Erica: Welcome to the Executive Function Brain Trainer Podcast. I'm Dr. Erica Warren.

Darius: And I'm Darius Namdaran. And we're your Hosts.

Erica: Sponsored by GoodsensoryLearning.com. Engaging remedial materials that bring delight to learning.

Darius: Sponsored by Ivy. Imagine turning your meeting's audio into a live mind map instantly so you remember what matters. Well, try ivvi for free now at ivvi App. That's ivvi App.

Erica: Darius, it's so good to see you. I'm so happy to be with you and to be talking to you about this topic where we're really going to be looking at teachers as executive functioning champions. It's so easy for us to talk about these things and forget to give enough gratitude to all of those people in the trenches. Maybe I shouldn't even make it a negative metaphor like that. They're really angelic people that go into education, you know, and just wanting to make sure that we give a shout out to them with gratitude and also with life preservers and tools and tips and tricks so that their jobs can be easier and they can feel more supported.

Darius: Yeah, I used to be a teacher, primary school teacher. I got a law degree and at the end of my law degree I went to this employment fair where they kind of headhunt you and encourage you to come and join them and so on. There was this one little table, and it was this school from the Rudolf Steiner School. And I saw all this art on the table and workbooks and hand drawn and handwritten stuff and so on. It was incredible. And I said, I've never seen any work like this before. And she said, oh yeah, this is how we work at the Rudolph Steiner School. I said, what do you do? And she said, we teach children about life through their creativity. So if we do maths, we do it through art or music or rhythm or something like that or whatever. Anyway, long story short, I was just hooked. I went on teacher training for a couple of years, provisional teacher for a year and a half, Then I got my own class and in total, I was teaching primary school for about seven years, which was quite unusual as a guy to be a primary school teacher. I just love teaching children. It was fantastic. And I've been a teacher ever since, in one form or another. Even now I'm basically a teacher, but on the Internet, you know. What about you? What's your teaching background?

Erica: Well, it's funny that you ask that. So I guess after I got my undergraduate degree in fine arts, I got a job working for a school with kids with Learning disabilities. And it wasn't that great of a school, but it really showed me the need for, you know, kind of a new way of teaching. And this woman was definitely trying, and it definitely gave me the momentum to go back to get my master's degree. And that's when I got it in educational psychology.

Darius: And.

Erica: And since then I've taught college classes, and I've done tutoring, and I've done teacher training in schools. But yeah, so, you know, definitely I've taught pretty much all age groups. Not as many large classes and not for as long, but I have. I have taught large classes and pretty much all age groups. So like a year here or a year there.

Darius: But yeah, so this podcast topic came about because we got a comment from one of our listeners who responded to one of our podcasts and it was quite interesting. It wasn't a positive response; it was a negative response. And it got us to thinking, tell me more.

Erica: I wouldn't say it was negative.

Darius: All right, Okay.

Erica: I would say that it was.

Darius: What did she say?

Erica: I don't, I don't have it in front of me right now. But roughly, but roughly, you know, that we were talking about. I forget which episode it was. But she didn't feel supported. As a teacher, you know, I think that it is very easy for us to kind of come across as, well, teachers don't do this, and teachers don't do that. And it's easy to say that when in fact, so often it's the top-down politics and they're just doing the best they can.

Darius: Yes. Sometimes as a teacher, it could feel like you feel so many different shoulds and expectations. Oh, you should be doing this, you should be doing that. I know that as a teacher myself, you know, teacher, you can just see it in the way parents are speaking to you. Oh, you've not done the math like this, you should be doing like this. You've not done this like this; you should be doing that. Are they not going on more school trips? Are they not doing this more or my child has got this difficulty, you should be doing this, you should be doing that.

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Darius: And there are a lot of shoulds. And it's very, very hard for teachers to meet the expectations that are often very unrealistic upon them, you know, and they're conflicting shoulds.

Erica: You know, administration might be saying something very different than what the parents want. I can remember being at a university running a college program for students with learning disabilities, and I had the president of the school in one ear saying, oh, we're accepting a blind child, but no one is to offer reasonable accommodations until the parents threatened to sue. And then I had the parents saying our kids aren't getting what they need. And then being in that middle ground, I mean, I had to resign from that position because they put me in an impossible place. And unfortunately, that's what happens. Although a lot of schools and colleges will charge extra for these kind of LD programs. So, you know, they see that as a way of making money, but in fact, it's not legal to charge for reasonable accommodations, but they kind of try to wrangle it so that it is a moneymaker, when in fact it shouldn't be. And it creates all sorts of ethical dilemmas. And for anybody, you know, I can say in the United States, I work a lot with schools, and I can see that the turnover rate for people that have to manage all of the accommodations is really high because they're really stuck in the middle where the administration wants one thing. They don't want to use the general education fund for special education. They just don't want to, but they have to. And so they've got the school pressuring them in one way and parents pressuring them in another way. And the turnover rate is just insane.

