What are Executive Functions?
Understanding Executive Function:
Executive Function (EF) is a term that is used to describe a collection of cognitive skills used to effectively identify meaningful goals, clarifying and designing a plan, organizing resources needed, while enacting flexibility in thought and action in order to navigate a path forward. The core skills are known as inhibition, working memory, and mental flexibility.
EF skills govern behaviors related to critical thinking, prioritizing, problem solving, planning, pausing to assess, some parts of communication, and organizing. To activate these skills, and thus their related behaviors, conscious effort and practice is required.
The part of the brain that is most responsible for these skills is the prefrontal cortex which is the last region of the brain to fully develop (around 25 years old).
Executive Functions are quite vulnerable, especially early in development, to many factors including affective and emotional interactivity like stress/ chronic stress, trauma, anxiety, and/or depression. EF struggles may also cause emotional stressors and mental health challenges.
"Whether you are a veteran, training, or newly minted teacher, Supporting Student Executive Functions: Insights and Strategies for Educators is the best curbside consult you could ever have and maybe didn’t even know you needed. Lisa Carey and Alexis Reid make complicated neurocognitive processes –
Jason Fogler, Ph.D.
