Building Executive Function Skills into Literacy Sessions - Beth Coppoc Gunshor

Welcome to For the Love of Literacy. I'm Bruce Hallett and today I'm talking with Beth Copic Gunshore about executive functioning and how it influences language, literacy and learning. Executive functioning is an umbrella term for a set of cognitive skills and mental processes that we will discuss today. While executive functioning is often seen as this abstract concept, it influences our student's ability to pay attention, remember and recall information, plan assignments, regulate the behavior and simply to think and learn. It is sometimes referred to as the brain's air traffic control system because it manages a lot of different functions, working memory, flexible thinking and self-control. In education, EF, executive functioning, predicts academic and behavioral success more accurately than measures of intelligence. Week EF is directly linked to difficulties with reading comprehension, math problem solving and emotional regulation. So it's a very real thing that teachers encounter all day long. When I begin working with a new special education student, I'm most interested in their language abilities, emotional struggles and executive functioning challenges. Yes, I like to know if a student is dyslexic, but attention working memory, processing speed and self-regulation abilities tell me more about how I can best interact with my students. Welcome Beth and just let people know that you are speech and language pathologist from Madison, Wisconsin, that you have practiced for over 25 years and have a fascination with words which I can attest to. We're both word and er, it's just beyond us about it. And how we learn them, I think that's the most important thing is how do we learn language and literacy and you love exploring words using structured word inquiry. Your interest in executive function started when you took a continuing education course on the topic over a decade ago. Beth joined her colleague Kathleen Love on an earlier for the level literacy podcast discussing developmental language disorders. That episode is one of our most popular and informative episodes and I'm going to put pressure on Beth and say that I'm sure today's discussion will be equally as enlightening. Beth, would you like to tell us a little more about yourself? Oh yeah, sure. As you said, I am a speech language pathologist and I actually have two jobs here in Madison, Wisconsin. I did mention them on that last podcast but I'll give them a brief mention again here. I work part time for our local school district where I'm mostly based in a classroom setting which is kind of unusual for a speech language pathologist. And along with my incredible SLP colleague Jen, we work with three to five year old children who have severe speech sound disorders. Our classroom is actually called the phonology classroom. I also own a private practice where I specialize in literacy and executive function as you said. I started using structured word inquiry as a base for my literacy work over 10 years ago and around that same time I also started building an executive function continuing ed for myself and working on it with my clients. A few of my clients come to me specifically to work on building their executive function skills but even if they don't even if they're coming to me for language or speech or mostly those literacy disorders, I am keeping executive function skills front and center for all those reasons that you mentioned earlier Bruce. A lot of my clients have developmental language disorder dyslexia, ADHD, they're on the autism spectrum or they're just delayed or have a disability and executive function skills and it's impacting their learning and progress. And if I can Bruce, I'd like to share from the outset that most of my learning and understanding about executive functions and the tools that I use to develop those skills come from a few primary sources. Sarah Ward and Kristen Jacobson of cognitive connections. Amazing. Tara Sumpter of seeds of learning and grouch and Wagner of the anti-boring learning lab have been guiding lights for me. I've also picked up ideas from Michael McLeod of GrowNow ADHD and by the way Sarah, Kristen, Tara and Michael, four of the five names I just mentioned are SLPs. Those professional site Russell Barkley as well as many others as inspiring their work. But I do want to say that any misunderstandings or mistakes that I may say today, those are mine, although I hope there aren't any. I will share a list of those names and some other resources that I mentioned with you to put in show notes. We're also starting a separate page called language hyphen ludicie.org. You can always go back and find information about our former guests. Their products, their offerings as well. Okay, Beth, let's define executive functioning. Isn't it more than the list of abilities that I mentioned in the introduction? There are so many different definitions out there that include so many different skills. I think you're right. And people might use different terms for some of those skills. All of them tend to grow out of the same three basic core skills. And I'll get to those in a minute. But usually the way that I like to describe executive function is by saying it's the thing in our brain that allows us to use our memories of the past and our ability to see and feel the future in order to help us decide what to do right now. So again, our memories of the past, our ability to see and feel the future to decide what to do right now in this moment. So I have this story that I love to tell to describe this. But first I have to set the stage for you. It's late March in Madison, Wisconsin. And there's old crusty snow on the terrace. The terrace is that section between the street and the sidewalk, right? And if you step on that crust, your foot goes straight through about six inches of wet slushy yuckiness. And not only does your shoe get wet, but your pant leg does too. It is very unpleasant. Just a few weeks earlier than this, you could have probably hopped across that solid snowpack and gone over to the sidewalk. But at this point in March, you avoid that snow because you'll just break right through the snow and get wet. Okay, so you got this image in your head. So I'm driving home from work in my Prius. And that's a pretty quiet car. It sneaks up on people sometimes. And I'm getting close to another school just as they are getting ready to dismiss for the day. There's a father crossing the street in front of me. And he is going at an angle from his car to a driveway that's going to let him access the sidewalk. But as he's crossing, he glances up and he sees me and he realizes he needs to get out of the street because he can't trust that I see him. So he immediately switches that diagonal course to the driveway and starts to go straight towards the terrace. But as he's about to step onto that crusty snow, he suddenly pauses and readjusts his path so that he is going up to the driveway. So what just happened in that moment, his executive function skills kicked in. He knew he had moved past that imminent threat of my car. And he was now focused on that crusty snow that he was about to step in. He pulled up his memory of stepping in previous snow like this, remembered what had happened. It was oh cold wet snow and pants. And then he pictured his future of walking around with a wet shoe and a wet pant leg having to go pick up