Particularly in this day and age, the sorts of goals that we have for kids are so complex and as important as they are for pushing thinking rather than rote learning. If you take a look for instance at the common core curriculum it is so loaded with executive skills that there are kids who can’t meet those goals not because they can’t understand the text and not because they don’t want to do well, but because they can’t meet the executive demands of the tasks.
I was looking at goals for a kid the other day and I’m going to get the wording, the exact wording wrong, but it was something like students will prepare a persuasive essay using at least three sources, documenting the facts associated with their opinion and organizing the essay into a cohesive whole.
And I thought, wow, that’s writing. That’s also executive functioning, right? And so some of the kids if they had a template they could actually do that, but if you leave them independently to do that or they’ve only done it once and they didn’t save the template or it’s crumpled up at the bottom of their backpack somewhere, they’re not going to be able to do it.
So a lot of the kids that we see are faltering because they can’t meet the executive demands of their environment and yet they are feeling that their intellect and their reasoning ability is unappreciated.
