Effective 4-Step Study System for Students with Executive Function Challenges

I'm excited to be here. So glad to have you here at TIA. Hello, Edward. This is Edward from Alma

Modern. How's it going? I'm great. I'm alive. I can't complain. I'm excited to be here.

So glad to have you here at Tifas for the first time and parents, teachers, therapists, coaches, anybody who's out

here to support kids with executive function challenges. This is Edward and I'm going to pop up your site real quick

here. This is alma modern.com. Edward is an amazing human being who specializes in helping mostly college and some high

school kids. And we are here at Tos Executive Function Summit. This is our homepage. If you like what we're doing

and you're here right now, you obviously signed up, but please share executive functions.com with your friends or

groups or things like that. So, Edward, hello. Welcome. Let's start with this before we even really introduce you.

What are parents going to be learning about today? Well, today we're going to talk all

about a simple way that we can encourage our students to study that's going to result in them feeling less stressed

out, less spirals, less shut down, and while this at the same time earning better grades on their test, which

sounds crazy, but totally possible if we follow this model. And now a little bit about your

background because your background is different from a lot of my speakers. one that you work a lot with college

students and two I think your background with a lot of content creation and stuff but I I really think all of your

experience with older students is different than a lot of our people here but when a parent comes up to you if and

they say what's your job what do you do how do you sort of introduce yourself yeah definitely so the way I sort of

define it in the simplest terms is that I'm a college success strategist for people and that may be directly with

students maybe with parents maybe with institutions and what I do is help them figure out what strategies do our

students need at the right time how do we pull the right one to ensure that they're able to reach their goals and

because I come from this college perspective that means I'm looking at the long-term arc of a student's career

in school. And so, while we can definitely talk about strategies applicable to a fifth grader and to a

10th grader, we've got to keep in mind if my student is on track for going to some fancy internship or to some fancy

college, we want to make sure to equip them with those quote college level strategies as early as possible.

Okay. And then I'm going to ask you a nerdy follow-up question. In in your bio, you use and so one of the things I

like about Edward is is his attention to detail. And one of the things that I noticed in your work is that you are

very particular and you're very particular about semantics, about the words that you choose. And I think this

is relevant to what we're going to be learning about today. But I am curious why you chose to use the term education

design studio when you're talking about your work and your business education because I'm assuming you you chose those

words very particularly am I right? Yes, absolutely I did and very non-conventional words for the space of

student help and support and things like that. The reason for that is because I always come with this sort of

designer's lens to the way that we do things, this strategy oriented lens. And so every student is so unique and what

that requires is that we really dive into understanding that student's worldview, their perspectives, their

unique brain. And then my challenge as someone who's trained in design and video and and graphics and all these

things is how can I create interactive tools for them? How can I take something that's really big and complex and

simplify it into a very short guide or infographic to make things as simple as possible? And so that's why we're an

education studio because we're designing learning experiences. I love it. I love it. So good. All

right. Well, let's dive in then. How do we help our students study with less overwhelm and better results? And I

guess we're going to start with a four-step study system. And then you have three really big sections today,

but this is the first one. So, definitely. So, what we're going to do here is I'm going to share um a a

whiteboard here. I love using whiteboards with my students just because they're interactive. We can

collaborate. But let's go ahead. In order to understand the process, we need to back out first into why does learning

or how does learning actually work. And I'm willing to bet that most of our students are defaulting to three

strategies when they study. And we actually know from research that those things don't work in their brain. And

it's the result of using these strategies that leads to the overwhelm, the frustration, the feelings of I'm not

good at this. Checking out from subjects completely. And so let's see if I can read your mind and everyone's minds out

there saying, "These are the strategies my students use, which are we one, they reread their textbook over and over

again. Two, they review their notes. Whatever that means, I'm assuming just means glancing over them, skimming them

over and over, or then they turn to flashcards and it's just this wrote memorization and repetition over and

over. But you see those always fail our students, especially our students who are neurody diverse, who experience any

