Helps with: priming students to think about the EF skills they bring to class that day and provides explicit examples of how they are engaging in mathematical activity; also orients students to consider the variety of EFs their peers may have
Use When: you are launching a task within a lesson, or at the start of your class period when discussing the learning objectives for the day
Example: A teacher is launching a task about unit rate and ratios and setting up the class to engage in group work. As they are describing the activity for the day, they say, “Today’s activity will use our EF skills in many different ways, so we’ll need everyone’s individual contributions to succeed as a group. If you are someone who can help keep track of lots of different numbers, your group will benefit from your working memory strengths today. Today we’ll also be asking everyone in a group to share their thinking at some point, so we’ll need someone’s cognitive flexibility and inhibitory control strengths to help us stay organized and able to reflect on how different strategies might be able to be used to tackle this problem.”
Helps with: developing students’ skills around setting goals, making plans, and assessing their own progress towards their goals; this can build agency in their own learning journey and strengthens students’ metacognitive processing
Use When: at anchor points throughout a lesson or unit (beginning, middle, and end), or when facilitating a discussion with individual students or small groups
Example: During a discussion or when students are working on a problem, teachers may adapt the following prompts to support students in reflecting on their reasoning and their problem solving processes:
What is the problem asking you to do? What tools or strategies could you use?
Is your current strategy working? Why or why not?
What can you tell me about [the content or problem context]?
How did you figure out how to solve this problem? What worked for you, and what didn’t work that caused you to try new things?
Helps with: supporting student’s engagement of all three main EF skills - inhibitory control, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, while building reasoning skills and connecting math concepts
Use When: throughout lessons or units on a regular cadence, as providing a structure for students to develop their reasoning can help them take up the same strategies and apply it to new content or other activities long term
Example: create opportunities throughout solving a problem for students to:
Identify a pattern and describe what’s happening
Predict what the next step in the pattern would be
Write a rule for the pattern, using descriptive sentences first as needed, before moving to other representations
Discuss what repeats or changes across each step in the pattern, and which quantities stay the same
Create their own patterns (option to set conditions the pattern has to meet to vary the difficulty of this task)