I. General Information
School Name: Nakusp Secondary School
School District: SD#10 Arrow Lakes
Inquiry Team Members: Julia Flesaker: julia.flesaker@sd10.bc.ca, Jaime Sing: jaime.sing@sd10.bc.ca
Inquiry Team Contact Email: julia.flesaker@sd10.bc.ca
II. Inquiry Project Information
Type of Inquiry: NOIIE Case Study
Grade Levels Addressed Through Inquiry: Secondary (8-12)
Curricular Areas Addressed: Science
Focus Addressed: Other: Executive Functioning
In one sentence, what was your focus for the year? How can I support my students in the development of organization, planning, and task initiation skills?
III. Spirals of Inquiry Details
Scanning: Based on my observations and submitted work, science nine students are happy to come to class and learn. They actively participate in hands-on activities, class discussions and exploring current issues. While they clearly enjoy the topics and lab work, many students struggle to maintain focus when learning becomes difficult, often having challenges with task initiation, planning, and organizing their work.
In my scanning process, I used the First Peoples’ Principles of Learning. This inquiry aligned with the principles that learning requires patience and time, and that learning involves the consequences of one’s actions. These principles focus on the importance of supporting students in developing resilience and understanding that growth often comes through sustained effort.
I still noticed a tension common in high schools: the pressure to cover a large amount of content can shift the focus away from developing competencies. This reinforced the need to balance coverage with learning experiences that allow students the time and space to build perseverance and understanding.
Focus: I noticed that though my students were actively participating and interested, they struggled when learning became challenging. These struggles were particularly evident during more complex labs when students were reluctant to initiate the work and struggled to plan next steps. I wanted students to appreciate that learning doesn’t need to be easy or immediate, and that there is value in the learning journey. Through hands-on challenges that progressively became more complex, I hoped to give students the time and structure needed to build perseverance and their confidence in trusting their own learning process.
Hunch: I do not see the need for the development of executive functioning skills as being directly caused by school practices or the learning environment alone. However, I recognize that these skills are often assumed to be in place by the time students reach high school, when in reality, many students are still developing them.
I asked students to complete a questionnaire (Dawson and Guare Executive Skills Questionnaire – Teen Version) to help identify specific areas for growth. This provided insight into where students may be experiencing challenges and allowed me to begin considering how I can more intentionally support the development of skills such as organization, planning, and task initiation within the classroom.
New Professional Learning: I attended a professional development day with Laura Munoz, where I was introduced to several resources, including The Scrappy Teacher, A Space to Speak, and DeclarativeLanguage.com, with a particular focus on building transferable science skills. In addition, I collaborated with our Learning Resource teacher to gather further resources and practical recommendations to support student learning. This collaboration helped provide strategies I could implement in my classroom.
Taking Action: Electricity labs required troubleshooting, trial and error, and flexible thinking. Students were encouraged to engage in problem-solving despite being uncomfortable with failure. They were given several blocks and opportunities to advance as far as they could with the challenges, and however far they got was considered a success. The electricity unit provided an ideal situation to build perseverance because circuits frequently do not work on the first attempt. In many cases, the equipment was old or varied, or the circuit had been constructed incorrectly, requiring students to investigate and revise their approach.
When students completed a successful circuit, there was immediate gratification of a working lightbulb, motor or buzzer. Circuit building activities touch on several executive functioning skills, including task initiation, working memory, emotional regulation, sustained attention, planning, and cognitive flexibility. Students needed to plan for materials, remember the combinations they had tried, monitor their progress, and adjust their thinking when something did not work as expected. These activities had clear outcomes, which helped students stay focused and motivated.
Circuit building tasks were given in a gradual release model with whole, peer, and individual tasks with step-by-step instructions. When something didn’t work, students reflected with peers on how to move forward. These challenges generally led to a noisy dynamic environment, which further challenged their ability to remain on task.
Checking: The electricity unit was a success, and students demonstrated increases in several executive functioning skills that carried over into the next unit on Earth Systems. I used the Dawson and Guare Executive Skills Questionnaire – Teen Version, before and after the electricity unit. Below are my results:
- Skill Progress
- Response Inhibition Same
- Working Memory Increase
- Emotional Control Increase
- Sustained Attention Increase
- Task Initiation Increase
- Planning/Prioritization Increase
- Organization Same
- Time Management Increase
- Goal Directed Persistence Decrease
- Flexibility Increase
- Metacognition Decrease
I am happy with these results and would like to develop further activities in other units that support a similar troubleshooting process. There are many executive functioning skills, and I would not focus on all of them next time. More meaningful activities intentionally targeting specific skills would be more understandable by the students and more easily addressed by the teacher.
Reflections/Advice: Executive functioning doesn’t come naturally to most students and needs to be taught or supported throughout their education. This inquiry opened my eyes to the struggle that students have not only with the curricular competencies, but also with foundational learning skills needed to demonstrate understanding. Without executive functioning skills, everything else in the education system is that much more challenging.
My thinking has shifted. Executive functioning goes beyond helping students organize their binders and homework or studying strategies. I will no longer assume every student has these skills in place and will intentionally embed executive functioning into my teaching. Executive functioning is a core part of learning, not just an add-on, that all students need to improve their learning and experience at school.