type of executive function challenges because they're they're very low levels of learning. And so what's happening is

when they utilize these strategies, they just kind of sit up front in their working memory and then they just exit

out of their ears almost. It doesn't stick. And in fact, the way real learning happens is when we can take

information, manipulate it, and let it get stored here in the back of our brain where it builds up stronger and then we

pull it back to the front, work on it, push it back, and it goes back and forth, back and forth in this sort of

cycle. And so then today what I'd like to share is just the system that we're going to use to fight this so that way

we don't have the overwhelm, the frustration, the my kid hates studying or they're just completely checking out

from school. Okay. So can I repeat part of what you just said? The three things that people

often default to is reading over their notes, reading over their textbooks and that they think is studying, reading

over their notes, reading over their textbooks and flashcards. Yep. Exactly. I I'm with you. And I I

talk a lot of times when I'm talking about like flashcards or Quizlet. I'm like it is such it's I think Quizlet is

like something that it feels like you're doing something. It gives you the illusion that you're doing something.

But I talk about it like if you wanted to like lift weights and like let's say you're trying to get big biceps or

something. I'm looking for a pen, but like and you were to like take this little remote and like do curls with

this and you do like 200 curls and you're like it's not doing anything. I've been doing this for weeks. Yeah,

it's probably not doing much. And that's what I think of as a lot of these things that I think you use the term rope

memory or and working memory. Like these are very they're not getting it's not learning. It's not learning.

Right. And learning really is um broken up into different levels of complexity and how deep and how sticky it is in our

brains. And the deeper the stickier that it is, the easier it becomes for our students to retrieve it. That's the

scientific term for pull it out of their brains on test day. And when we use these strategies that unfortunately

everyone defaults to and unfortunately some students are just explicitly taught to reread their textbook to highlight

their notes and they actually don't translate to learning. So then on test day what happens is they're trying to

remember the Pythagorean theorem and they forget the first letter or number of the formula they need and suddenly

they can't remember the rest of it because it's all built on this very weak memory and we want to fight that. And so

a lot of our students actually don't hate studying. They don't hate learning. They don't hate math. What they hate is

their ability to not learn it. And so we've got to equip them to learn it and then I promise you it'll turn everything

around. You're speaking my language. Yeah. They don't they will say I hate math or I

hate this or that. It's the experience that they're having that's uncomfortable that's not working for them that they

ate. Right. Exactly. Exactly. So, we need to learn the system. That's

all we need. And then we're going to share it with them and then I'm going to give you all some tips to make sure that

you can ensure they're being pushed to use that system instead of defaulting to these strategies which feel easy and

feel productive but they're actually not. So, what I'm going to do here is I'm going to move over to sort of the

strategy in a nutshell. So, I've got a guide here and everyone is welcome to please go grab this guide. No email

signups, no nothing. You're just going to click a link that you see available and you're going to pull the guide as

well as a video. Um, it is definitely my goal, my mission that we make access as open as possible for people. Um, and so

I want you to share this widely with people. And I'll zoom in here as we work on it. But this is kind of an overview

of our four steps. These are our guides and all the modern little videos in the bottom corner. So you don't feel like

you have to remember everything here. Show your student the video and they can watch it and learn the strategy

directly, too. So I like to call this the study loop. That's sort of my version of a study cycle only because

roller coasters feel much more appropriate when we think about the experience of studying. Cycles feel very

boring. And at Alma Modern, we're very big on what is the students experience. And um, studying is very much like a

roller coaster. We see the ups and downs and the loops. And so we're playing into that here. So got our four steps. And

how do you feel size-wise? Do we think this is big enough for people to see? Yeah. Thank you for doing that. Yeah,

great. Good. So, step number one of our cycle here, I'm going to delete it for a grand reveal like Vanna White is

basically we need to teach what you know. So, this is what our students need to do. They just need to teach what it

is that they know about something instead of putting in more content, instead of doing more reading, more note

