Transcript
Alis Rocca [00:00:01]
In these shorts podcast clips, we offer nuggets of information from our longer podcasts that give advice and quick tips to help you as teachers, recognise children’s needs and respond more efficiently, empowering you to adapt teaching effectively. This clip is from my podcast with Doctor Bettina Hohnen. Bettina is a clinical psychologist, author and speaker, working in the field of child mental health and neurodiversity. In this clip, we discuss the executive function framework and how, as teachers, we can understand a child’s behaviour as a response that may be a skills deficit rather than just bad behaviour. In this way, we can learn how to develop children’s skills, setting them up for life in order to be more effective, both as a learner and as a social being. If you’ve heard of growth mindset versus fixed mindset, then continue listening to hear how this can be used as a strategy to help teach children to understand themselves as having the capacity to change and to learn the skills they need to be successful.
Alis Rocca [00:01:12]
Can you tell us a little bit about what’s meant by executive functions and why that’s an important area to understand with regards to the work that you do?
Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:01:21]
Yeah. So executive functions are housed in the frontal lobes of the brain. There are these silent skills that enable us to manage everyday life. So an analogy, is they’re like the conductor in the orchestra. They tell the bit of the brain, the rest of the brain, when to start, when to stop. You know, it’s not the right time to say that thing right now. How to plan, how to organise, how to manage our emotions. And they are developing over these 25 years and actually that’s the last bit of the brain to develop is these executive functions. The reason that I use this model and that I think it’s so powerful, is because I think often we are mislabelling behaviour in children. And if we use this framework of executive functions, we understand that often it’s a skill, that a child is struggling with, rather than it being to do with their character or their intelligence, or their attitude, it’s actually a skill problem. We identify what the skill is and then we can help to teach them the skill. So for example, if you have a child, there’s a lot of behaviours that we can reframe using this model. Let’s think about a child who, they’re in a football game and they think, you know, the referee has blown a whistle against them or something and they shout at the referee, ‘I hate you’ or whatever they say, something worse than that. Now we might say, this a rude child, I have to tell my child that they can’t do that, or we might say that’s the child’s response inhibition. Actually, the frontal lobes need to engage in that moment and say to the child, not now, no don’t say that, that’s the wrong thing to say. So we say, we can completely reframe it as a skills deficit rather than something intentional. Let’s give another example. You say to your child, ‘can you go upstairs and get ready, you know, I need you to get your hat and don’t forget your gloves because it’s cold and just clean your teeth before you come downstairs’ and they come downstairs and they have forgotten their gloves. We might say,’oh my goodness, will you listen?’ Or we might say, ‘that’s a working memory difficulty, I think your working memory let you down there and so you forgot one of the things that was happening’. Now it always, as you can tell, assumes the best of the child, but it also gives the child a way of doing it next time. So rather than just getting cross and going, ‘can you try harder?’ You say, ‘so when I give you three things to do, let’s think about a way in which we can help you remember’. Or ‘next time you feel really upset by what the referee did, you know, sometimes referees do make a bad call. Next time, why don’t we try this’ and you give them a little strategy to do it. So it’s building up these skills, it’s setting them up for life and it’s keeping in this positive relationship and having the best intention for your child. And actually it’s so powerful, I even now work with a lot of adults who will be struggling somehow in their lives. And if you can reframe what’s happening for them as an executive function problem, they think, ‘oh, it’s not that I’m bad it’s not that I can’t do this, it’s a skill I just need to develop, or maybe I need a little strategy, maybe I need a bit of help with that. ‘ You know, this book that I’m writing, you know, I struggle a bit with the time management. So I’ve got somebody on board who’s helping me with the time management. It doesn’t mean I’m not intelligent. It just means that that’s a skill that’s a bit weaker for me and I’m still working on it, but I need a bit of extra help.
Alis Rocca [00:05:02]
So again, as adults who care for children, whether we’re talking parents or educationalists, it’s about, again, detaching the behaviours and seeing what’s lying beneath it and thinking, okay how can I teach, how can I support, how can I look at this differently? So that they can learn a different way next time?
Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:05:22]
Yeah, exactly. And it’s incredibly powerful. I mean, one thing that comes up a lot for me in my work is, kids who struggle with flexibility. So flexibility is one of the executive functions and that means it’s a kid who, when something changes and they can’t do what they want to do, they fall to the floor and they are all over the place. So you say, okay, you know, there’s this one kid I’ve been working with who needs to take some vitamins. And she is really struggling with her flexibility because she’ll take the pink one, but she won’t take the green one. And so rather than saying just ‘come on’ or getting cross or making a character interpretation of that, we’re saying, ‘I think flexibility is getting in your way. Let’s think about another time when you’ve been really flexible, so I noticed that yesterday, when the new teacher came in, and the teacher that you love wasn’t there, you were able to be so flexible and just say, okay, it’s different. It’s not what I was expecting, but I managed it’. So kids will be using these skills in some context. And then you can say,’how can we help you in your flexibility with taking this other pill?’ It literally has changed this kid now she’s able to do that. But she was also struggling with going to restaurants when she didn’t know what the food was. So, those kinds of things which are so frustrating for everyday life, you reframe it and you have this new vocabulary, this new language to talk to a young person about what’s happening. It’s much more compassionate. It’s a bit like, ‘I can see you’re struggling’ and it’s also building resilience for the future because it gives them a pathway for how might I do this? How might I get better at this?