his child, having to walk them back in this miserable condition. And he changed his plan right in that moment so that he was accessing the driveway. An important part of this is that he was probably feeling the cold that wetness of the prior experience, right? It wasn't just this cognitive statement of oh my shoe will get wet because that kind of thought is too abstract to prompt change. I'm guessing it was the memory of what it felt like when it happened the last time that helped him know he didn't want to feel it again. And that is executive function. He took in the situation, remembered the path, predicted a mental movie of the future, adjusted his plan to avoid what he saw and felt would happen. So when people we know and love keep doing the same problematic thing over and over again and we wonder why do they keep doing that? They know what's going to happen. It's because they have a glitch in that feedback system somewhere. Maybe they aren't able to store memories in an accessible way. Maybe they can't pull it up fast enough. Maybe they aren't abstracting from one experience to the next. Maybe they don't have the language to talk themselves through possibilities. Maybe they don't feel that urgency until it's too late. It can be any of those things that are impacting our executive function skills. So Beth, you mentioned that there are three core skills that involve working memory, inhibition, and cognitive flexibility. Could you go into each of those or define them a little more into a little more depth? Yeah, sure. Let me talk about nonverbal working memory and verbal working memory first. So working memory refers to our ability to hold and manipulate a limited amount of information for a limited period of time. So verbal working memory is our brain's ability to hold phonological information and nonverbal working memory is our brain's ability to generate and hold visual spatial information. So inhibition that second core developmental executive function skill is our ability to stop or repress an action. You can kind of think of it as a go, no go kind of situation. And most of the time things are in go and we actually have to stop them from happening. So that is the act of inhibition. And the last core skill flexibility is our ability to shift between actions, between what we're thinking about to shift between various possibilities. So flexibility is really kind of equal to shifting. So Beth, I'd like to ask you how do students develop executive functioning skills? And do schools require a higher level of executive functioning skills than say watching television at home? I'm a feeling we all know the answer to that question, but I think it's worth exploring, right? The first thing about how do they develop? There is a great working paper from the center on the developing child that is based out of Harvard. And I will share that link with you Bruce. And they go into all sorts of the elements that feed and develop executive function skills. But the thing that I really want people to know is that executive function skills don't just develop automatically. They don't just run on their own and develop. So adverse events can have a negative effect on their development. We need things like positive relationships, nurturing and predictable living conditions and more. So be sure to check out that paper. But for our purposes here, I want to emphasize that executive functions develop through experiences. We do a thing. We remember what happened when we did that thing. We anticipate it will happen again the next time we do that thing. And it's not just having one experience over and over. It's important that we have varied experiences so that we can compare those experiences to each other. We can make predictions about how they're the same and different. And then we can learn from those predictions, which in turn helps us make better predictions with each new experience. It's a giant feedback loop. And so to make that feedback loop effective, we need real life tangible experiences, not experiences on a screen, just a little aside free there. So for some folks that feedback loop develops pretty easily while others benefit from or even need coaching, but everyone needs opportunities to build these. And if kids are coming into school without those executive function skills as developed as they could be, that is going to make school even harder than it needs to be, right? Because there needs to be sort of a basic level of inhibition to function in a group of 25 kids. Also teachers are giving directions that students are having to process and understand themselves moving through space, doing those directions without a lot of support. So the more bodies that are in a classroom, the more teachers are going to need those executive function skills to be in place. So yes, schools need students to have a lot more executive function skills than a student needs to have when they're sitting at home on a screen, which I think you said, right Bruce? Obviously screen use is a huge issue in school schools are fighting over it. I think we're putting too much blame on our cell phones because a lot of things go into the child's ability to focus the child's ability to learn language, right? But all these environmental factors can come to a head when a child walks into a classroom and the learning environment is very different from the home or the community environment. I sometimes feel that by pushing reading instruction down into kindergarten, we are taking away some of that time that we used to have to develop those executive function skills in a big classroom setting. I personally would like to see more focus on developing executive function skills through those varied experiences through developing language as opposed to really diving head first into reading instruction. It can be part of the picture, but I feel like it's often the primary picture in a lot of schools these days. I live three miles from Cornell University and my children and where I first taught elementary school is in a school that's about five miles further out and I live in a very small community. The school had a wonderful mixture of kids and some of them came from wonderful working class farm backgrounds, but there was a population that the research is about with Cornell University and I think a college had studied the effects of multi-generational poverty on students. We had some students coming into kindergarten already telling us literally when I work on my PhD, this is what I'm going to focus on and then other kids would come in with only three or four hundred word vocabularies and had never really sat in a chair or held a pen. So all these factors come together when they came into school and you get a tremendous variability and that does not mean that someone who comes from a two-professor household necessarily added advantage to parents are working all the time. I don't want to insinuate that at all and we had many rural families that were very solid upbringing, very strong up rings. At that school there was a big push to teach kids in kindergarten, phonemic awareness, phonics and some of these children it was like why are we doing this to them? They were not ready at all. And I will talk about what might be happening for some of the students developmentally about some of those reading skills and the flexibility that we expect and how they're prepared for it yet. And then they pick up some of that emotional baggage that