reviewing, more flashcards. No, we need to pause that. We need to say what's actually living in my brain. That is

step one of effective studying. So, we need to teach what they know. So, they're just going to pick one to three

concepts. I would say for our students who don't have an ability to sit and study for long periods of time,

encourage them to study one concept at a time. We don't need to study all 10 concepts. We don't need to go over the

whole study guide at once. just pick one thing and then explain it like they're teaching it to someone. Teaching someone

who doesn't really know much about it, but the trick is as they're explaining this concept, they can't peek at their

notes at their books. They're totally relying on what is sticking in their brain. There may not be much there to

teach and that's okay. This is a time to push your brain. And in fact, science shows that even if what you're teaching

isn't right, it still improves learning over if you were just taking in more content, just continuing reading.

Can you say that again? I want people to really hear that. Yes. Even if what you are explaining,

even if what you're teaching isn't correct, it's still more effective than just reading content over and over

again, which is shocking. And in addition to teaching, we're going to encourage them. Can you add visuals? Can

you add examples whenever you can practice lecturing? And so this brings me to a couple of tips that we can do as

parents, as educators to help them with this process. And the first thing is be a listening ear to them. Let them

explain a concept to you. Don't just nag them and say, "You should go study your math because you have a big test

tomorrow. Say, can you teach me that concept that you're going to be tested on tomorrow? I'm here to listen. Teach

me because I don't know anything about it." Right? And then the second thing we can do, I recognize we don't all have

time for that. And that's okay. But another great thing we can do is that we can provide them with supplies to make

this teaching process more fun. I feel like every student loves a good whiteboard. I don't know what it is

about writing on a whiteboard that just feels so good and so tactile to people. And so I would say provide them with

that if you're able to give them some markers, have them practice teaching it out loud. Maybe they've got an iPad. I

am a stylist for it or something so they get this feeling of actually teaching people something. And those are great

ways to encourage this as step one of our study cycle rather than opening up your textbooks first. Okay. Love it. And

I'm a big whiteboard person as is our our mutual friend Gretchen Wgner. Yes. Who sticks it on our face all the time.

I stick it on my face all the time. Right. But my follow-up question here is, and you don't have to go too deep

into this, but just can you speak briefly to for the parent that's watching that's thinking, well, is this

adaptable to different subject matter? Can you just give us a brief answer about that?

Yeah, absolutely. Whether we are working with our toddler on their alphabet, which is an experience I've had

recently, and it's painful. It's a painful process. When we say, "Can you sing me the alphabet back?" That's

exactly what you're doing. You are encouraging them to teach you something. You are helping them retrieve all the

things in their brain. And and when they get stuck on the letter G, and you're sitting there like, "Uh-huh." But we

don't give them the G. We just hold. We pause. We say, "You can do it." And then they say, "That's okay." And we keep

moving forward. Right? It's the exact same experience. But somewhere along the way, we drop off. teachers drop off and

we stop encouraging that practice. And so instead, we want to jump back in and say, "How do we do it again?" Whether

it's math, whether it's English, history, teach me what you know. And so instead of, "How was your day at school,

we say, what did you learn today in your world history class? I know you got a test next week that you were telling me

about. What did you learn today?" Well, what is Nazi Germany? What does that mean? I don't know if I've ever learned

that before. And allow them to teach back just a very short summary. And though they may be hesitant, especially

our older students, hesitant at first, over time, getting used to that type of question, they'll start to break down

and be more comfortable answering that type of question. So that's a great practice and way to build them up to

doing this. Excellent. Thank you. Thank you. Yeah. So, it's applicable it's it's about uh

it's applicable to different subject areas at different ages. And it's it's really about getting the brain trying to

summarize what they do know and not worrying about all the details, getting the brain moving and and trying to be in

the subject matter as much as they can or not as much as they can but with what they have in the moment.

Exactly. Exactly. We need to know what they know and that's important. Once we know what we know, this is where things

get a little bit more complex for our students and may take a little more prompting, a little more scaffolding.