Alis Rocca [00:07:10]
Is there like a finite list of executive functions.
Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:07:15]
Yeah, there’s a great book called ‘Smart But Scattered’ which I would recommend by Peg Dawson.
Alis Rocca [00:07:23]
Okay. We’ll put that in the show notes as well at the end.
Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:07:25]
Yeah.
Alis Rocca [00:07:26]
Tell us a bit about that.
Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:07:28]
Yeah. I mean, it’s really about these kids, I mean, often kids who might get a diagnosis of ADHD because executive functions is a core difficulty underlying in ADHD, the core kind of cognitive difficulty. But these kids who are super smart, but they kind of leave this trail behind them. They’re always forgetting things and losing things, and they can’t manage their time and those are all of the executive function skills. So, the book Smart but Scattered, I mean, if you suggest that to a parent who’s got a kid like that, they will smile and go, ‘oh, that’s my kid’. So it’s really good. I mean, I’m also writing this project, crazily, I’m writing a book about executive function skills and struggling with my executive function skills as I’m writing it. But, you know, trying to write about it as well in a more, in a way, to embed this approach in family life. There’s a program called Activated Learning, that’s developed from Canada, which is embedding an executive function awareness in classrooms. So it’s becoming more and more well-known.
Alis Rocca [00:08:46]
You talked a little bit about mindset. Could you let us know how this plays a role in how you support parents, and how parents and teachers can support children through mindset, through internal motivation. Through getting children to see the world and themselves within the world in a more positive light.
Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:09:08]
So there’s a lot of research about the importance of our beliefs about things and its impact on our behaviour, even on how our body functions. Growth mindset and fixed mindset is an idea that is quite well known. This idea that, if we have a fixed mindset, we have this idea that I am intelligent or I’m not intelligent, and it’s very fixed and it affects our behaviour. But if we can have an idea about a growth mindset, which is the idea that the more I do something, the better I will become at it. You know, if I keep going with something that I’m struggling with, I will get better.
Alis Rocca [00:09:49]
Even if you’re talking about an executive function like flexibility.
Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:09:53]
Yeah exactly. And that is how the brain works. The way we get good at things is by doing them again and again and again. So it really fits with the neuroscience. But it has a really big impact on a person’s engagement with the task, obviously. If you think, I just tried this thing, you know, I went and gave a public speech for the first time, I was rubbish, I’m not good at public speaking, you’re not going to try again. If you think, that was the first time I did it, obviously there were a few things that I was struggling with, I need to just do it again and then I’ll get better and better and better. So that’s been brilliant, that it came from Carol Dweck in the States, it’s been very, very powerful. In a way the executive function approach really adds on to that, because I think one of the downsides to the growth mindset was that kids would be told, you can do it, just try harder, go on, do a bit more, you can do it, just try harder. But it became a bit of a pressure for kids – ‘well, I’m trying, I’m trying and I’m sitting in my room and I’m revising and I’m still not doing well.’ So the executive function approach puts a bit of meat behind it and says, ‘I know that you’re trying, but I wonder what strategies you’re using. I wonder if the strategies you’re using, are the best ones for you.’ So, that I think is not written about much at the moment, to be honest with you, but I think, you know, it will be. It’s a growing thing.
Alis Rocca [00:11:22]
We look forward to your book coming out, so we can find out more.
Dr Bettina Hohnen [00:11:24]
I need to write about that. The other thing actually is there was a young person that I’m working with, she’s 17, a brilliant young girl who recently got diagnosed with ADHD, and she said this thing to me the other day because she’s really struggled with stress all her life. And she said, ‘I read the other day that actually a little bit of stress can be good for you, and if you have too much stress, you go over the edge’. And, it was really quite powerful for her because there is this research about stress mindset. So the idea of stress, the word stress has a bad name. We think about stress and we think, don’t do it any more, it’s bad for you, it’s going to cause physical health difficulties, we need to stop it. But actually that’s not true. In order to do anything well, we need a little bit of stress to get us to the point where we’re energised. But if we have too much stress, we fall off the other end, and then it’s impossible for us to do anything. So again, this is a very important area of research because what they’ve done is work with young people and said, you know, about this stress mindset idea, a little bit of stress is good, too much is over the top. And that helps young people to say, ‘okay, actually that feeling in my tummy, those butterflies, a little bit of it is a good thing. I’m actually going to give my peak performance when I’ve got a bit of stress.’ So that’s the mindset, the way in which we see and understand what’s going on inside us. Our beliefs about that is very powerful in helping us to keep engaged and to use that energy in a positive way.
Alis Rocca [00:13:08]
I hope you enjoyed that Nip in the Bud nugget. If you want more, why not go back and listen to the whole episode with my guest? If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with others and visit our website for more information, advice and resources.
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