you've talked about, right? They start to think, well, I'm not a reader. Yes. I don't know how to read. Yes. I'm never going to learn how to read. We can add trauma to trauma by putting a child where they're going immediately like I experienced some many other people experience, you begin to doubt yourself. And you're seeing people that are not having any problem learning. And I'm laughing because I know a lot of my guests have not had problems learning. Then other people that it's everything has been effortful learning how to read, spelling, writing to do it. But that's what this podcast is really all about. My interests obviously focus on the connections between language and literacy. And so my attention has been in working memory but very much on the verbal side. I hope that you can teach me a little about the nonverbal aspects of working memory because for many teachers that's even more obscure. Nonverbal working memory is I would say it's kind of the the part that happens first, right? You make an image of something that you want to communicate. And then you start to layer the language on top of it. If there's a deficit in nonverbal working memory that can affect the other part of working memory, the verbal working memory. So there are approaches or programs out there that work on developing that nonverbal working memory. So when you hear someone's language, that is the image you are making in your head. Also nonverbal working memory can impact reading comprehension. So if you read the word cat, you will likely generate some representation of a cat in your nonverbal working memory. And as the text adds additional information over the course of a paragraph or maybe even the whole text, you are updating that image of the cat. What does it look like? Where is it? What is it doing? You're constantly revising that nonverbal working memory image, right? But if you have weak, nonverbal working memory, then updating that image is going to be difficult because it's fallen out of your head. So that makes comprehending spoken language or written text an extra challenge. And then you can imagine how that impact ripples across other forms of literacy, including and writing activities. But I also do tend to concentrate on those verbal working memory pieces because I'm a speech language pathologist and like you, I am interested in the language. So it's always good to go back to that nonverbal working memory and try to understand what's happening there. I'm working with linguists and other people who are helping me prove my own writing abilities, but also obviously work with neurodivergent kids. And almost always where they start is they pull up a picture. And they ask the child just to describe it. It's a picture of a cat. And then we're going to, where's the cat? What color is the cat? What what feelings is the cat to try to enrich that child's ability to connect the visual with the the language piece? And I think that's very helpful. I've seen this work with Adelis as well. And what you're doing with that picture of the cat is providing a scaffold to the student or the learner who has weak nonverbal working memory. So they have it's externalized, right? It's an external tool for them to use to boost that weak working memory. And then the more you can start to back away from that picture so that it's an internal picture, the more you're building that nonverbal working memory skill. There are folks who think that you can't really grow working memory, but there are tools, strategies, approaches that you could use to boost that area and help students be more successful. So then to talk just a little bit about verbal working memory, let's go back to that father in my earlier story who was using his working memory to compare different outcomes of that car driving toward him, right? The stepping in the snow, whether there was time and space to move to the driveway, he was probably using some nonverbal working memory to picture the outcomes, but he was maybe also using his verbal working memory to talk himself through different options. Different brains are going to operate in different ways. All brains use a combination of those two forms of working memory to hold and manipulate information. In that previous podcast that we recorded with Kathleen Love, we talked about using a sentence repetition task as a sort of screening tool for developmental language disorder. And the part we're tapping into there is verbal working memory. Can you hold onto a sentence and repeat it back to me? What happens is I increase the complexity of the syntax, or if I add in words you're not familiar with. Verbal working memory is going to struggle as those demands increase. And if it's difficult to hold onto something in your working memory, either one of them transferring it to your long-term memory is going to be affected as well, because that's the path we're using to get information to our long-term memory. So let's say I'm teaching a student and I give them some new information. They have to hold that in their working memory long enough that they can extract the information out of it and transfer it to their long-term storage. But it's not just that. They also have to pull up information from their long-term storage, compare the two pieces of information that they've been told, decide whether to update what they already knew with what they're learning, or reject one or the other, and meanwhile, while they're doing all of that, I've already moved on to the next sentence, right? Like, I'm moving on and they're still trying to work through this process. Sometimes I think this is why we have students who have these little islands of disconnected knowledge, because they've kind of stored it, but not been able to pull up their previous knowledge and compare and contrast and connect it to other pieces of information. So executive function is even at play when you see a student only be able to access information from a certain path. They can't come at knowledge from multiple routes and access what they know. Both you and I have an interest in structured word inquiry. Peter Bowers, who's the founder of SWI, has been a great influence in both our personal education and the way that we approach teaching words. And getting kids to understand how English spelling really is something that works. So I'd like you to touch on the relationship between structured word inquiry and working memory because many people criticize without really understanding that structured word inquiry, especially things like entomology places much too heavy a load on executive function. You know, working memory skills. Yeah, I've definitely heard that feedback as well. I would say that one way that we help students with limited working memory through the practice of structured word inquiry is by building on strengths. There's actually research that shows that one of the better ways to support a limited working memory is by building on strengths. I love that we did research on this, but there's a lot of discussion about how structured word inquiry explores words by starting with meaning, then going to structure, and then looking at related words before going to the phonology of the word. Well, that is going to help your students with weak phonological memory. So verbal working memory relies very heavily on phonology. So when we are building these visual tools first, when we are building on the knowledge that they already have about a word, we are