Darius: Yes. And the turnover rate in teaching is high as well. I think it's seven years in the UK at the moment, at least.

Erica: I actually got some statistics that. Yeah, What I have here is that 8% of public-school teachers and 12% of private school teachers leave the profession each year.

Darius: Okay. So that is seven. One in seven years turnover. So, you know, 12%, 70. Yeah, it's around one in every seven years. It gets renewed on. On average.

Erica: Yeah, those are statistics by the national center of Education. So. And then they also had 52% of K through 12 teachers specifically report feeling burned out often or always. And that's a gallop from 2022.

Darius: How much percent did you say?

Erica: 52%.

Darius: Oh, my goodness. Feeling burnt out for half of all the teachers are feeling burnt out at any one time.

Erica: Is this a break your heart here? We've got 67% of educators consider burnout to be a very serious issue.

Darius: Yes. So what have we got to contribute to this conversation then? From the executive function perspective?

Erica: I think giving teachers the support and love that they deserve because we have to keep them. We've got to juice them up so that they can be the best that they can be, so that we can really help our kids and that they feel appreciated and also encouraging the parents out there understand that it's often the case that they're kind of in the middle.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: You know, it's a shame because I have to admit there are sometimes some teachers that don't do a good job.

Darius: Yeah.

Erica: They just don't do a good job. They might have tenure and they're just not into it anymore. Or it might be that it's the only job that they could get and their heart's not in it. And sometimes those teachers give other teachers a bad name. But there are so many extraordinary teachers.

Darius: And they are a minority in this thing. You can often paint the picture on everyone of that, but that's not the reality. I mean, the majority of teachers are hardworking, determined, trying to do their best in a hugely challenging environment. Because I think one of the biggest challenges as a teacher is it's kind of like you have to be good at everything, you know?

Erica: Yeah.

Darius: And it's like everyone's got their strengths. You know, one person might be very linear, well structured, methodical, follows the plan. But then you've got some kids in the class and we're not following the plan. Well, they need to be adaptable and adapt and change something on that. And so they're like, this is past my comfort zone. I don't know how to deal with this. But then there might be other. Other teachers who are really good and adaptable, improvise, adapt to circumstances. But they're really terrible at their administration, providing lesson plans, you know, fulfilling what their government approval in the UK would be, school

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Darius: inspectors want from the documentation and evidences of things and so on. So it's just incredible how much you have to do and actually how much you have to be good at.

Erica: Yeah. And in fact, what I feel is that what teachers have to be outstanding at is executive functioning skills.

Darius: Well, that's where we can really talk to this. And so one of the great things about executive functions and teaching is that it's actually a potential for a really big win, for a low effort, big win, you know, because often as a teacher, what you're looking for is, okay, that might be a really great strategy, but the effort to deploy it, the cost to deploy it, the cognitive load, etcetera, is just like, is it worth the effort to become really good at this versus the payoff? Because there's so many things you could be better at that often-what teachers are looking for is like a tool they can just deploy, and it's not something. There's a lot you have to scale up or learn about or train on et CETERA One of the great things about executive function is that it can really help you as an individual get quick wins, but it can also help the students get quick wins as well. And that's the great thing about executive function skills and tools and approaches. It's just that quick win.

Erica: Yeah. Well, I think, you know, most teachers go into teaching because they're pretty good at executive functioning, but I think there are times where some teachers forget that the Littles have a long way to develop to have good executive functioning skills. And I think sometimes we teach above their zone of proximal development, and we expect them to do some executive functioning skills that they're just not ready to do yet. You know, I'm really seeing that with technology. So this was an issue that came up last year with a couple of my students who were to school where all the teachers used different ways of communicating the assignments. And basically the kids were expected to manage all the different ways that the teachers wanted to share their homework. Some teachers were saying it in class, some teachers were saying it on canvas, some teachers were using other online places. And what I noticed is that whenever I met with them, all we were able to do for the whole hour when I was really supposed to helping them with their work and executive functioning skills, it took us the whole hour to figure out what their homework was. We had to go to so many different places. And when I confronted the school, the school said, well, we allow our teachers to. To share the homework however they choose. And I thought, wait a minute, that doesn't make any sense. Because these kids, and if they have executive functioning issues, get completely confused. Because even when they turn in the assignments, each one has a different way of doing it and they get completely confused and they get lost in all of it. Instead of it all being in one place, it's in this. In these variety of locations. And yeah, every. Every day it was an hour to figure out what their homework was. And by the time they were done figuring out what their homework was, they were so frustrated and spent, they didn't have any energy to do their homework. But that's. That's not necessarily a teacher issue. That's really a school issue. What we'd have to do is we have to have a single way that makes it simple for the kids to be able to get their work so they can get their work done. But we're constantly moving to new and better systems, and teachers are expected to kind of constantly learn a new system and new, here's another system, and here's another system. And here's another system and it gets overwhelming.