And step two, let me share my screen again here, is that we need to There we go. We need to ask our students to spot

their gaps. Now there's this concept in learning science called metacognition which is where we think about our

thinking. So you may hear that word thrown around even here at to metacognition is how can we think about

what the way we think or what we know. And so this is an opportunity to reflect and self assess a little bit.

Yeah. Absolutely. So we are going to start comparing our explanations the way we taught things now to our textbook or

our notes. So now we're able to open up and compare what we were able to answer and we have to assess. Did I do this

pretty well? Was I kind of there or was I just totally off the mark or did I was my teaching session all of one sentence

because I really didn't know very much about this concept. And we want to encourage students to then color code

each of these concepts. Now, especially for those with any executive function challenges, we want to make sure that

we're making this as tangible as real as possible. And so, this is a technique that I love to use with my students if

we need to color code our concept awareness and understanding as red, yellow, or green. Red being you didn't

know it at all. Yellow was there was some decent understanding. Maybe you get a C or you know D or B if you took this

test and then green is like you got 85% of this or more. A great way we make this tangible for our students, we can

get red, yellow and green sticky notes and um have all three available and then students can write the concept on the

correct color sticky note and we put it on the wall, right? We are going to make an entire wall for them if we can all

about studying for math or for history. And it is so exciting when a student reassesses when they go through another

one of these loops and something that was previously red now gets to move to yellow and then they can throw the red

sticky note away and put it on a yellow sticky note and stick it on the wall and it makes school tangible. It makes

concepts real world for them and allows them to interact in a way that that other formats don't. It's such a it's a

great way to encourage them to constantly stop and assess how much do I know? What do I know? What do I not

know? And it becomes this fun challenge of can I move everything over to green at some point, but that requires we

assess what we know and then we assign it a color so we can move forward with it in the future in our future study

cycles. And I know some parents right now are probably thinking about this in terms of

like how long does it take type thing like should they be doing this for weeks before the exam, days before the exam,

the night before the exam. Um that that sort of a question is probably going through some people's minds. Can you

speak to that briefly? Yep. Great question. Now, I have just noticed with the many students I work

with, they wait until the night before an exam, as much as I don't want them to, that's when the bulk of the studying

happens. And what's so beautiful about the study loop is that whether we have three weeks to loop through study loops

over and over and over again, or we literally are cramming the night before an exam, which is especially common with

the college students I work with, it's almost this right of passage to stay up all night and study for something, which

I strongly urge every student not to do. But regardless, the study loop is way more effective. So, we can just stack

multiple loops back to back to back on each other. And if we got to do four or five of them, Yep. the night before.

It's way better than what they were going to do before anyways. I like that.

Yeah. So, what can we do to help our students spot the gaps? Because remember, this part is tricky. It's hard

for a student to say, "Well, that was actually red." It takes a lot of self-awareness. Takes an understanding

of the material and especially if there's any sort of um desire for a dopamine release. It was all green,

right? They just rate themselves green all the time. And so, we have to step in and say, "Well, no, let's let's have a

realistic assessment here." So, there are a couple things we can do. One is if you are able to listen to their study

session, you can say you rate what you think you got red, yellow, or green. And I'm going to rate it two and let's

compare our answers. If you are not able to listen to their study sessions, I'd encourage you to actually use AI,

especially with our high school and college students. Have them open up AI and just quickly prompt it and say, "I'm

going to explain to you World War II and I want to get your feedback on how well I explained this for my 10th grade

history exam." AI will rate you based on the grade level and say, "Oh, I see these holes. I would give you a red. I

would give you yellow. I give you green." It's a great way to go. The other thing we can do, again, providing

the materials. I love the sticky note option. Students really gravitate to that. If you've got a flash card kid,

now's not the time to say, "Throw out all the flash cards." There's a time and place for flash cards and there's a

better way to use flash cards. In fact, I've seen TIF's presentations on better ways to use flash cards. And so, let's

keep the flash cards, but maybe we buy them highlighters to turn them red, yellow, and green. Or we buy them

different colored flashcards or we're giving them tools to make sure they're able to color code. If you've got a

digital kid who just prefers all things digital, help them create an Excel sheet or a Google sheet and color code the

rows of all the concepts as red, yellow, or green. And then they can change the color when something is upgraded to a

new color. Yeah, thank you for saying that. Flashards are not inherently bad.