freeing up what limited working memory they have for other aspects of the task. So the word matrix is a tool that offers visual support. Visually, it provides the student with a type of scaffold that is going to facilitate your working memory. And in fact, there's recent research from the structured word inquiry research Vanguard, Swerve, that provides evidence that students can actually recall more words when words are presented to them and a matrix that is centered around a base. That's exciting. That right there is showing through research that we can boost working memory using some of the tools of structured word inquiry. I would also say that the spoken routines that we use, such as the word sum, which is pretty wrote, right, we try to use the same language each time, is teaching the children a strategy for self-directed speech. And that again is going to free up their working memory for the parts of the task that are more difficult. Yeah, so by giving our students that consistent language for the word sums and the consistent routines for investigating words through those four questions, we're helping them develop something that they can use for their own self-directed speech around spelling. Beth, that base has a final y and you're adding a suffix. So you know what you need to do. Toggle the y to an i. Those routines are a sort of cognitive scaffolding that supports working memory. So as a reminder, those four questions that I talked about are first, what does this word mean that we are investigating? That way we're grounding it into something that's meaningful for the child or the learner. We next investigate how is it built? We generate hypotheses so that we become word scientists and we're trying to disprove them and offer evidence that supports our hypothesis. We look briefly at the history as part of that. We also then for the third question look at the related words. And then lastly, we are looking at how are the graph themes in that word functioning? What are the phonemes or other pieces of information they may be representing? And I just want to mention what a word sum is. It's not that complex, but it's incredibly powerful. And all you do is between the different parts of a word, all words are composed of a base element, which many people incorrectly call a root. And a fixes what I call many more themes, either suffixes or prefixes. Every word in every language actually is either a morphological base by itself. Like water, hour or teach, doesn't matter how many syllables, or is a combination of a fixes and a base, all longer words. So if you have a longer words like re-teach-in, you go RE plus sign, T-E-A-C-H plus sign, ING. And if you show a child a word sum like this, even if the child has very limited spelling ability, very little ability to decode words, they can immediately read and recognize multi-syllable, which are really polymorphemic words. So it's a very simple concept, but it's a very powerful one. Okay, so I just used the phrase self-directed speech. Let me talk about that for a minute. Self-directed speech is the speech we directed ourselves to mediate our own behavior. And for us today, it's not important to define what exactly I mean by the word speech. This speech that I'm talking about can be external, where you're actually here or say the words out loud, it can be internal, it can be words or images or a mix. I'm just talking about how do we communicate with ourselves to get things done? And research suggests that the heart of the task, the more we rely on self-directed speech, I can think of countless times when I've been trying to accomplish some task at home, and I keep getting distracted by all the other tasks that I encounter along the way, and in frustration, I'll finally say, "Buff, you need to get down to the basement and empty the dryer." And by saying it out loud, by externalizing it, and directing that speech at myself, I finally can complete the task. I'm sure you've done this, Bruce. I've done it a lot. I also read a book called "More Than Words" by Mary Ellen McDonald, who talks about self-talk, how it influences everything from doing small tasks, like you just mentioned, to psychotherapy, that we really need to have these discussions, and it has to be intentional to do it. And it's a very interesting book, and I think what you said is it's really important that we understand and look at how we talk to ourselves. I mean, things like meditation is very important. So, Beth, I'd like you to tell me a little more about how you incorporate executive functioning skills in your sessions. So, let's just talk about inhibition. For a minute, you may recall that that is one of those three core executive function skills I mentioned earlier. Inhibition is the ability to stop yourself from doing something. So, that father I talked about needed to inhibit himself first, from continuing to move toward the driveway when he thought the car was coming at him quickly. And then he needed to stop himself, or inhibit himself from stepping in the snow. So, that self-directed speech I talked about is one way we can inhibit an action. Sometimes, the self-directed speech can be very concrete. Beth, you need to put your phone down and get started on your paperwork. And actually, there's research, like we mentioned, that shows that talking to yourself in that third person way is effective for inhibiting unwanted actions and also for initiating desired actions. But sometimes, our self-directed speech doesn't keep up. And so, I see this when we're doing one of those word sums that we just talked about. And a child is saying, replace the E with I and G. And they're actually still writing the E. So, they forget to replace it with the I and G. So, often, not always, what they said causes them to pause and notice that they've written the E and accused them that they need to self-correct, right? Which is good practicing of a meta-awareness skill, which is another executive functioning skill. Can you monitor what you're doing? So, that was inhibition to play, right? I didn't stop the go of right the E. I've also seen the impact of inhibition not doing, but it should be doing when a student says one letter name, while writing a completely different letter or even a number. The student's saying E-D, even if their hand is writing E-Y, or their hand is writing a 6 for the letter S. It's like a form of word finding, which is when you can't find the word you need to express a thought, or you access a similar sounding word or a word with similar meaning, the system doesn't repress or inhibit the incorrect form. It allows it to pass right through. And that thing that isn't inhibited can either be spoken or it can be written, right? Either one of those can be the thing that did not get stopped. But let's go a little bit broader here than literacy. Inhibition can help. help us choose what we pay attention to. Can we repress the desire to think about that shiny object on the shelf, while my teacher is talking to me about suffixing conventions? Or the thing, again, that we all struggle with, can I inhibit the urge to pick up my phone when I am supposed to be doing some other task? So it can be hard to notice that my attention is off task, but it's also hard to stop it, even when I know it's not where I want it to be. So as with anything we do, the less we practice the skill, the harder it becomes. So how do we practice directing our attention? Mindfulness, which you mentioned