Helping Children and Teens Strengthen Executive Skills to Reach Their Full Potential

Executive skills are brain-based skills that develop across childhood and that take a minimum of 25 years to reach full maturation. They are skills that support goal-directed behavior and although essential to school success, they are typically not explicitly listed in local, state, or national curriculum standards. When the pandemic closed schools in the USA in March 2020, the resulting reliance on remote-learning instruction exposed how much support teachers and in-person learning provide to students with immature executive skills. This paper will describe those supports and will build the case that in the absence of the kind of scaffolding teachers provide for students with weak executives, many students have struggled. Three strategies for strengthening executive skills will be outlined. These include: modifying the environment to make it more supportive and less punishing for students with weak executive skills; explicitly teaching executives by embedding them in daily routines; and offering incentives or motivators to entice students to practice skills which are laborious in their early stages of acquisition. Focusing on strengthening students' executive skills will address the problem of "learning loss" that has resulted from the disruption the pandemic has caused.