They're not. It is a tool, but it's also how you use the tool. So, thank you for clarifying

that. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. If I'm going to use a hammer to eat ice cream,

suddenly a hammer is not very effective, but it will work. It will work. Not the best tool for the

job sometimes. Yeah. So then once we've got that, we can move on to step number three, which

is now we need to build our knowledge. This is when we do the actual study part. You'll notice we're almost done

with our study loop here. And this is when what we traditionally think of with studying actually happens. So now that

we've taught what we know, we were able to spot the gaps in our students knowledge. Now they need to strengthen

it. They need to make things more sticky. So I mentioned earlier that the way learning actually happens is when we

bring things up from our long-term memory into our short-term working memory and we work with it. We

manipulate it and then it goes back into storage and back and forth and back and forth. So this first step was can I pull

things out. What do I know? And then I'm going to assess it and I'm going to work with it. That's what we're doing here

now. And so we're almost halfway through the way the brain actually learns. So in order to build our knowledge, remember I

mentioned we don't want to reread our textbook. We don't want to reread our notes and just do flashcards over and

over again. The reason is because these things they are focusing on what I have down here as the who, the what, and the

when. When did this happen? What happened? Who did it? what is the formula? Very shallow types of

questions. And as our students age up, as they get into about 10th grade, when grades start becoming really important

for college, if they take an honors or AP course or IB course, when they head off to college, no one cares about those

kinds of questions anymore. They're being assessed on much deeper things. Why did this happen? How is this

working? How is the formula working? And what if it never happened at all? What would be different then in the world,

for example. And these are much deeper types questions. And so what we need to do is we need to strengthen our

knowledge, strengthen our understanding by turning to videos. We need to do practice problems completely unassisted.

We're not going to follow along the guides with the practice problems and immediately check our answer. We're

going to push ourselves instead to work on things and to take in information in new ways, leveraging AI to say, "Can you

teach me this in a way different from the way my teacher or professor taught it to me? Can I create a visual and

start translating my knowledge in a new way?" I have one amazing student who she's very artistic and she gets big

rolls of butcher paper. She has these massive scrolls for each of her courses and it's so fascinating. It's like she's

opening a giant Torah or something. as she's scrolling through to the right section of her notes. She rolls up the

butcher paper and what she does is after class, she comes home and translates what she learned onto this massive

scroll in art and she just drawing mind maps and arrow. It's amazing. Amazing. That's brilliant. That's one of my

favorite things to teach is drawing your notes. But selfishly, like I do that myself. I have these big giant things

taped up on the wall and I'm such a visual person. Mhm.

I mean, everybody is in ways, but yeah, I love that. For those listening, I love it. When I talk about flashcards, I talk

about, you know, the one best what kids often do is they'll write like the word or thing on one side and then the answer

on the other. And I want to see if they're doing that like a bizarrely crazy amazing drawing, fun, colorful,

weird, symbolized, whatever like thing on the note card. It's not the note card, but it's the the time that your

brain is spent like playing with the information. But I love this because what I can can see with this in terms of

studying is having that big thing on the wall and adding to it every once and it's just like hanging out there, but

every time you walk by it, you're seeing it. Just the reinforcement that's happening with that with no effort is

studying. Right. Exactly. I think that's my favorite thing in the world right now.

