Vocabulary Archives

What are Executive Functions?

January 1, 2015 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Executive Function Coaching is at the forefront of many new discussions surrounding the best methods to help young people thrive in (and out of) the classroom. The reason why Executive Function is so talked about right now is because we have more brain research than ever before and we understand how executive function impacts academic performance. However, explaining Executive Functions can be difficult because most are unfamiliar with the educational and psychological jargon used to describe Executive Function coaching. This blog post is designed to help everyone understand why Executive Function coaching is so helpful and how it works.

The simplest way to define Executive Function is: “The Ability to Complete Jobs the Best Way Possible.”

From the moment a student receives an assignment until the time he or she turns in the final project, several different mental tasks must be completed.

To finish any assignment, a student must answer the following questions:

What materials do I need to complete the assignment? (Organization)
When should I do this, and what is the best time for me to finish it? (Planning)
Is soccer more important than finishing this paper? Is this paper more important than my math homework? What should I do first? (Setting Priorities)
Should I answer the text I just received from my best friend or not? Should I check the update on Instagram that’s being commented on by all of my friends? (Impulse Control)
Does the assignment adhere/fit the instructor’s expectations or have I reinterpreted the task? Am I delivering what was asked for? (Self-Monitoring)
Obviously, there’s more to getting a task done than just telling oneself they must do it. We are pulled in many different directions by conflicting priorities and the normal distractions of life. Completing simple tasks sometimes involves complex questions that may not have easy answers.

For most young people (and many adults) there are one or more “weak spots” in their process of completing a specific job. As adults, some of us are terrible at meeting deadlines (Self-Monitoring), but absolutely excel at purchasing all the supplies we will need to complete a task and setting up a work schedule (Organization/Planning) but never begin the actual work (Task Initiation).

Through Executive Function coaching, we pinpoint which of these mental tasks (e.g. Impulse Control, Self-Monitoring, Setting Priorities, Task Initiation, Planning, or Time Management) needs improvement and then develop specific skills and strategies to enhance a student’s performance. Executive Function coaching celebrates a student’s strengths and examines each individual gear in the machine of task completion. It’s a holistic and individualized approach that is successfully improving how students are able to meet and exceed their goals.

Executive Function coaching involves much more than is outlined here, but the fundamental process is easy to understand. If you want to know more, check out My Learning Springboard’s Executive Function Coaching page or contact us to discuss your family’s specific needs.

By Brad Hoffman, M.S.Ed.
Board Certified Educational Planner and Learning Specialist
My Learning Springboard, Inc.

What is Nonverbal Learning Disorder?

December 11, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Difficulty picking up concepts and patterns affects kids visually, socially, and academically

By Caroline Miller
Original Source: Child Mind Institute
Originally posted December 10, 2014

This is the first in a series of articles about non-verbal learning disorder developed in collaboration with Winston Preparatory School, a New York area school that has taken a leading role in working with students with the disorder.

When we think of learning disorders, we tend to think of dyslexia and other disorders involving language—that is, kids who have trouble decoding language and learning to read.

But there is another, less well-known type of learning disorder that’s not about verbal communication—hence it’s called nonverbal learning disorder. You’ll see it referred to as NVLD or NLD. It isn’t an official diagnosis like ADHD and autism—in fact many kids who have non-verbal learning challenges have those diagnoses. But experts say focusing on NLD explains what’s happening with kids—and how to help them learn—better than those diagnoses.

Recognizing patterns

Kids who have NLD do not have trouble decoding language, reading, or learning information in a rote way. As Scott Bezsylko, executive director of Winston Preparatory School, puts it, “Think of it as the opposite of dyslexia.” The problems these kids have involve, he says, all the other kinds of learning. “All the stuff that involves understanding information—relationships, concepts, ideas, patterns.”

These deficits—all things related to the right hemisphere of the brain—can affect a child’s ability to do a surprising variety of things. Physical coordination, social interaction, problem solving, organizing thoughts, planning—all these things can be challenging. They seem very different, but the unifying theme is that each requires the ability to recognize patterns or concepts and then apply them to new situations.

The five areas of NLD

There are five areas in which children with NLD show weakness. Not all children have weaknesses in all areas.

1. Visual and spatial awareness:

Many kids with NLD have trouble understanding visual imagery. For example when they are asked to copy a shape like a cube they produce “profound distortions,” says Bezsylko. “These kids can’t accurately perceive the cube, the forms that make up the cube, and the relationships between them. Hence they can’t copy it.”

They also have difficulty evaluating visual-spatial information. This means they have trouble grasping the relationships between things they see and having a clear sense of where they are. This can make them physically awkward.