Darius: Well, yeah, I think this is a really interesting challenge that isn't just for young children at school, and it isn't just for teenagers in high school. I'm also seeing that with 40-year-olds at the workplace with dyslexia, for example, and adhd when I've been coaching them likewise, we can literally spend 40 minutes working out how to do one bit of software within their system before we actually get onto the executive function. Strategic coaching required. Workplace strategy coaching is what we call it here in the UK for dyslexia and adhd. You get a workplace strategy coach. They look at the system that you're using and they go, right, if you've got a problem with working memory because you're being asked to pull this information from this part of the

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Darius: system and then move it over to that part of the system, you don't realize that the cognitive load to do that jump is really easy for other people. But for you, you just drop that information, it becomes inconsistent and then everything downstream of that becomes a nightmare and you put it off because you unconsciously know you're messing it up. But when someone points out, they then go, oh gosh, yes, well, how do I solve that? And there is a technique and there often is a simple solution to do it. But the point here is, even if you solve it for that person, okay, they forget. So even if you solved it for that student for the first 45 minutes of that session, the coaching session, and you go back next week, it can be Groundhog Day again because they can't remember. And so what I've ended up having to do, and my big realization with this is, my goodness me, all this software and all these systems are going to continually change. Where is going to be my single source of truth? Yeah, and it ends up being Apple Notes or Google Keep or OneNote or a notebook or whatever it is, you need one single source of truth. And I've been experiencing this with my programmer at the moment, my programmer for Ivy, he has been setting me up with Ivy on my computer so that I can go in with some AI and ask it questions and interrogate the code base and have my ideas. And instead of telling him all my ideas, I can speak to the AI, all my ideas. But the thing is, he shows it to me, and I've forgotten what he says. And all he's typed in is like run space. I underscore such and such and then it works. But I forget, I forget what window it goes in. I Forget. And I have to call him back up. And I go, oh, I'm really sorry, I've forgotten. And so I have to do what I teach my clients to do, which is. Right. While you're telling me I'm just going to take a screenshot, I'm going to save it into my note with a quick little one liner. Do this next, Darius, I know it's obvious right now, but let's state the obvious. Do another screenshot. And I have to often say to Roman, look, can we just pause a moment? I'll take a screenshot. And he has to pause. Put it in. Oh, can you pause a moment? Take a screenshot. Now, how does this tie into our teacher thing in a way, bringing it back to the teachers, if we. And this is another should that we're putting on them. Okay, this could be felt as a should, but if somehow students could have a place like a notebook or a base or something that isn't part of the school system that they will change but is theirs that they can go back to. And it's in my notebook. They said this, I wrote this down, I took this photo, whatever that they can then if they've got five different systems for finding different homework, they've got all the instructions somewhere. They basically need a place for all the instructions.

Erica: You know what this points me to is something like Shovel. Now. Interesting. Shovel will if your Canva. If the teacher's Canva is updated, it updates it automatically on Shovel. Shovel. Now, the one thing I don't know is whether Shovel will work with more than one.

Darius: So first of all, which Canva? The canvas that we know, Canva.

Erica: Actually, I'm saying it wrong. It's Canvas. I think they use something called Canvas in the States. There's so many different programs out there. There's Blackboard, there's Canvas, there's Google Classroom, and then of course, there are those teachers that use a few of them.

Darius: Right, okay. And Shovel is that scheduling organization tool that you've mentioned before. Remind me of it.

Erica: Yeah. This is an outside app that you can purchase that works on your computer, but it can integrate with many of these interfaces so that it will update things automatically for you. And it's almost like the Apple Notes of homework, you know, because it allows you. You can just drag things into your column, into your calendar. You can drag an assignment; you can drag a class. It keeps track of the semester for you. It lets you know if you have enough time to complete all of your assignments. It.

Darius: Yeah, that's good. But the Thing is, as a teacher, we're kind of brainstorming here, Erica.

Erica: Yeah, we are.

Darius: Teacher. What is the simplest? I mean, pen and paper is really the simplest.

Erica: I agree with you. But guess what? That's not what this generation wants anymore.

Darius: And that's the problem. That's the simplest tool that is common in classrooms to help classrooms do

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Darius: really useful executive function stuff.

Erica: Well, that's the problem because I think that there isn't one. Kids aren't allowed to have their phones. They're not allowed to have their devices in the classroom because they often use it as a distraction. So the few students that have used it inappropriately have made it impossible to be able to carry around different devices if that is the best way for a particular student. So it's really tricky. I think basically we've fallen between the cracks where AI has created this whole new world for us. And we haven't quite figured out those crevices, what they are and how to navigate them. I think this is one of them.

Darius: So how do these students get their homework then? Does it get emailed to them?

Erica: It's different for every school. Some schools have one system. Those are the ones that I see are having the most successful. They use all teachers are required to do to put all of their homework onto Google Classroom and all in one place. But there are those schools that are kind of letting their teachers choose how they want to do it. Yeah, that's where it's kind of falling apart.

