down as the foundational step of executive function. Writing a list down, writing ideas down, writing stories down, writing certain things down, and then planning extends our working memory, our metacognition. All of our executive functions get enhanced the moment we can take a, note. Because without a note, you have to rely on memory for everything, which you can do, and we used to do in the past. But note taking is so important fundamentally to the whole process.
Erica: Extremely important that kids know how to take notes. I agree. There are, there are.
Darius: How do they do it? Well, if they wanted to do it, how would they do it?
Erica: It depends on the school, depends on the teacher. And that's part of. That's part of the confusion. As part of the confusion, it's not.
Darius: Let's say we've got a typical child who's got their online. Okay, all of their homework's online. They've maybe got four different, five learning management software tools. Google Classroom, Microsoft, Canva... Different teachers use different things. Many of them have got three or four different learning management software. Let's say, okay, in the classroom, they're not on a device, okay, let's say. And they're looking at whiteboards. They're maybe doing some worksheets or PDFs or whatever they're working on at that point in that scenario. Let's just take that scenario. Give me some strategies that students have actually used in that scenario to sort of take notes of important things like passwords or login details or processes.
Erica: I'm just telling you that this seems to be a standard answer to me. A lot of the time with my kids, I'll just say, so where are your notes? I don't have any. You don't take notes? No, we don't take notes in school. that's what I'm hearing a lot. That's what I'm hearing now. Not all the time. There's some schools that do, but I think that's part of the issue is it's very confusing for kids because there's not a standard way of doing things anymore. It was much more standardized in the past. They're coming back.
Darius: Would they have, like, a, planner, like, often in the old days?
Erica: It depends on the kids. It depends on the school. Some. No. Very few schools have paper planners anymore.
Darius: Okay. Do they have homework books where they write certain things into their homework?
Erica: Very, very few schools have that. It's all digitized.
Darius: Everything's digitized pretty much.
Erica: That's pretty standard at this point. I rarely see anybody writing anything down.
Darius: And if it's digitized, are they all mostly using a device of some school device or some sort to get access to that digitized, or are they tending to do the digitized stuff at work?
Erica: some schools have devices; some schools do not provide them.
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Erica: It's not standard. Every school is different. Even every public school is different. So it's really interesting. When I work with students, there's a learning curve because I have to figure out what their system is. And some of the systems are good. Some of them are terrible. And then even within those systems, some of the teachers use it well and some don't. So this is the crisis. This is the problem, and it will get better. But these kids are really slipping between the cracks. And many of them are blamed, as have, being careless, lazy, unmotivated. And they're diagnosed with executive functioning issues that the teachers don't really know how to address. So they tend to go. Tend. Not always. They tend to go to external people. And then we have to create systems for them, and that, usually gets them through, but it's. It's a yucky, uncomfortable time right now for those.
Darius: Yeah, that is really hard. Yeah, I get it now. Erica, it is amazing when you open up like this, how hard it is, this friction on every level with these online tools at home and classroom. They're not taking notes. They're not having this single source of truth that can guide them to where they need to be, et cetera. It's really hard.
Erica: And the tools change all the time. Oh, we were trying this new program, or we're doing this new program, and it's not like the old program or the system has a completely new interface. They update. We had an update, and here's the new update. And you don't do it this way anymore. You do it this way. So the bottom line is I have enormous compassion for students, for teachers and administrators, even though I get frustrated with the schools and frustrated with the teachers, I'm sure they're just as frustrated.
Darius: Yes.
Erica: Because they're just doing the best they can, trying to navigate this knot of, constantly changing tech tools that they have to accommodate, and they have to teach the kids. So they have to get their agenda done, which is to be teachers. But they have to do it with all of these tech tools that they're still not fully formed, and they're still not fully realized that they're constantly being changed and morphed and made better. But every time they're made better, it's a new learning curve and it gets in the way of learning academics.
Darius: So, Erica, thanks for bringing that up. That's a really interesting insight. Until next time.
Erica: Until next time. Sponsored by learningspecialistcourses.com Courses and resources that support educators and coaches.
Darius: Sponsored by ivvi.app. Imagine turning your meeting's audio into a live mind map instantly so you remember what matters. Well, try Ivy for free now at ah, ivvi.app. that's ivvi.app. Thank you for joining us at the Executive Function Brain Trainer Podcast.
Erica: Check out our show notes for links and resources and follow us on social media.
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