2. Higher-Order Comprehension:

Higher-order comprehension is the ability to identify the main idea in something, the details that support the main idea, and the relationships among them. This affects kids’ ability to comprehend reading, and write or tell a story effectively.

It also affects taking notes. Bezsylko observed that some kids essentially take down everything the teacher says because they don’t know what’s important and what not to take down. Other kids don’t know what’s important so they take down nothing, and people think they aren’t paying attention. Or they take down all the wrong things.

3. Social Communication

Most kids with NLD have trouble reading emotion in facial cues and body language, so they often don’t know what’s going on in social interactions. They miss the social patterns that other kids pick up automatically, so they don’t know what’s appropriate behavior in a given situation.

Difficulties with social communication is one reason why kids with NLD often focus—sometimes obsessively—on technology. “In chat rooms or in a video game they don’t have to deal with all the nonverbal stuff,” Bezsylko notes.

4. Math Concepts

Many kids with NLD are very good at rote learning, and they are able to do well in math just by memorizing data. But as they get older they struggle to solve more advanced mathematical problems that are based on recognizing concepts and patterns. Even with a problem they’ve seen before, if it’s approached differently or modified slightly, they have trouble recognizing it.

5. Executive Functions

Executive functions are a set of skills we use to organize our thinking, plan and carry out actions, and figure out how to solve problems. Most kids with NLD have weaknesses in these organizing and planning functions. For instance they struggle with breaking down a project into smaller pieces, or conceiving steps that need to be taken to get something done.

“These kids have trouble figuring things out—in fact they don’t really know what figuring something out means,” Bezsylko says. “We have to help them learn to do that—the step-by-step process you go through.”

How do these deficits manifest in kids with NLD?

In addition to the different combinations of symptoms, kids with NLD also vary along a spectrum of severity.

One the one hand there are kids who are extremely high-functioning but socially awkward, a little clumsy, disorganized—what Bezsylko calls “the absentminded professor type.” Other kids are more pervasively affected, and they function with more difficulty in many areas. “These kids often struggle to learn everything that isn’t rote or literal.”

At Winston Prep, a study of more than 100 students with NLD showed that there were 6 combinations of the 5 deficits. The largest group had all five of the deficits, but the second largest group had just two: social communication and executive functions.

When do these deficits become noticeable?

Many kids with NLD can do well enough in elementary school because they are very good at memorization and rote learning. It’s common for them to run into trouble around middle school, when their difficulty with the higher order reasoning—figuring out the main idea, the details, and the relationships—causes them to fall behind. “There’s a saying that in fifth grade you stop learning to read, and now you read to learn,” notes Bezsylko, “and that’s when these kids fall apart.” Historically, Winston Prep took kids in sixth through tenth grade; they’ve started to take some kids as young as fourth grade.

“Almost all of these kids look inattentive and disorganized,” Bezsylko adds, “especially as they get older. The more that schoolwork, math concepts, and socialization become complex rather than rote, the more those difficulties start to show up.”

A more comprehensive diagnosis

NLD is not one of the official diagnoses mental health professionals and schools use to categorize kids with psychiatric or learning problems. Kids who have it usually have other diagnoses—often autism or ADHD. But while those diagnoses list their symptoms or behaviors, they don’t fully explain them, argues Bezsylko.

For instance, if a child is disorganized and inattentive, he is likely to be diagnosed with ADHD. But he may well be disorganized and inattentivebecause he doesn’t understand what’s being discussed, what he reads, or the problem he’s been asked to solve. That’s where NLD comes in. “You can’t pay attention if you can’t understand,” notes Bezsylko.

Similarly, a child diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder will be described as having social and communication deficits. Those behaviors, too, can reflect NLD—not being able recognize patterns in facial expression, body language, and other forms of nonverbal communication can make kids unresponsive socially.

Take the kids in the Winston Prep study who had all five of the deficits. Most of them had a diagnosis of either ADHD or autism spectrum disorder. “But those diagnoses don’t identify three important areas where they are struggling,” notes Bezsylko: “higher-order comprehension, math concepts, and visual and spatial relations. Unless their NLD is recognized, they’re not likely to get help that strengthens or compensates for weaknesses in those core areas.”

Math Needs Reading and Writing

November 12, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

$Math Needs Reading and Wriitng$ I clearly remember those high school days as a student in a classroom with at least thirty-five classmates. As an introverted person, I also remember thinking to myself: “If I do not understand something, I will wait to go home and read the textbook; that should be enough.”