Yeah. Totally. Me, too. And it's so effective, especially for our kids with EF challenges because we need to see

things in new ways. If we get down to the truth and the unfortunate reality of a lot of the schools and and education

our students are getting, schools just don't have the capacity to serve every student exactly the way they need to be

served. I know there's unfortunately a lot of sort of villainizing of, oh, the teacher doesn't give my kid what they

need, and I'm going to say, wait, in the real world, a teacher has a lot of responsibility. Our colleges have a lot

of responsibility, and they have to play to the masses. And unfortunately, the the paths that are often chosen to reach

the broadest number of students doesn't often include our kids, our students that we care so much about who see the

world, who see school, who learn just a little bit differently than the others. And this is their opportunity to say, "I

love visuals. No, I I love writing. No, I love creative projects. I love engineering. I'm going to squeeze

whatever I'm learning through that lens, and this is my opportunity to tailor my learning, to take ownership of my

learning, and build knowledge in a way that actually works for me in my brain." And that's what makes the step so

exciting. And it allows you to finally say, "No, you are your own teacher. You can go ahead and take all of the great

ideas that you're getting in school and you're going to adapt them so that they work for you." That's why the step is so

so important for us. Excellent. Love it. So, what can um our parents do? Just a couple little quick

tips again. First is do something called body doubling, co-working. If you've never heard of those concepts before, it

means just you're going to work on this, I'm going to work on this. Let's do it in proximity to each other. Plenty of

research to show that that encourages students to actually study, to actually get things done. We can do it with

homework, studying, etc. And it's very motivating for both us and for them, which is a nice perk.

Do you do body doubling? I do all the time with my students. Some of our sessions are literally just body

doubling sessions. You do it in your personal life, like with your business stuff, cuz I'm this

is like so key to my uh work. I do. And I think it's it's a great way to overcome friction when we say, "Oh, I

should do this, but I've got these million other things I'd rather do instead." But if you can set an

intention and have someone hold you accountable and you sit together and work on it, it's why exactly why when

someone gets a gym membership and then you never go, but if your friend gets a gym membership, you're more likely to go

because you'll go together. Same concept here. And then we've got the other idea here, which is let's normalize asking

for help. I think that there's so much hesitation around going to tutoring. There's stigmas attached, right, with

getting outside support, visiting your teacher to ask for help, going to professor's office hours, and let's

encourage them to ask for help when we've got time. And the reason that's falling under step number three is

because who better to help them build their knowledge in new ways and people who are great at that subject already

and they may have a wealth of options available to them. I got to run learning centers in colleges for a long time and

unfortunately the students who most needed to be there for tutoring and for coaching they didn't show up and they

didn't show up because of the stigma attached with asking for help sometimes. And so if we can sortly subtly weave in

ways to normalize asking for help and making tutoring just a normal part of the student experience. And when it

comes time to build your knowledge, those experts in these areas are going to be great ways to share and teach us

content in new ways than the way we get it from our textbook or from our teachers. Yeah, I'm I'm so aligned with

you and I'm going to say on this one just to really reiterate when I'm talking to families, especially college

students. I think that I have either three or four things that I always say to college students that like of the

main things like I say the the same principles to all students but for college students there are three or four

things that come up but one of them is that that self- advocacy piece which I equate with asking for help and that I

say that you know it's a really difficult conversation sometimes when when you're working with a student or

family and and they're not willing to go to office hours and it's like I've just seen it play out so many times it's

predictable but if they just go to office hours just go to the writing center just like and own it be like I'm

here for me I'm not here for my parents I'm here to as much out of this thing as I can. Like reframe it, you know, and

and and really go ask for help all the time. Like it's a fun thing to do cuz it actually is cool and fun and

interesting. But it it's so it is a key if you you struggle with school and you're a

college student, it is a critical key as far as I'm concerned to success. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. Couldn't agree

more. And I'm sure all the learning centers out there in the world are saying, "Yes, absolutely. Please come

because we need more people keeping us busy. Um it's just not enough students to take advantage of something,

especially in college, you're already paying for, so please go use it." Final step here, we are going to reflect and

reset. Now, I want us to always end our sessions, encourage our students to review what worked from this time

studying. And what still feels shaky? What do I need to do next time? What needs another loop? Should I target all

of my yellows and move them into green? And then after that, should I move all of my reds into yellow and then into

green? Right? Having a plan for what's happening next time and when is that session going to happen? Because when we

can make it tangible, when we can articulate it, when we can maybe put it in a calendar, if our students are using

calendars or if nothing else, make a note of it and set it on top of our notes for ourselves or our homework.

