Executive Function Skills

What are they and how Montessori supports their development

The Myth of Multitasking

Scene 1: Dad is making dinner, listening to a podcast for a presentation he will give at work, and helping his child with a school project. 

Scene 2: Your boss is leading a team meeting about a new project, while many colleagues are sending emails and frequently checking text messages.

Scene 3: You are reading an article about executive function skills, watching television, listening to your children play in the room next door, and waiting for an important phone call.

Wow, these adults have mastered multitasking! They attend to multiple things, perform various tasks, and follow different thoughts all at the same time. Amazing!

Not so amazing, actually. The ability to multitask is a myth! We operate under the illusion that we can simultaneously pay attention to multiple activities and thoughts. The reality, however, is that when a person performs one task at a normal speed, the execution of the second task is delayed “in direct proportion to the time spent making the first decision.”1 The reason we think we are effective at multitasking is that we are unaware that one of two things happens: we either have a significant time lag between tasks within our cognitive global workspace or forget the second task altogether. So, if multitasking is a myth, what skills should we employ to effectively and efficiently learn new things and reach our goals?

A fundamental skill in learning anything is the ability to concentrate and pay attention. Once attention is grabbed and maintained, learning then continues to develop via active engagement, error feedback, and
consolidation.2 This skill of “sustained attention” is one of eleven executive function skills that develop over a lifetime, with critical windows in the primary and adolescent years. 

What are executive function skills? How do they develop? And how does Montessori pedagogy—particularly at The Post Oak School—support the development of these skills?

Executive Function Skills—The Basics

At their most basic level, executive function skills are the brain-based skills you need to achieve goals. These skills help us comprehend new information while reading an article, ignore the impulse to check our
phones, and have a sense of time passing while reading this issue of Roots magazine.

This theoretical model for children and adolescents, proposed by Drs. Peg Dawson and Richard Guare, is practical, relatable, and based on current research.⁴ In the chart to the left, executive function skills are defined and followed by examples at different ages.

How the Skills Are Developed

Executive function skills are brain-based skills that develop beginning at birth through maturation at about age twenty-five. Research on the developing brain indicates that executive function skills are critical in
the development of key academic skills as well as social skills, self-regulation abilities, and general life skills. Being able to be a good friend, hold a job, drive a car, manage a household, and learn an instrument all depend on executive function skills.

Children are not born with these skills. Instead, they are born with the potential to develop them.³ Executive function skills mature in response to the interaction of the child’s internal, self-directed learning, and the adult’s provision of external structures such as cues, limits, and school environments. While genetics and conditions such as ADHD, anxiety, learning disorders, and stress can inhibit their development, the skills can develop fully with appropriate support from the child’s home, school, and extracurricular environments. “Executive function skills develop relatively rapidly during the preschool and early adolescent periods…(and) scaffolded opportunities to practice and reflect upon executive function skills promotes their development.”⁵

Montessori environments and pedagogy provide scaffolded opportunities for learning and practicing all eleven executive skills. A recent research study determined, “The Montessori program, in particular, seems to offer a type of educational practice with the power to enhance executive skills and facilitate the acquisition of complex executive control in preschoolers as compared to the conventional practice.”⁶ Other studies of Montessori programs suggest similar results.⁷

Executive Function Development

Executive function skills are practiced and supported through the framework of five tenets of Montessori pedagogy: the prepared environment and materials; the prepared adult; child-directed learning; mixed-age communities; and experiential learning. The following is an overview of the five tenets—along with examples of how Montessori pedagogy, in general, and Post Oak, in particular, supports them.

Prepared Environment and Materials

• The Montessori environment is structured, organized, calm, and aesthetically pleasing.⁸ 
• Sustained attention is cultivated through three-hour work cycles and minimal interruptions to those work cycles.⁹
• Montessori materials are specifically crafted to interest and engage the child at each stage of development. Cognitive flexibility is supported by self-correcting materials, which provide immediate and encouraging error feedback.
• At the Primary and Elementary levels, attention and concentration develop through the child working with her hands instead of learning via textbooks.¹⁰

Prepared Adults 

• The Montessori teacher is a calm, observant, nonjudgmental guide who seeks to nurture curiosity, a love of learning, and independence.
• To foster cognitive flexibility at the Elementary and Adolescent levels, teachers provide continuous constructive feedback, supportive spaces to take intellectual risks, and “cultivate a friendly feeling towards error, to treat it as a companion inseparable from our lives, as something having purpose, which it truly has.”¹¹
• Teachers reflect with students about their learning, areas of strength, and areas of growth. This supports metacognition, a skill that enhances a student’s ability to transfer or adapt her learning to new contexts and tasks.¹²

