As you start to focus more on Executive Function (EF) in your classroom, it is important for you to reflect on how things are going – what is working well and what is not. To do so, you can gather and use data from EFgo™, your observations during the REFLECT period, or both. This will give you an idea of where individual students, as well as your whole class, are in their EF skill development and see how students are improving over time.
Follow the Recommended Instructional Periods (IPs)
The best way to begin is to follow the IP timeline recommended by EFgoPRO™. Once you have more information about your students’ EF skills, determine how you might start to incorporate intervention activities into your daily teaching. One good place to start is the routines you already have in your classroom. Explore the recommended activities and determine where they fit naturally into the flow of your daily schedule. This also helps you track what activities you have used and when they worked best.
Track Implementation of Activities
Keep a checklist or clipboard ready to make notes of which activity you tried, the time of day you used the activity, how long students did the activity, and any notes about challenges or individual struggles the class had. EFgoPRO™ has examples of activity trackers HERE. It is important that students experience the right challenge level during activities, making sure the task is not too hard and not too easy. We want to keep students in the zone of proximal development – they can perform with the guidance of an expert but have not yet mastered the task at hand themselves.
Conduct check-ins with other staff members as often as you can. Learn from the experiences of others! Use a Professional Learning Community to collaborate and discuss successes and challenges you and your colleagues are experiencing, as well as to generate new ideas for intervention.
At the start of each instructional period, use the new assessment data to evaluate how students have improved over the previous weeks. Note where you had the most success implementing activities. Celebrate that success! You can also start to think about how you might adapt the activities for the next Instructional Period or academic year.
Reflecting for Success
Reflection is an essential part of the Instructional Period. The three categories of questions below invite us to think about, discuss, and personalize the classroom experience in the following ways:
- What? questions: What activities did I use?
- So What? questions: What did these achieve? How am I feeling? What am I thinking? What did the children learn?
- Now What? questions: Where and how will I apply this activity next time? How can I apply it to other situations and environments? How can I improve the activity for its next use?