Darius: Okay, so that's the biggest executive function takeaway here, really. One system, this one system, isn't it? I suppose the biggest takeaway. Simplicity. You know, Elon Musk and all these other engineering geniuses around the world, they just say the best part is no part. And if you can delete it, delete it, you know, to simplify the whole process. And it's like, how do you simplify? And I found that with Apple Notes. It's not the perfect note taking app, but it's powerful, simple, very competent, does 95% of what I want it to do. And I don't need to mess around with notion. I don't need to mess around with some Google system or some other system or whatever. I just have one simple system and that's it. And the benefits outweigh the simplicity of it, the downsides of the simplicity, basically.

Erica: But then, you know, I hear myself, I hear you. We talk about being multisensory with students and allowing them to pick their different ways of processing. That's the hard part is like, how can you have a simple system where kids can pick their way of processing.

Darius: It's a great question, really.

Erica: Or can you have a system that honors multiple ways of processing? For example, the system is highly visual, and the system is very sequential, and the system also is very simultaneous. That's what I like about NoteBookLM, because it allows you to pick your way of processing. You can create a mind map; you can create a podcast. Podcast. They now allow you to create video. So they now have video overviews. They've reorganized their whole platform now so that over on the right, where you can do all these magical things to your content, they have nice, they now have three colorful boxes to pick from. You know, you can do video, you can do audio, and then you can do kind of all the study materials. And I forget what the last box is. And then also I discovered this today on NoteBookLM, that just blew my mind. Whereas when I went into. Because I was like, I want to do a video on the new features of NoteBookLM, and I was kind of exploring and I saw that when you go in to add new content now, they have a new word called discover. So when you hit discover, they say, what do you want to discover? And this particular notebook I had was on ancient Egypt. So I said, more resources on ancient Egypt.

Erica: There were 10 different, like Encyclopedia Britannica, I mean, really high-level options. And I could just check the boxes of the ones that I wanted to add to my library.

Darius: I see. So yeah. So it wasn't stuff that you already had on your base?

Erica: No, I, I, and I didn't have to search for it. It made some recommendations on what I might want. And then so you just check off the boxes of the ones want. Then it adds it. Now I might be like, well, but hold on, I want to check it out. Then you can click on the title, and it opens it, all the text written out and you can be like, oh, wow, this is great, I want to keep this. Then you can keep it. But if you look at it, you're like, oh, this isn't very good. You can just uncheck the box. And then it doesn't affect the overall scope of the notebook, but it just made finding materials much faster as well.

Darius: So teachers are in a really tough situation because they are this middle person between the system's expectations,

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Darius: The parents' expectations, and their own internal expectations of what they want to do as a teacher, why they are there as well.

Erica: I'm going to add another one. And they have to deal with the fact that they're trying to accommodate their own way of processing. And then a classroom with huge variety of kids. You're going to teach to the majority, but what about the minority? What about those kids? You're not reaching. You know, it's a lot to juggle.

Darius: Talking about teachers, I have to tell you a story that I came across the other day from my daughter, you know, 27-year-old daughter, she got this on Instagram. And so it's a story about a teacher teaching the kids to do an assignment. Okay? And what she had been observing is they'd been taking all of her assignments and putting them into ChatGPT and pasting the ChatGPT answer and giving it back to her. And she was dispirited by that. So she came up with an ingenious way of dealing with it. Now, there's other ways where people have put little secret phrases inside and it can prove that it's chat GBT because it's responded to a secret phase and all that. And she can just call them out and say, you've done it on chat. She didn't do any of that. What she did instead was absolute genius and real pedagogy. Okay? So what she said was, I'm going to give you this assignment and I would like you to put it into ChatGPT. I would like you to take the answer it gives, and I want you to go and research which statements it makes are true and which are false and come back and tell me what it got right and what it got wrong. So they did one of their usual assignments, put it into ChatGPT, got the answer, instead of giving it to her, they went and basically marked the ChatGPT's homework for them. And when they came back, they were shocked at how many of the statements it made was wrong. Okay? And they got really upset with the teacher because they thought that the teacher had tricked them into making ChatGPT say wrong stuff because they had presumed that ChatGPT was right. Just like we go onto the Internet, gives us an answer in an authoritative teacher-like voice. So we believe it, okay? These young people are believing it. So she said, no, I didn't. There's nothing clever in the assignment. I didn't put anything in it or anything like that. So to prove it, what I'm going to do is I'm going to ask you to ask the AI to write a report on any topic that you like. Football, hockey, you know, computer game, whatever it is, it writes the report. And again, their job was to go through each sentence and Check whether it was accurate or not. And again, there were the inaccuracies, and they were really shocked. And what the teacher just taught them was critical thinking.

Erica: Yeah.