earlier, Bruce, is a really great tool for strengthening our inhibition muscle. So as my thoughts drift, I can build the skill of noticing that they've drifted. And then once I notice it, I can build the skill of pulling my attention back to where I intend it to be. So I practice this during my sessions with the use of a flashlight. A physical flashlight. I have it right here. In the book, Peak Mind, the author Amishi Jot describes two types of attention. There's the flood light when everything is lit up, and then there's the flashlight, when the ray of light is targeted in a more narrow manner. So I use my physical flashlight with my clients, especially my younger ones, to help them notice where their attention currently is. So if they notice something on my shelf, I will shine the flashlight on that thing and say, right now, I can tell your attention flashlight is on that. If they're talking about something outside the room or something that happened earlier, I might just shine the flashlight away from what we're working on or I might even shine it at the door and say, "It feels like your attention flashlight is on something that happened earlier outside my office." When I explain this strategy to folks, they often skip this step. They often want to just shine the flashlight where they want the student's attention to be. But I think it is so important to help the child notice where their attention is right now, so that then they can practice bringing the attention back to what is important right now. So like I said, after I've noticed where their attention is, I will then shine the flashlight on our work and I'll ask them to shine their attention flashlight on what we're doing. And Tara Sumter from Seeds of Learning, then asks, "Is what we're doing the important thing right now? Is what you're talking about that off-test thing? Is that what's important right now?" And by doing that, we are encouraging self-reflection and meta-awareness. And each time they notice where their attention is and they bring it back to our work, we are actively practicing and building that skill of inhibition. We can also model, wait and stop. Many childhood games target inhibition. Like Simon says, duck duck goose, freeze tag, all of those wonderful games, right? They are all targeting, can I stop myself from doing something? Simon says, if you don't hear that magic phrase, you have to stop yourself from doing the action that you're seeing the leader do, right? That is teaching inhibition. So how can we build the skill of inhibition into our sessions? Well, one way is to encourage your student to pause over a word they don't recognize instantly. Sitting with that, not knowing, is so uncomfortable. Can they learn to inhibit the urge to give up panic? As for help, instead encourage them to pause by giving them another task. Ask them what they notice about the word. Encourage them to take that breath and examine the word. I actually have a routine that I use with my students, which I very cleverly call, stuck with a question mark. And initially, when a student first starts working with me, I ask the student just to spell out the word, just spell out the letters that you see. And not only are we practicing a whole multitude of other reading skills like letter recognition when we do that, we are building in a pause. We are inhibiting random guessing of the word based on the first letter they see or just giving up. If the student doesn't know the word after they spelled it out, I just tell them the word. With my clients who have studied with me for a period of time, I ask them to do a little bit more work. I ask them to look for familiar affixes. I ask them to look for graph themes they're familiar with in the base. And then if they're still stuck, I give them the word. But what amazes me is how often just doing that act of really seeing what's in the word helps the student shine that attention flashlight long enough that they can read the word. Doesn't always happen, but it happens often enough that I stick with this strategy. And as a little aside, sometimes people wonder where I get words to study since I don't follow a set curriculum or I don't have a scope in sequence. Well, this is one place. When they're reading these texts and they come across words, they don't know or words that are interesting. I will keep a list of those. And then I choose some words from that list that target a concept that I know we need to work on. And then I let the child choose from that shortened list, which word are they interested in studying? Now I'm now going to inhibit that conversation and come back to randomly guessing it words we don't know. I want to reflect on the unintended impact of constantly timing reading for our students and stressing about how quickly are they able to read. Are we teaching students to pause and explore an unknown word? Or are we teaching them to just toss something out and hope for the best as they move on to the next word? On your last point, it's quite well known now that one of the best ways to increase fluency is to slow the student down by putting pause marks just slashes between phrases. This is so well established. You can have a student instead of rereading a whole chapter, just have them read two or three paragraphs where each sentence has been divided into phrases. That will raise the reading comprehension of that whole chapter by over a grade level. All you have to do is say, when you hit the pause, stop. What it does, it slows them down, get some focus on what they're doing and it gets them away from reading is the race mentality, which we often do with students. And I just have to make a confession as you were talking about inhibition. I have just moved this computer into a new room for the summer and I have all these posts at the bottom of the screen and I just realized this one needs to go away. This one needs to go away. And I said, no, you're not going to rip off the posts while Beth's talking. A few years ago, I was called into a school to work outside of the school with student who was just non-functional and I got them reading and I got them writing and then I worked with a speech pathologist and she said that she wanted to work with him over the summer on inhibition, on attention and I asked her, you can't do things about that. You know, I know it's not effective to tell the student to pay attention and we went over exactly what you're talking about and she worked with a student for about six weeks over the summer and he began to internalize these behaviors. He was saying to himself, stop. He was talking to himself. - So don't speak. - Yeah. - So his self-regulation was really very impressive and it helped this student get to the point where he could function in school. This is post-pandemic and I'm sure a lot of teachers understand what kids went through during that disruption in their lives. - You know, when you're talking about those slash marks, what that's doing is interrupting that go. Right, I talked about the go, no go and it's giving a visual cue that overrides the go so that there's long enough for the child to process what is happening. So I just love how that ties right into this whole inhibition piece, what those slash marks are doing. And then you also mentioned emotional control and that is definitely related to inhibition, right? So if you have a student who's puzzling a bit, they're confusing you with their literacy development but they also