next time study this concept then it's going to help make it real for us in our minds and then we are deciding what to

do and when to do it and then finally we're going to take a break and we're going to forget about school and forget

about learning at least for a little bit because our brains need time to recharge and to absorb and to organize

information and this is sort of the last step of how I explained how the way the brain learns we see up here we are

retrieving what we know we're pulling it out of our long-term memory even if it's not very good even if it's kind of weak

that's okay we're going to assess that now that we've got it up in our working memory we're going to build our

knowledge we're going to layer it we're going to add more context new formats of learning things new types of practice

going deeper into why how if and then finally we are resting and That's allowing our brain to push it back even

stronger, stickier, bigger this time into our long-term memory. And the more we can do this, the more loops we can

have, the easier it's going to be for our students to pull out the knowledge on test day. And we're not going to see

as much overwhelm, as much anxiety, as much I hate this subject. I'm always bad at this subject or I studied and studied

and I never get a good grade. Those things start to slowly melt away the better and better we get at using this

kind of cycle. Now, you mentioned the word backfire and what you and I were talking about in the

pre-in, but you were talking more about the common study strategies that backfire, but I can imagine at this time

something in particular backfiring, and I want to ask you about that. So when a parent whose intention is to be helpful

but by this time you know everybody's brain is tired and your child is reflecting and you

notice that the reflection is inaccurate. Is this the time to point out to your child how inaccurate their

reflection is or how unrealistic it is? No. Please no. Not yet. Is that a fair question?

That is a fair question and it's rhetorical but and it's coming from a great place

though right like as parents as educators their success is our top priority. We want that for them so

badly. And so our tendency is to jump in and say yeah well I don't think it was as great as you thought it was and

there's nothing more deflating, demotivating. Instead, what we want to do is allow them to own their own self-

assessment. Right? That is metacognition. That is their thinking about their thinking, not your thinking

about their thinking. And we're going to allow them to own that. We're going to allow them to sit with that. And next

time we come in with all of these little tips that I gave us, right? And I've still got a couple more that I've got to

uncover. All these tips and we slowly layer them in so it becomes stronger and stronger. The first time you explain

this to them or you give them this guide and they watch my video, they're not going to do it very well. They may do

step number one and then stop. That's okay. That's where our tips come in handy to keep encouraging them to do it.

That's what ongoing coaching, ongoing parenting, ongoing tutoring is all about is how do we continue to introduce the

strategy and every time it just gets 1% stronger, 1% better usage. This is not an overnight solution for anybody. It

takes time. It takes practice. And so we want to give them the time and space to adopt this, to translate it, and to

internalize it for them. One of the secrets of this is that it's not about the accurate recall at this

time or reflection at this time. It is about just the process of reflection. And so often if we bite our tongues,

they will self-correct and say, "Actually, I wasn't being or they might say it the next day, which is still an

amazing win." Like it's it's a but it's not even still not even about that. It is just about the practice the going

through the motions of of trying to reflect and and really as the adult in the room keeping your eye on the prize

which is it's about this process. It's not about making sure that they're reflecting on everything accurately.