Darius: And my daughter said it like this. That teacher switched on their critical thinking because they had switched off their critical thinking by just accepting what had come through ChatGPT. And that exercise switched on their critical thinking. And the way they started to use CHAT GPT became different. And as you and I both know, the way we use ChatGPT is very different than a beginner uses it because we don't get ChatGPT to do stuff for us. We use AI to do stuff with us, to provoke different ways of thinking to reflect on what we've created. What does it think about it? What's its impressions? If it was a client or a user or whatever. And then you, we respond back and it's this to, you know, and you.

Erica: Realize, constantly more useful. Yeah, I'm constantly correcting AI and having a discussion with it. And the beautiful thing is it's so polite. You can be like, oh, that's terrible, I don't like that. You know, I want more of this and more of this. Although it's funny, I do try to be quite polite with it because I think it's, I think it's important to be polite with anything and I think it's only going to be a reflection of us eventually. So if we're not nice to AI, it won't be nice to us.

Darius: Sam Altman from OpenAI, the CEO of OpenAI, he mentioned how much the politeness is costing them in tokens. He's like, people being polite to the AI is actually very expensive for us.

Erica: That's very funny.

Darius: Every time you say, oh, could you please do this or could you please do

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Darius: that? That's an extra word. And that costs them money. Every letter costs them money to process. And the AI is processing that. Please and thank you and could you and so on. So it across a billion users or however many half a million, half a billion users they've got, whatever. Now that's a lot of cost for them.

Erica: That's very funny. But it's a very important cost because we, we want to teach politeness. You know, the other thing is I was watching a YouTube video of a couple of high-end people arguing about whether AI was helping the brain or hurting the brain. And Daniel, amen, who's a brain MD. It was a very interesting podcast because Daniel, he was suggesting that it was really getting in the way of critical thinking, that too many Individuals are using it to do the work for them and really remarked on a study, a study where they let people used AI to do the work for them and then others did it themselves and they wanted to look at the brain activity and they discovered that, yeah, that ChatGPT was really hurting the brains of people that were using it to think that their brain activity had gone down significantly because they're not really thinking through anything, they're just having things done for them.

Darius: Yeah, I, I mean you can make up all sorts of different tests and so on that I have. I'm very skeptical about that kind of research and so on because you can set up research, you're setting someone up for a fall in many ways in that sort of scenario. I think the end result is we know that there are some people who will be lazy and use the laziest way, and it's always been like that. And their brains will stay switched; their critical thinking will stay switched off and then others who do keep their critical thinking switched on and AI will amplify both. It's an amplification tool and yeah, so I don't buy that kind of stuff.

Erica: But what you're talking about is passive versus active learners and absolutely a lot about that. If you're learner, then you're not going to have as much brain growth as active learners. Yes, but it was interesting to listen to their argument and, and what it really boiled down to is, you know, you have to really be a conductor.

Darius: Yes. And you need to be executive functioning.

Erica: On a higher executive functioning and, and reasoning, critical reasoning, like the analytical thinking.

Darius: Well, executive function. Okay. Used to be the realm of executives.

Erica: A functioning executive. It's a good definition.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: Executive functioning. If you're good at it, you'd be a good functioning executive.

Darius: Yeah. Now in the past, you know, there would just be one or two executives, a bunch of a few executives and then a whole organization. There were either managers or technicians that did what you said. The managers would do what the executives had said, manage it. They would create processes. The people would follow the processes; they would follow the plan. They would be very much passive in that they would be cogs in a machine like a factory, in the Ford factory or whatever. And the world has changed every decade thereafter until actually more and more people are having to be the executives of their lives. They're no longer an employee example, they're self-employed. So they have to have much more executive function skills and so on and so forth. And ironically, as technology does stuff for us and as AI does stuff for us. It actually pushes us and requires us to be more of an executive.

Erica: It can, and it can also not do that. It all depends on whether you're a passive or active learner.

Darius: Yes. And if you don't do that, you lose your job.

Erica: You'll probably lose your job. You probably will lose your cognition to some point.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: You're not going to be strengthening it. You're not going to be establishing new neural pathways. And we all know that when things lay dormant, they die.

Darius: If you don't use it, you lose it. And. And that's it. And. And that's exactly what he's talking about in this research. But I think going back to the school classroom, executive function is both something that really helps the teacher themselves. As a teacher, if the children learn very basic executive function approaches like, let me take a note of that process and put it into one laminated A4 sheet that goes into my bag, or let me have a printout of my schedule, or write out my schedule and

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Darius: put it in my bag so I can look at it. And very simple executive function things, but tools that are in their bag that they can refer to critical things, that's all executive function. And then if they start learning those skills of switching on the executive function tools of critical thinking and so on, it equips them for the future in terms of the tools, they're going to have to be the executives of their lives. Because once you start dealing with AI, you have to be very clear what you want. And sort of like an executive saying, this is what I want. This is the goal; this is the process I want you to follow. I'll judge whether you've done it right or wrong and all of these kind of things, like you would if you were the manager of a person or of a contractor. You know, it's like, contractor comes in the house, I want you to fix my house. And you're like, well, you don't just say that to contractor. You say, I want you to replace this toilet, and it's got to look like this. And I want you to make sure that the tiles are replaced and that this floor is done and etc. You got to be explicit. And you basically got to be the executive of that scenario.