tend to be a student who has those huge emotional reactions or they shut down and they can't recover. Their inhibition skills might be something that you want to examine as your lens for what is going on with that student. It might be that it's happening across the board and it's also affecting their literacy development. - No, absolutely. I mean, these things are all tied together, right? Kids will behave or problems, kids can't self-regulate, even attentional problems. We know that about half of the kids who have dyslexia also have ADHDs, some people think it's higher, right? This is all connected together. You know, often we want to decide low instruction, we'll just work on decoding, things like that and it's never worked because there's so much going on with a student but there's also so much more that we can support the child with when they're trying to learn the very important tasks, very challenging tasks in school that some kids, as I mentioned earlier, don't have a problem learning and other struggle with. That's a lot of attention now to the role of handwriting. We understand quite clearly this is not just a skill, this is a neuromotor activity, it's tightly tied in to this whole system that we've been talking about, how we learn to read, how we understand what we read. So I'd like you to just go into handwriting and it's rolling in a vision. - I do use handwriting as a tool for developing inhibition and then practicing inhibition as a tool for developing handwriting because it flows back and forth. So usually by the time a client has come to me, they have pretty well established their motor patterns for forming letters. And there is a lot of variety and how they form those letters. Some of them are very unusual and some of the letters actually look exactly like a different letter because my primary purpose for our limited time together is not handwriting. I try to choose the most impactful letter to work on and I will practice that new motor pattern with them until they can make it intentionally when we're thinking about it. But then we run into the difficult step, right? How do we inhibit that previous pattern and let the new pattern come through? So what I do is delay the habitual response. I'm introducing an interruption. Initially, I am the one providing the interruption. As I see them start to approach where that letter is going to show up in their word, I will say, "Oh, I remember you have a new letter, a new way of writing that letter." So I am providing the interruption. But as quickly as I can, I try to back off me being the frontal lobe that's providing the executive function and transfer that job to their executive function, to their frontal lobe. So maybe I will front load the activity. I will say you are about to write the letter A and you have a new way of writing that. How are you going to cue yourself? What are you going to say to yourself? There's that self-directed speech again. To remember the new way of writing the A. And we will also have a script that we use. So for letter A, if they're right-handed, we talk about it being a push over. And so I can just say it's a push. And then they learn to say to themselves, "It's a push to start forming that letter." And then I might introduce another interruption by encouraging them to use a different color ink when they get to that letter. Just anything that interrupts the automatic response of circling three times and then putting the downline. It's where some of my students are like, they're winding up for a takeoff or something. They keep circling around and around and around and around when they make an A and then finally drop it down. And you know what's happening there? Inhibition. They cannot stop the circling around of making that circle to turn it into an A. Fascinating. So all of that is just practicing inhibition, interrupting the automatic response, and allow your executive function to kick into high gear. So Beth, I want to get into the third core skill that you mentioned, which is flexibility. And you do a lot of things that involve language and reasoning. And I look like you to share those with us. I think that language and that self-directed speech that we're talking about is an incredibly powerful way to model and develop flexibility. One phrase that I like to use or I try to use is same but different. So skilled readers are able to abstract how out, how what we learned in one word is going to apply to another word. They're also able to notice an inhibit what doesn't apply to a different word. But struggling readers are going to need more explicit pointing out of those patterns. So a phrase like same but different is really powerful. So for example, this word bathe is the same as teeth because both have a final E in that final position, marking the pronunciation of TH. But they're different because the final E and bathe is also marking the pronunciation of the A. And in teeth, we don't need that final E to mark the pronunciation of EE. So they're the same but they're different. And we can use this kind of phrasing everywhere to model flexibility, to coach flexibility. So if someone is nervous about going to a new place and all I can think of right now is a playground in a nearby neighborhood, you can explore how that neighborhood is going to be the same but potentially different from the familiar playground at their school, for example. And if and then, if then it's another powerful phrase that I use for flexibility. Okay, so I'm not encouraging people to use this. And if you eat your veggies, then you get your dessert kind of way, but instead in a way that helps students notice an abstract patterns out of something that happens. So if we notice a final E, then we might need to replace it when adding a suffix. If I see you GH in a word, then it might spell the sound that we represent with an F most often, or it might be a history marking graph. If I do this, then that might happen. If I see this, then I might hear that. So we're sort of starting to associate two different things, but we're not always saying it's going to happen. That is flexibility. And another thing I do to promote flexibility in my sessions is I talk about plan A, plan B. Never forget plan B when you're planning something with a learner. So plan A is that we'll play the regular game at the end of our session. But if we run out of time plan B is that we're going to play the speed version. So you've introduced the possibility of this other thing that might happen so that if you have a child who is more inflexible, they've had some time to sit with this possible action. So those are three phrases that I find really powerful for building language around flexibility. Same but different, the most powerful one in my opinion. If then and plan A, plan B. The other day, as someone gave me a sheet based on Kelly Cartwright of Duke and Cartwright Act of You of Reading, she did a presentation for the Dislexia Training Institute talking about executive functioning skills. And the list of the three major components are of course exactly the ones that you've mentioned. But I also often mentioned that Kelly Cartwright has a book called Word Callers. And she's very concerned about up to 30% of kids read accurately, read fluently. It sounds good. The teachers think the kids are reading, but have really diminished comprehension. And in the book, she provides activities that you can use with students that basically have students