A Teacher’s Guide to Executive Function Skills

What are EF Skills?

In classrooms every day, teachers are working to keep students focused, engaged, and ready to learn. When students struggle with attention, self-control, or remembering what they’ve just learned, it’s often not about a lack of effort, it’s about insufficient skill development. This is where executive function comes in. Executive Function, or EF skills is an umbrella term for the skills we need in order to think. These include the foundational skills of focused attention, inhibitory (impulse) control, working memory, self-regulation, and cognitive flexibility. These foundational skills also support more advanced EF skills like planning, organization, and problem-solving. EF skills provide the foundation for our ability to learn and to regulate our behavior. Everyone has EF skills and everyone’s ability to use their EF skills will vary from day-to-day.

We’ve all experienced days where we just can’t pay attention or are having trouble remembering things in the moment. The same is true for students, and the stronger their EF skills are, the more good days they’ll have where they are paying attention and able to take in and remember what you’re teaching.

Students who act out, disrupt class activities, and can’t stay on task are all showing signs of struggling with underdeveloped EF skills. They aren’t choosing bad behavior, they simply lack the skills to do the right thing. Students who don’t seem to improve academically despite interventions, also lack the skills necessary to benefit from this assistance.

Why should we care about Executive Function (EF) Skills?

EF skills are the foundation for learning. Research shows that EF abilities predict academic and life-long success significantly better than IQ^1,2. We also know that for students who struggle academically, if they have strong EF skills, then interventions work, but if they do not have strong EF skills, they do not catch up. The NICHD Study of Early Child Care, that tested 1,273 students nationwide, showed that poor EF scores were helpful in identifying students with poor math and literacy skills³. Because EF skills are foundational to learning, having poor EF skills predicts poor school achievement, but it is less predictive for high achieving students – as long as you have the proper foundations, you can benefit from normal instruction and the effects of EF skills are less pronounced. This means that EF screening is most useful where it is most needed – early identification of students who will struggle academically.

Schools spend large parts of their budgets and learning time screening for math and reading skills, but they rarely screen for the underlying cognitive skills. This leads to students cycling through years of special interventions without ever testing if they have the cognitive readiness, the necessary EF skill levels, to actually benefit from these interventions.

How can we support EF skills in the classroom?

EF skills are developed through intentional practice and use. The five biggest contributors to developing EF skills are (1) responsive relationships⁴, (2) cognitive stimulation⁵, (3) environmental predictability⁶, (4) social-emotional skills⁷, and (5) cognitive-motor movements⁸.

The good news is that you are already supporting EF skill development in your classroom. Developing responsive relationships includes:

• greeting your students by name,
• checking in on struggling students before they act out, and
• being the same person on Monday and on Friday.

Cognitively stimulating instruction means using interactions that foster knowledge acquisition — adult-guided learning opportunities that direct attention, encourage exploration, and move a child toward independence. These include:

• using complex vocabulary
• providing appropriate scaffolding of each student’s abilities so that they are challenged but not struggling
• structured play activities that have clear goals and rules.

Environmental predictability means:

• clear, consistent expectations for students
• minimized visual clutter to prevent sensory overload
• relational consistency – the same adults with the same warmth and the same boundaries for appropriate behavior

Social-emotional learning includes:

• teaching students to "stop, think, choose" before reacting
• naming emotions and checking in with what they are feeling
• providing conflict resolution strategies that students can use themselves
• bringing the class together through morning meetings, circle time, and class agreements

Using cognitive-motor movements means having your students move with intention. Combining movement with thinking activates the whole circuit for learning in the brain, from the pre-frontal cortex to the cerebellum⁹. Progressively increasing both motor challenge (movements that cross the body and require more coordination) and cognitive challenge (changing rules) directly exercise their EF skills. This can look like:

• playing games like Simon Says and Freeze Dance
• Physical Education games
• CogniMoves® – intentional brain boosters

Key Takeaways

1. EF skills are for everyone. We typically only hear about EF in special education or for older students, but EF skills begin developing before students even enter Kindergarten.
2. EF skills are the foundation for learning. In order to learn, we need to be able to keep focused attention, ignore distractions, remember what we’re learning, flexibly tie things to what we already know, and control our own actions.
3. EF skills are the missing piece in learning interventions. Students can’t benefit from interventions if their brains aren’t ready to learn.
4. You are already doing things that promote EF. Now that you know which things promote EF skills, you can do them with more intention.

References