Erica: You know what you have to be. You have to be present. The people that are not using these things are not really present. They're onto the next thing already. They're just trying to get something done. I think a lot of people, and I'm going to admit this, and I don't want to do this ever again, which is there have been times where I've been in a rush where I've let ChatGPT do things and I haven't read it over carefully enough.

Darius: Ah, right.

Erica: But I think you know that particularly if it's something very simple, like responding to an unimportant email, we have to be really, really careful that we stay in that conductor seat.

Darius: Yes.

Erica: But I think I would love to just make sure during this time together that we do offer some easy ways to integrate executive functions into a busy class.

Darius: Do it.

Erica: I know you and I have some great ideas that could really help teachers. So one thing I was thinking about was metacognition. So a lot of kids don't understand what metacognition is, which is thinking about your own thinking. And one way to teach that to students where it doesn't take any extra effort is to think out loud. When you're thinking out loud, you're teaching kids how to think. And you can say to kids, all right, you guys, this is what I want you to do. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to do the activity first and I'm going to think out loud, and I'm going to show you how I would think through it. And I think being able to do something like that, where you have to teach it to them anyway, you're not really adding anything extra. What you're doing is you're just uncovering your thinking process. And you might even uncover some blips that they might have in their thinking process. Like, okay, so the first thing I'm going to do is read the directions. You see, most teachers would read the directions, but if they actually start to integrate metacognitive skills and say, okay, I know that I always have to read the directions because sometimes I can make a mistake, and I may not do the problem correctly. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to read the directions, say, it's a math class. And then I might say, well, you know, what I'm going to do is I can see in the directions that there's more than one thing that I need to do. So I'm going to draw a little box against. Up against the words. Every time I see a new thing that I have to do, I'm going to draw a little box, because those are going to be little reminders to me that I not only had the directions not only asked me to do one thing, but they asked me to do more than One thing, and I don't want to forget, but if I draw those boxes, that's going to help me to remember to do each one of those things, because I can check them off. But you could see teachers don't often do that. Some teachers might, but if you do, you are teaching them executive functioning skills by just thinking out loud.

Darius: That's fantastic, Erica. That's a great tip. Fantastic. I know we've talked about it before and every time we bring this up, I just realize how valuable that is. I was out on the golf course this morning before I started work. I do early morning walk around the golf course and play some golf now. I just taken up golf three months ago and it's a fascinating exercise in executive function golf. And it's also fascinating exercise in how you talk to yourself and.

Erica: Yes. Which is working memory.

Darius: Yeah. And also what I find is I end up talking to myself on the golf course out loud. I go, oh, you hit that shot. It went a bit short, but you did well. You chose the number eight. You were going to choose a nine. And that would have left you short, even shorter if you chose the nine. But the eight gave you that extra distance because

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Darius: you knew if you fluffed up the eight, it would still be halfway there. And if you did it really well, it would just go a bit past it. But so you managed it. And I talked myself through it like this, you know, know. And again, it's this another aspect. Instead of modeling your thinking, once you start doing it for yourself, there's this other aspect of executive function where this inner critic of how do you deal with the inner critic inside of you that is criticizing you all the time. How do you deal with that? And in golf or in anything you're learning, you're dealing with this inner critic all the time. I read this fascinating book called the Inner Game of Golf where he talked about the two selves that appear when you start playing golf or when you start playing tennis or whatever. There's two selves. One is the inner critic, and one is the actual one who plays. And so the inner critic can feel like a bit of a domineering coach. And then the player is the player who tries to do what. What they're expected of it and sometimes fluffs up because they're trying to impress the coach or other people round about them. And it's a whole dynamic that goes on in any sport, especially golf, where you've got this inner dialogue going on and how important that is.

Erica: Yeah, yeah, well. And of course, I mean, I know, you've mentioned quite a few times that you feel that you have a small working memory. And what you're doing by thinking out loud is you're using one of the tools of your working memory to hold the information and to analyze the information. You're using your inner voice, but you're supporting it with your outer voice. But it's all coming from your inner voice, which is working memory. In that, by using your outer voice, then you hear it as well, and that helps you to hold that much more information, which I think is fascinating.

Darius: Now, it also helps you process it. There's a lot of processing going on involved in that, you know.

Erica: Yep.

Darius: Anyway, what's your next tip?

Erica: Well, it's one that you mentioned a little bit earlier, which was teaching explicitly. Let's use an example. Say you want your kids to be more cognitively flexible. Then call it out. Teach it explicitly. You might say to a student, I can see that you're struggling moving from one task to another. That's called cognitive flexibility. And let me teach you a little bit about that and let me explain why it's so hard for you to change from one task to another. I see that. I recognize it and I feel you. Right. But perhaps I can teach you some strategies to make it easier. But you see, so that's just making something very explicit. Call it out. If somebody doesn't have good listening skills, say, wow, I really see that it's hard for you to listen. Teach it explicitly. What's it like for you asking them questions to find out how they process? I mean, there's so many ways that you can teach explicitly. What are your thoughts on that?