categorized words in two different ways. One, by the sound, for example, what's the beginning sound? And then is it an animal or a plant? So what's the beginning sound in pig? And they'll say, and then they have to categorize it just by having the kids think like that. Stop and really think about it. It's really helps them in an amazing way, deep in their comprehension ability. These are very powerful tools. And I must say I'll put this personally. I always thought these were beyond the reach of what we could teach. And I've known for a while that that's not true. And you're helping me. They know we really have to work on these to do it. And we're going to ease the child's ability to learn. And that I think is the best thing we can really do. I do like what's happening in that example. You just gave about really modeling and structuring in flexibility practice. It does remind me of one thing I've been pondering lately about age expectations around flexibility. So my guess is typically developing children. That is a beautiful thing to do kindergarten first grade second grade. Right? You're practicing flexing between these two ways of thinking about a word. What I've been pondering lately is some research about how children switch between rules for categorizing. And so there's this task called the dimensional change card sort task, which I thought was called the Wisconsin card sorting task. But it turns out the Wisconsin card sorting task is for adults. And this is the version that we use for small children dimensional change card sort task. So on this task children are asked to sort cards based on color. So there's red and blue flowers and there's red and blue trucks. So they have to sort into two piles based on their color. After a few rounds, the researcher asked them to switch to sorting the cards based on their shape. And it's three and four years of age. Most children continue to sort based on color. They can tell the researcher. Yes. If it's a truck, it goes in this pile. If it's a flower, it goes in this pile. And then the researcher hands them another card and they go right back to sorting by color. They can't shift how they are sorting the cards. Right? I actually have a video link of this happening that I'll share with you Bruce. It is fascinating to watch. So it's not until around age five that most children are starting to be able to shift from one sorting rule to another. Well, what does this have to do with what we were just talking about? Russell Barkley says that folks with ADHD or other executive function delays are operating with a roughly 30% delay in executive function skills compared to the same age peers. So a five year old, if you're doing that activity where you first sort by sound and then sort by what kind of animal it is or something, they are operating similarly to a three and a half year old with that 30% delay. So are they going to be able to shift rules that easily? A six year old is similar to a typically developing peer executive function wise who is four. So when we are asking kids to do things they're not ready for and evaluating them based on that. They can be again layering on that emotional baggage we've been talking about. So I'm not saying we shouldn't practice those skills because like I said, that's how we learn executive function skills, but it's important to know about these expectations that we are placing on these developing brains. Beth, you do some wonderful things with clocks to help kids with executive functioning challenges. And I'd like you to explain them because I think it really makes again this whole issue very concrete. Yeah, and that is exactly what my intent is is to make the abstract visible. So the work that I do with the clocks that I'll tell you about is to make abstract concept of time visible or concrete. The work that we do with word sums and word families, we are making the abstract visible. That is my drive through all of this. So so many people with executive function issues struggle with feeling time and please note the verb that I use there, feeling time. I understand how time works. I can concretely think about time, but I do not feel time. You can ask my husband, I do not feel time. So there is no pressure for me to get one thing done by a certain time of day. Wherever I am, that's the most important thing. When I leave that space, then I no longer feel. the urgency of having to get that thing done. So how do I work on time sense with my clients? The main way is a tool called the Working Clock, which comes from Sarah Ward and Kristin Jacobson of Cognitive Connections. And again, I have a beautiful video that we will share that maps out how to do the Working Clock because it's very hard to describe over a podcast. But basically what I do is I have an analog clock right in my hands and I will map out with my client how we are going to do the session. So I usually have some sort of plan. We're gonna start with the clock. I mean, it's different every session, but let's say that the session is that we're going to review some words that we studied last time. We're going to read a short text. We're going to explore a word. We're going to write a sentence and then we're gonna play a game. So I will with my client right on the clock using a dry erase marker. We will block out the first five minutes of the session to work on the clock. And then usually what I do is I go to the end of the session with my student and we block out the last 10 or 15 minutes to play the game. And now we have a period of time between that clock planning and the game planning that we have drawn in with dry erase that we are gonna fit the rest of those activities in. So we are learning how to manipulate time to get our tasks done. I also like to think that I have now modeled for a student that it's okay to plan into your schedule something fun and rewarding. That is an important skill in a society where it's work, work, work as fast as you can. Now it's okay to prioritize having a little bit fun at the end of getting those meteor maybe more challenging activities done. So now we have on our clock. I'm holding one for Bruce to see. All of our session mapped out in different colored little time chunks. So how do I use this during a session? Well do you remember that attention flashlight that I use? If a child is going off task, I can say to them, I notice your attention flashlight is somewhere else. I can point it towards the clock and I can say is what you're doing part of our plan? Is what you're talking about more important than playing the game at the end? Is what you're talking about related to what we plan to do in this moment? And honestly all I have to do most of the time is just do that and the child was, oh no, no, no, no, we have a plan, that's right. Sometimes the child really wants to talk about what they're talking about. And so I'll say, oh, okay, so that's more important that the game fine. Every once in a while I'll let that go on. I will shorten the game time. It's a little bit of a shock for them when they get to the end and the game time isn't as long but I'll remind them that they made that choice earlier. If a child is doing that repeatedly, I will actually pick up the clock and start to erase the game time and move the other work into that and it makes concrete for them that time is not endlessly elastic. If we take time now, that takes away time from something that we plan to do later. So that is really effective. The