This is Jennifer Gonzalez welcoming you to episode 61 of the Cult of Pedagogy podcast.

In this episode, I'm going to share seven systems that can really help your outside the

box learners be successful in school.

It seems to me that every teacher in every school struggles with what they might call

unmotivated, lazy, or disorganized learners.

These are students who seem to have a ton of potential whose test scores might even be

pretty high, but who can't ever seem to get it together school-wise.

In my own teaching experience, I spent an inordinate amount of time on these students,

giving them lists of makeup assignments to do, meeting with them at lunch or after

school to help get them caught up, contacting parents, meeting with parents, helping them

go through their binders and backpacks and lockers over and over again to find missing

work, and coming up with lots of different ways to basically say the same thing.

You just need to stay organized.

It turns out this set of skills actually has a name, executive function.

The first time I heard this term in Paul Tuffs 2012 book How Children Succeed, it was

like a light bulb going off.

Kids who struggle with executive function often have perfectly strong academic abilities,

but they don't have the same ability as most students to stand top of the little details

that make life run smoothly.

So when we try to get them to manage those details, the same way that most other kids

do, our efforts almost always fail.

If I had known that, and if I had known someone like Seth Perler to show me what to do differently,

...