Darius: Yeah. Yeah. I've been thinking about this a lot with Ivy, the app that I built. If anyone doesn't know, I'm building this mind mapping app where you it mind maps what you say. It's an instant, intelligent voice to visual interface. And what I've noticed is that often explicitly teaching someone, you can think that you're explicitly teaching someone because you're saying it with your voice, but sometimes you need to write it explicitly down as a visual step. And to see those steps, that's another form of explicitly.

Erica: Right.

Darius: So in a way, when you say you're explicitly teaching something, try and explicitly teach it in their language.

Erica: I love that. Right. If you're a sequential learner, then you'll break it into steps. If you're a simultaneous learner, you'll break it into a mind map. If you're a verbal learner, you'll allow Them to speak it back to make sure that they have the right understanding.

Darius: Or ideally, you do it all at once. So, for example, you know, if you're doing that exercise of. Let's go back to the image original exercise of going through the checklist of the mathematical process. Okay, you could just do that verbally like you just did there. Okay. But ideally you would have some visual aid, so you would be reading out from the instructions. Okay. But you've got a choice. They could be so small, like a piece of paper that you can read and you're modeling you're reading it from it, or you can make it big enough that they could read it at the same time. And so if you did that and you've got that in your mind, that they need to engage with this on multi levels so that visual thinker can see five steps. All right; I'm seeing five steps that sequential learners seeing

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Darius: the sequence, that simultaneous learners seeing the big picture. Oh, there's only five steps or two main steps with three steps on one and four, five on the other. And you know, the other one who's very spatial, can remember, oh, I remember the teacher was standing there and it was in front of the classroom and there was this big thing, and they lock it in. There's just so much going on without you realizing it. The moment you start using explicit visual aids, you unintentionally start engaging so many of these other things because you start pointing to it, you start looking at it, you start looking at the students, you start doing all sorts of different things rather than staying in that verbal zone.

Erica: So, yeah, it's thinking, are you breaking things into steps? Are you color coding? That's a language that a lot of kids love. A lot of kids love. Maybe you're a math teacher and you always use. You have a blackboard, and you use white, and you never use color. Try bringing color into it and see what happens.

Darius: Well, let's add one little step to this. So let's say, okay, you're a teacher who wanted to teach them this maths sequence, okay. And you've decided, right, I'm going to blow this up. It's going to be big on the whiteboard or whatever, and I'm going to talk you through the things that I would think through while I was doing it and so on. So you've modeled it. And then while you've modeled it, you've been quite explicit because you can see the exact steps and so on. So again, it's quite explicit. Maybe you could then ask the students.

Erica: Yeah.

Darius: What would you be thinking or saying to yourself if you were doing this instead of me? And one of the students might go up, go, oh, I'd be thinking, what color would I make that task? And what color would I make this task? And the teacher would go, oh, that's interesting. Right. And you go, well, what colors would you do? These ones. I don't normally do the colors. I just do the checkboxes. And they might say, oh, all the easy ones I'd make green. And all the hard ones I'd make orange. And I would maybe that make me feel better because there's more green than orange. And I can manage it. I don't know. I'm just making this up myself.

Erica: Right, right, right.

Darius: But you never know what's going to come out.

Erica: You never know what's going to come out. And what you did do is you just brought in another way of processing, which is analytical, analytical, interactive, and verbal.

Darius: So then what happens is, once you externalize and express what's going on in your mind, you know, another child might be saying, oh, yeah, Miss, when I'm talking about this, I'm just. I just think, oh, this is not going to work. I'm really bad at maths. That's all I'm thinking about. And then you'd have that conversation about the teacher. Do you know what? I didn't mention it myself, but I sometimes think like that, too. And that's one of the reasons why I think, oh, I don't want to be embarrassed in front of my students. I don't want to miss a step. And so that's why I bring out the process, to make sure I follow the step. And so that's the beauty of real teaching, is having that interaction. Yeah.

Erica: Another student might say, well, you know, there are five steps. And I might have trouble remembering all five steps and remembering the right sequence. So I'd probably come up with a memory strategy. So I'd take the first letter of the most important word, and I'd either write out a new word or I'd write out an acronym or something like that. And that would help me to remember the steps. But then the kids are learning from each other, and then all of a sudden, you're facilitating learning. And when you, as a teacher, act as a facilitator, a lot more kids get engaged.