working clock really promotes motivation for my clients and hey, word nerds will know or will want to know that motivation is related to the Latin word move vary, which means move. And in this case, we are teaching for the student how they're moving through time and that in turn helps motivate them to get tasks done. The child is learning to ask, how do I see myself moving through this session and do I feel good about it? I have a story about one client who was the bountiest of clients. I love her. My sessions with her are always a joy, but the working clock is huge for her. One session I blocked out a solid 30 minute chunk on the working clock and didn't really think about it. That was one of our more difficult sessions. She was constantly bringing up other things, moving out of her chair, bouncing around and it wasn't until the after our session that when I was erasing the clock that I thought, wait a minute, I did a really long chunk on the working clock. I wonder if that is what was at play here. So the next week I made sure that there was no section on my clock that was longer than 15 minutes and the session went so much smoother. It's hard to know if that was the cause, but I'm not going to experiment and find out. We are going with short 10 to 15 minute chunks that she can really feel when she looks at that clock. I also use my working clock with older students to predict time. So I might ask them, how long do you think it will take you to write the sentence? And after they write it, I'm going to ask them to estimate how long it took them to write it. And then we compare that to how long it actually took. We might do that with a paragraph two, right? That just takes a minute or two out of my literacy focus session, but it's laying the groundwork for developing their time sense. I don't know how many people have had a high schooler say, oh, I have an essay due tomorrow, but it's okay, it's only going to take me like 15 minutes. It's not going to take me that long to do. And you're like, ah, no, it's going to take you like two hours. Well, what I'm doing is planting those little seeds that say, oh, this takes longer than I thought it would. And we're developing that feedback loop that I talked about at the beginning of the session about using a previous experience to revise my predictions of how long something is going to take in the future. I read recently that attention deficit disorder could be also called intention deficit disorder. That people intend to do things. And I see this in myself, though, I really don't think I have either executive functioning issues or ADHD. You know, I've got a plan. I'm going to get it done today. And it doesn't happen. You get distracted. I think it's a very interesting way of looking at it. A lot of times students want to get something done and they just can't do it. We need to recognize there's deeper issues behind that. Right. And the application is one of the executive function skills, right. And in order to initiate a task, you have to be able to picture it and know what you're working towards. And again, that is your nonverbal working memory and then mapping the verbal working memory of how you're going to approach that task is part of that picture. And as you're doing the task, you're monitoring yourself and giving yourself feedback. Like, this is the direction I need to be going. Wait, no, this is taking me down a random path. And go in a different path. It's all part of that executive function picture. So Beth, I've loved the way that you pull all these pieces together. And I can see them all working together as a system. And for me as a biologist, I love systems. All these parts, they all work together. But I'd like to give you a chance to pull a few more pieces together in your final comments. There are three things that I really want to leave listeners with. One is to remember that we are modeling and coaching these skills. We may never see the student actually demonstrate any of these skills independently. But we are preparing that soil. We are choosing which seeds to plant. And if you can share that same perspective with families, that they are helping prep soil and they are planting these seeds. And then it may take years to see it pay off. That can be really encouraging for us as instructors and for parents. So we are sort of acting as frontal lobe surrogates while our students or our children are building these really important executive function skills. Executive functions develop until around age 25. And then if you think about that 30% delay, it may take even longer for some of our students. So patient is the word of the day here. I also wanted to say that listeners may find themselves thinking, "Oh, I do this already." And when a parent says that to me about something that I'm recommending to them, "I'm going to celebrate." "Yes, you are doing it because that is a yay thing." But I'm also going to encourage them to go ahead and pay special attention to that thing they're doing for the next week. Or if you're an instructor or a tutor or a therapist for a session, I do this too. I try to mix up what aspect of development or what skill I'm centering during a session. Because the lens that I am bringing to the session influences what I notice a client is doing. We're human. We cannot observe all the things all the time. So what we pay attention to during a session can shift the nature of the whole session. And you know what? That is putting our own executive function to use right there. We are stepping out of the automaticity of our regular session and we're using our meta-awareness skills in very intentional ways to change what is happening during a session with a student. And then lastly, I encourage everyone to think about their own executive function skills as an instructor. What are your strengths? Where do you need to externalize your supports? I do that working clock activity to boost my students awareness of time. But I'm also 100% doing it because I need support in my own timeline. If I get into some topic during a session that is fascinating to me, I will gladly go 20 minutes over our session time. I will just keep talking and having a wonderful time with a student. So I need the working clock and a timer that might be also used at the same time to keep me on task. Setting timers helps me with my executive function differences. So those are my three final points. Beth, this has been great and I want to thank you because we can often think about executive functioning skills as something that's very abstract. You brought it right down to the concrete. And we are dealing with these all day when we work with students. But as I mentioned a few times, like with the Post-it notes, we also need to reflect on how our executive functioning is working both for us. us and for our students. I want to thank you very much for this wonderful discussion. I'm providing a new service that putting all the information in the show notes, contact information, and for teachers that have products such as books or apps, we'll all go into a new website called language-literacy.org, language-literacy.org, and you can go back and find all the information you want about all my previous guests at that website. I want to thank the ever-growing number of people who are listening to our podcast on Spotify and an Apple podcast. If you'd like to provide me feedback or suggestions, please email me at [email protected]. So thank you very much.