To my surprise, reading the textbook was far from enough to clarify most of the questions derived from a math class; perhaps the textbook was too complicated or I did not have the proficiency required as a reader to decipher the math text myself. To make things more complicated, completing a project was usually a difficult task since I was used to short meaningless answers such as “True,” “False,” “A,” or “x=10.” The lack of structure in reading and writing and how it was negatively affecting my performance in mathematics was evident. Why was I not able to understand the book and communicate my findings to my teacher?

The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics states: “The development of a student’s power to use mathematics involves learning the signs, symbols and terms of mathematics. This is best accomplished in problem situations in which students have an opportunity to read, write, and discuss ideas in which the use of the language of mathematics becomes natural. As students communicate their ideas, they learn to clarify, refine, and consolidate their thinking” (NCTM, 1989). It is reasonable to infer that whether or not students are proficient in reading, they need to be trained in reading mathematical content in order to build independence in the future and understand the unique reading skills of the discipline when teachers are not around to assist them. Moreover, if we think of a topic, such as algebra, as a unique language that allows one to translate verbal expressions into algebraic expressions and equations to solve real life problems, the reading of mathematical contents should become more natural and meaningful, allowing students to become more comfortable and confident while studying math.

On the other hand, writing offers students and teachers valuable information about the processing and understanding of math concepts and provides an opportunity to organize ideas and improve the communication of findings. Furthermore, the teaching of math as an isolated subject is a thing of the past; nowadays we have the chance to incorporate interdisciplinary lessons in our teaching that can help students in the process of integrating not only reading and writing in mathematics, but also other disciplines, allowing students to make connections between math and other subjects. Generally speaking, it is extremely important for teachers to guide their students, regardless of the discipline being taught, in the process of becoming effective communicators in a very demanding global society where communicating and learning on one’s own are becoming required skills to improve one’s chances of success.

By Jose Parra, Private Tutor

Physics: What’s the Answer?

October 17, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

When I am discussing a physics problem and a student interrupts me to ask for the answer, I sometimes wait a moment before replying. Not because I don’t want the student to know the answer. On the contrary, I am pleased if he or she can get it right without my help. But if I sense that the answer is the only thing the student wants, then I wait.

Teaching physics is not just about getting the right answer to the problem at hand. It’s also about teaching how to view the natural world, how to think critically, how to approach the unknown so that the student may eventually become a master and solve a physics problem no one has ever solved before.

This sounds idealistic. Of course, the reality of homework assignments, lab exercises, quizzes, tests and exams should not be ignored—like all instructors, I want my students to do well. Furthermore, not all those who study physics in high school or college will go on to study the subject at higher levels. Nevertheless, I think it’s important when teaching physics—and science in general—to convey some sense of the whole enterprise, which goes beyond memorizing formulas or facts, but is aimed at understanding the interrelationships of nature.

And this leads to a paradox. Because the only way I am able to convey any general idea is through specific examples. That is, I work with my students, guiding them through problems and showing them how to analyze situations that are not completely general. These problems—such as throwing a baseball—usually contain some simplification (the ball doesn’t rotate) or approximation (air drag is neglected) that limits how well any result obtained (say, for the speed of the ball just before it reaches the bat) corresponds to what goes on in the real world. And yet, I still hope that the students will catch on and realize that there is a general pattern, so that they will be able to apply what they learned with the baseball to a jet of water coming out of a fountain and maybe one day to designing a missile defense system.

Therefore, after the student has asked for the answer and the wait is over, I say, “I’ll tell you the answer. But first tell me how you solved the problem.” Once the student has told me what he or she did, I’ll probe a little more and ask about the assumptions the student made or any limitations of the calculation, trying to encourage a general view of the physical principles involved. And then I’ll give the answer. Because we all like to get it right.

By Neer Asherie, Private Tutor

Can Students “Go Deep” with Digital Reading?

October 16, 2014 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

By Holly Korbey
Original Source: Mind/Shift Online
Originally posted September 9, 2014

Mark Pennington’s students often read on their laptops. Pennington, who’s a reading specialist in Elk Grove near Sacramento, Calif., sees a need to teach kids how to read digitally and stay engaged, and thinks that digital reading will eventually catch up to what kids can do reading print. When asked if his seventh-graders are more engaged when reading from digital readers or in print, he said it depends — motivation and environment play a big role.

“Most of the digital reading that students ‘practice’ is at home on Instagram, chat lines, Facebook and texting,” he said. “Since students are choosing to read and respond in these mediums, and since students have considerable prior knowledge and expertise in the subject matter, their engagement/comprehension is high.”

The trick to being a good reader, no matter the medium, is being an engaged reader, a fact that Pennington notes is well-supported by research. “It’s pretty clear that good readers are active readers engaged with the text,” he said.