Darius: Yes. And it's incredibly efficient. It seems like you're taking an extra, you know, five minutes to do this. And minutes count in a lesson. I mean, it's incredible how much of A lesson is boiled down to minutes. Like you calculate, I have to do this many minutes of this, I have to do this many of the minutes. My lesson plan says I'm going to spend three minutes doing this, then I'm going to say six minutes doing that. But Bobby had a bit of a blow up at the beginning of a class and that cost me eight minutes. And then they were late from the previous class. That cost me three minutes. We're now into a 50-minute lesson and I'm 15 minutes behind and I've got a 50-minute lesson and that's only 35 minutes left, you know, 45 minutes left or no, 35 minutes left, and all this math is going on inside your head. You're like, I've got this stuff to do. And the thing is, in a whole year you can think, oh, you've got a whole year to teach them. But you boil it down, you've got so many lessons in the week, four lessons on this kind of maths in the week, or let's say six lessons in this math. You've actually only after all the holidays are taking off, you've got 40 hours, 40 weeks of teaching. But they don't get

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Darius: get this Monday and that Monday and so on and ends up become 35. You add those 35 times four you've got, and then you multiply that by minutes. You've only got so many minutes. It's literally like that. And then they've got an assembly on a certain day that's taken away a whole lesson on that and you're like, oh my goodness, I've got this curriculum to get through. If I don't get through it, I'll be regarded as a bad teacher because I've not taught them everything. You know, all of this is going on literally inside of a teacher's head and when we say to them, just spend five, two, three minutes talking out your thoughts on something they might be saying to them, oh, that's two minutes I don't really have. Do you know what I mean? But the point I'm trying to make here actually is that those, that kind of interaction saves so much time and makes learning so much smoother.

Erica: Yeah, you don't have to teach it over and over again.

Darius: That's right. The children aren't coming back to you asking you again. You know, it's just so effective at getting that kind of feedback from the teacher.

Erica: And I'm glad that you said this and a lot of teachers will be uncomfortable with this, but I'm Going to say slow down and give brain breaks. Because, you know, if you can see your class, they're all zoning out. They're not learning anyway. They're going to miss everything that you're talking about. And giving them a 12-minute brain break could bring them back online.

Darius: Yeah. I mean, how many times? And this is a working memory issue. Okay. Talking about working memory, inhibitory control, and cognitive flexibility, three aspects of executive function, which is basically capture information, focus and adapt. Capture, focus and adapt. Those are the three main elements of executive function. This capture mode of students. A person can be nodding their head, listening to you, understanding everything that you're saying, but not remembering a word of it.

Erica: Oh, yeah.

Darius: And that happens because their working memory.

Erica: Is overloaded or they have attention deficit disorder.

Darius: No, they might. They might. It can be. And you can often think it's the attention issue, but it's not. A lot of the time. A lot of the time it's not an attention issue.

Erica: Overload.

Darius: A lot of the time it's working memory overload. And if you diagnose the problem incorrectly and think it's an attention issue, you treat it as an attention issue. Darius, pay attention to me. Pay attention to me. Neil, I am paying attention to you, but it's not sticking. I don't know why. I know why. It's because their working memory is overloaded. If they had a time to dump their working memory, write a note down, draw a picture, turn it into some sort of activity, sort of anchor it into their memory, then they can take on the next thing.

Erica: Yeah, yeah.

Darius: And brain breaks do that as well.

Erica: Brain breaks. Brain breaks are magical. I've had some kids where if I just didn't give them the brain break, they would have just shut down for the rest of class. Whereas just that one or two minutes brings them back online. And I'm going to explicitly, because we've implied the 12 ways of processing. You know, understanding what the 12 ways of processing are a great thing, and we've had plenty of podcasts on that. Having a deep understanding of what that is. Because there might be some ways of processing that are not your ways of processing and just understanding that they can be somebody else's is really important. So making sure that you are aware of all the different ways of processing so that you can accommodate them. And of course, the final one I had, which we wove in, which was facilitate, not only facilitate, but give students choices. So if you want to see if they have mastered the content, give them different ways of showing their mastery give them choices. You can do a video, you can write a paper, you can do a drawing, you can do, you know, whatever. Just allowing them to show their knowledge in a way that's fun for them so that the assignment doesn't feel too much of a chore, because that's what ignites joy for learning and love for learning.

Darius: Well, Erica, it's been good having chatted about this and we, we love teachers. We know what they go through and what a challenge it is. We really appreciate teachers. And it's a massive executive functioning exercise being a teacher, you know.

Erica: Well, you know, I don't want to do it. I'll be honest. It's a really, really hard job that's very unappreciated. So I am just so grateful for everybody that is out there that tries year after year after year and makes a huge difference in the lives of so many children. So I take my hat off to all of you teachers and hope that you can find some nuggets of information and

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Erica: things that can support you in the classroom.

Darius: Hear, hear. Until next time.

Erica: Until next time. Bye Bye.

Darius: Sponsored by Ivy. Imagine turning your meeting's audio into a live mind map instantly so you remember what matters. It's ideal for students and managers with dyslexia or ADHD. Try ivvi for free now at ivvi.App. That's ivvi.

Erica: Sponsored by the Executive Functioning Remedial Assessment, an online tool that quickly identifies challenges and delivers targeted strategies for success.

Darius: 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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