It's about building the skill to reflect. So I'm going to say that again. It's not about the accuracy of the

self-reflection. It's about building the skill. And it seems for the at all that it's like but we're reflecting so that

we can be realistic. It's like be patient like it comes like you know with with practice. So please I I interrupted

you here. No, please. And I I think it's a great it's a great analogy. It's the same way we would want our manager at

work, our supervisor, if we've got one of those, to be patient with us as we are slowly learning something and not

expected to do something perfectly or get an evaluation the first time we've done something. Um, and over time

allowing us to figure it out. And similarly, our students want that same autonomy. That's what they want. So,

just a couple little tips here with breaks. It is so easy for students, especially our highly motivated

students, the students who get caught up and no, I need to get an A. I need to get an A. I've got to sit here. I've got

to study and study and study to teach them that no breaks are actually a good opportunity for our brains to reset, to

recharge, and internalize and organize. Take a break with them. If you notice that you haven't seen them in an hour

because they've been studying, they've got their head down and they're just so hyperfixated on studying and they think

they can't look up. Say, "Hey, let's let's grab a coffee. Let's take a quick walk down the street, right? Five, 10

minutes, just a little recharge getting them out of their environment." Doing that with them, that's a productive work

habit for any of us. So, it's good for us to align our brakes in many ways anyways. And then also help them to

strategize. So, ask them what is your what are you going to study next? Prompting them to remember, oh yeah, I

need to plan. It doesn't doesn't stop here. I've got to keep thinking about the next loop, right? These things stack

on top of each other. And so, just prompting them to do that is a good reflective practice that we can all

benefit from. So that is our full study loop in a nutshell and remember you can grab this you don't have to memorize it

all and then watch the video which is like a three-minute explanation of the study loop nice and studentfriendly so

they can learn it too. Thank you Ed. So um I have two follow-up questions for you. One is uh I have a

final I have this question and then my final question which I ask every speaker. Um my first question is is that

is there anything that you feel like you left out that you wanted to cover? Yes, there's so much. And even with this

I feel like I probably overdid it a bit only because I care and I get so excited and nerd out over these things. I

probably could have cut it in half. Um but yes, there's a ton of things I left out. Things like you mentioned we all

love learning visually. That's true. That's called dual coding theory and our brains are hardwired that way or how

long should these study sessions be and what happens when a um when my student hits a total wall and they can't

continue learning in new ways. There's so many other strategies we could cover but we can think of this as a good

baseline strategy. It's why it's card number one in our survive exams collection because it is the foundation

that we can layer so many things on top of. Okay. And then my last last question is

uh to the parent that's watching right this very second and as we're recording this put putting our minds in thinking

about the people watching this and that there there's a lot of parents that are coming into us that are really

struggling and really looking for answers and um really concerned for the parent that's in that space right now.

What's the most important message you hope they leave with? Just your heart's message of forgetting about executive

function or studying or anything. Just your heart's message to that parent. Yeah, I will say first off, you're not

alone. It's really easy to feel like every other parent you talk to, their kid is earning straight A's and they're

in all of these activities. And no, you're not alone. For so many families, so many students, struggles, especially

around studying and motivation and confidence in school are real life. And I would also encourage you to have grace

with this process. And because I come from the college space, I can reflect back and say it's okay if in sixth grade

in history they earn a C, right? If that is what they were capable of and that was where we were at the time, it is

just an assessment of where they were at the time. It is not going to affect their ability to become the president or

an astronaut or something someday. As long as we're being proactive and any parent listening to this does care and

they're being proactive because they're here. They're here to learn. They're here to grow. I'm not concerned about

their students. They're going to get the help and the support they need as long as we just continue on this path and all

we can do is just keep taking strategies, sharing them with our students and teaching them how to adapt

themselves and the world around them so that they gel and mix a little bit better.

Excellent. Well, thank you so much, Edward. And this is your site here if I can get it popped up. alma moodern.com

with Edward Cornado the third and third. My name is Seth Perllin and we're here at Tifos Executive Functions.com. You

know that because you signed up but if you like what we're doing, please share the URL with your friends today so that

people in groups can find us. People come join us literally the entire weekend all the way up until Monday

night people join us for the first time. So please share it around and help people find us. Thank you Edward so much

for being here and thank you parents for everything you do for your kiddos. Thank you. Bye.