“You can also flip back and forth very easily, and spatially, there are advantages to print media.”

One of the best ways for readers to show engagement with the text, he said, is through marginal annotations.

“There are real advantages to print,” he said. “You can write on the text right there,” noting that if students aren’t allowed to write in textbooks, they can use small sticky notes that come off easily. “You can also flip back and forth very easily, and spatially, there are advantages to print media.”

Making those annotations in digital readers, like iPads and Chromebooks, can be more challenging than grabbing a pencil and sticky note.

When Pennington’s seventh graders took the Smarter Balanced Assessment in English Language Arts on new Chromebooks last April, Pennington didn’t teach them how to use the test’s annotation feature. Students would have been able to highlight reading passages and take notes on the text to help them answer test questions. He thought it was too complicated for them to learn how to use well in time for the test.

“It was so cumbersome,” he said. Students had to turn on the annotation feature, move back and forth between screens, remember the location of the notes, and then return to the questions they were trying to answer. He said for most of his students, it would have been tricky to “walk and chew gum at the same time,” so he shelved it.

Drawback of devices… for now

While ever more schools adopt textbooks and student reading materials to digital readers like iPads and Chromebooks, some recent research suggests students may comprehend more from reading print. Middle school students who read from both print and e-books showed they understood more of what they read from the ink-and-paper books, according to one preliminary study presented by Heather Ruetschlin Schugar and Jordan T. Schugar of West Chester University.

Although tablets and touch devices allow readers to interact in innovative ways, the researchers wrote, “Reading comprehension research with multi-touch devices is still in its infancy and students will need to adapt new reading strategies in order to maximize their learning in this environment.”

For older students, the ability to take notes easily appears to be a big reason for choosing print textbooks over digital. In a Hewlett Packard online survey of 527 college students at San Jose State University, 57 percent of students who responded said they preferred print materials to e-books when studying. When citing reasons for their preference, 35 percent of print users cited “note-taking ability” as a reason for preferring print vs. six percent of those who favored e-books.The Schugars have conducted two additional studies in which grade school students better understood material when not distracted by the bells and whistles of an interactive digital book. Annie Murphy Paul, in writing about the Schugars’ work for the New York Times, wrote, “It seems that the very ‘richness’ of the multimedia environment that e-books provide — heralded as their advantage over printed books — may overwhelm children’s limited working memory, leading them to lose the thread of the narrative or to process the meaning of the story less deeply.”

Yet those who study reading seem to understand that comprehending in the new medium may require some new training and practice to receive the full benefits. In a recent New Yorker article, Being a Better Online Reader, Maryanne Wolf, author of a history of reading called Proust and the Squid, said she’s developing digital apps to help train students to deep read digitally. She cites a new study that showed fifth-graders became better digital readers after learning how to use the digital annotation feature.

“The same plasticity that allows us to form a reading circuit to begin with, and short-circuit the development of deep reading if we allow it, allows us to learn how to duplicate deep reading in a new environment,” Wolf said in the article.

Teaching new skills

Maybe new note-taking skills require nothing more than a shift in perspective. In a recent MindShift article about a one-to-one iPad program, Hillview Middle Principal Erik Burmeister said that annotating digital books gives his students a sense of freedom – a place to “dirty up” their materials with thoughts and ideas.

“In a traditional school environment, you’re given a textbook and told not to write in it at all. And this is really counter-intuitive to what we want kids to be able to do in the real world,” he said. “We want them to write all over the things that they’re reading.” Since allowing every kid to write on paper books would mean throwing away those books at the end of every year, the devices give kids the chance to annotate inside the document.

“It”s being able to engaged with the material in a really kinesthetic way,” Burmeister said. “The material is so sacred that it’s not sacred, you can really dirty it up.”

So if engaged readers annotate, and students may or may not prefer taking notes in print books, what’s next for the e-book? Where does it fit into school? What’s the best use of an e-book for learning? More research will need to be done, especially on how students use the annotation features of e-books, to get a clearer picture of how well students can take notes and be able to find them on digital readers. Perhaps technology will improve, and annotation features will become more intuitive in the next generation of devices. And maybe parents and teachers will need to distinguish reading for fun on tablets, with the distracting bells and whistles, from reading for school, where material is less interactive but more straightforward for better absorption.

Mark Pennington believes that there will always be room for both print and digital reading in school. In the mean time, he will continue teaching kids how to annotate, because giving students the “ability to talk to the text, to create an internal dialogue with the text,” is the best way to help students understand what they’re reading. Whether that ends up being most effective tapped on a tablet or scribbled in the margins remains to be seen.