Child-Directed Learning

• Allowing a child independence offers him the opportunity to achieve things he has set his mind to do. Helping often is an impediment.¹³
• By promoting the child’s liberty rather than telling the child what to do and what to learn, the teacher is deeply supporting these executive function skills: response inhibition, task initiation, planning and prioritizing, time management, and goal-directed persistence. This enables the child to actively engage in practicing these skills rather than observing as the adult practices the skills for him.
• A child’s opportunity to engage in self-initiated, goal-directed activities gradually strengthens their self-regulation skills through practice, especially when combined with the appropriate environmental structure.¹⁴
• The National Research Council on the Developing Child at Harvard University is clear: “Give children agency. Children are more motivated when they have some degree of self-determination and can elect to pursue tasks that are personally meaningful. When they have a choice of projects, or at least a little wiggle room as to how a task gets done, children are more likely to stay engaged.”¹⁵

Mixed-Age Classrooms and Multi-Year Cohorts

• Students of different ages learn alongside one another, providing peer coaching and social interaction. Social interaction is essential to learning because it undergirds sustained attention, active engagement, and the development of executive function skills.
• In Primary classrooms, older peers model emotion regulation when a lunch falls to the floor and task initiation when they independently find the broom and dustpan to sweep up the crumbs.
• In Elementary, older children assist younger children with organizing materials and planning collaborative projects—which requires prioritizing tasks and sustaining attention on extended pieces of work.
• Older adolescents model response inhibition as they learn to use social media, goal-directed persistence as they send off college applications, and time management as they handle the academic demands as well as internships, travel, and extracurricular activities.
• A significant benefit for a multi-year cohort is that the teachers have extended time to observe the child and understand the child’s areas of strength and growth. Teachers work alongside the students as they learn concepts over long stretches of time, not week-long units that are never revisited. Sustained attention and cognitive flexibility are supported as the student’s curiosity drives them to learn more, challenge ideas, and experiment with different approaches.

Experiential Learning Beyond the Classroom

• Beginning at the Elementary level, students are encouraged to go beyond the classroom to answer their questions and quench their curiosity. 
• Elementary students plan short visits to museums, transportation centers, nature centers, and more. The students collaborate on the details of the outing (planning/prioritization), agree on the specifics (cognitive flexibility), and phone the museum (task initiation) all with goal-directed persistence.
• Adolescent students are involved in week-long outings—locally, nationally, and internationally. Students practice planning/prioritization as they create travel plans, schedule flights, and create budgets. They practice emotion regulation as they travel without their family, working memory as they pack their suitcases, and cognitive flexibility when flights are delayed.

The sidebar below describes the particulars of how The Post Oak School is intentionally guiding students as they develop and practice executive functioning skills, training faculty, and educating parents. 

Be on the lookout in The Post for brief articles from our student support team regarding executive function development, social skills, emotion regulation, mindfulness, and more.

This article was taken from our summer Roots Magazine. You can find the article and more by clicking the button below.

Read our Roots Magazine

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END NOTES

1. Stanislas Dehaene, How We Learn: Why Brains Learn Better than Any Machine…for Now (New York: Penguin Books, 2020).
2. Dehaene, How We Learn
3. Peg Dawson and Richard Guare, Executive Skills in Children and Adolescents: A Practical Guide to Assessment and Intervention, 3rd ed.(New York, Guilford Press, 2018). Peg Dawson and Richard Guare, Smart but Scattered: The
Revolutionary “Executive Skills’’ Approach to Helping Kids Reach Their Potential (New York: Guilford Publications, 2011).
4. Eric Q. Tindas, Reading, Attention, and Executive Functions, Houston Branch, International Dyslexia Association Fall Symposium, (The Briarwood School, Houston, TX, September 30, 2023), Speech.
5. Philip David Zelazo and Stephanie M. Carlson, “The Neurodevelopment of Executive Function Skills: Implications for Academic Achievement Gaps,” Psychology and Neuroscience, Vol. 13,
No. 3, September 2020.
6. Silvia Guerrero et al. “Shaping Executive Function in Preschool: The Role of Early Educational Practice,” Cognitive Development, Vol. 67, July/September 2023.
7. Angeline S Lillard, et al., “Montessori Preschool Elevates and Equalizes Child Outcomes: A Longitudinal Study” Frontiers in Psychology, Vol. 8, October 2017. Angeline Stoll Lillard, Montessori: The Science behind the Genius,
updated edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). Adele Diamond and Kathleen Lee, “Interventions Shown to Aid Executive Function Development in Children 4–12 Years Old,”
Science, Vol. 333, No. 6045, August 19, 2011.
8. Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, (New York: Henry Holt, 1967).
9. Lillard, Montessori: The Science behind the Genius
10. Lillard, Montessori: The Science behind the Genius
11. Montessori, The Absorbent Mind
12. Zelazo and Carlson, Neurodevelopment of Executive Function Skills
13. Maria Montessori, Citizen of the World: Key Montessori Readings, 3rd Edition (Amsterdam: Montessori-Pierson Publishing Company, 1946/2019).
14. Zelazo and Carlson, Neurodevelopment of Executive Function Skills
15. Lillard, Montessori: The Science behind the Genius
16. National Scientific Council on the Developing Child (2018), Understanding Motivation: Building the Brain Architecture That Supports Learning, Health, and Community Participation, Working
Paper No. 14 (Retrieved from www.developingchild.harvard.edu).
17. Kimberly Harrison, Interview, March 8, 2023.