The Most Effective Executive Functioning Curriculum For Schools

EF skills are critical to success at school and continue to grow in importance through adulthood. When predicting student outcomes – from elementary school through professional life – researchers have found that EF skills outweigh academic abilities as indicators of success.

While EF skills are implicitly in demand across all areas of life, they can fly under the radar of our awareness. When a student’s EF skills are overextended, symptoms of strain manifest as content gaps, anxiety and frustration towards schoolwork, or motivational difficulties.

Even if we recognize EF as the cause of a student’s challenges, it can be difficult to teach these skills in a way that works for the student, particularly those skills that seem most natural to us.

Despite these challenges, EF skills are in fact quite trainable and a robust set of techniques exist to successfully support their development, even for many students who are frustrated by standard organization tips and tricks.

In this curriculum, developed by Harvard & Stanford alumni, we share not just the proven techniques that support Executive Function development, but also the principles behind them. In doing so, we provide the latitude, options, and language you will need to adapt to each student’s unique level, motivations, and needs.

Our curriculum includes everything you need to teach your students essential executive functioning skills and apply them to current classwork. Scripted lessons, ready-to-use resources, and easy integration with common education software (like Clever and ClassLink) means minimal prep time for teachers. Pre-assessments and individual student trackers mean maximum personalization and efficacy for students.

Our curriculum is based on optimizing learning pathways and includes emphasis on skill transfer across multiple subject areas. Our modular curriculum can be used to target the root causes of each student’s unique challenges. Applicable for classrooms, home schools, SPED classrooms, and self-paced learning periods – our self-paced PDs, turn-key teacher materials, and access to additional online resources mean minimal prep time for teachers and easy integration into any classroom.

To truly address students’ academic & behavioral challenges, teachers must first understand the root cause of their struggle.

Most often, this root cause is underdevelopment or dysregulation in the underlying systems, skills, and processes that support learning rather than just the content being tested. Once identified, the root cause can be targeted and the challenge can often be ALLEVIATED.

In a typical EF development training, the skillset has been broken down into as many as 40 sub-skills which can work together or separately. In our curriculum, these skills are organized into 4 primary categories based on the steps inherent in completing any task:

We use the acronym “PICL” (pronounced pickle) to refer to these steps. Plugging sub-skills into the PICL framework helps us to consistently express the relevance of EF skills, like organization and reflection, to the completion of tasks for our students. This helps students see EF skills as an integral part of completing any task rather than disconnected, extraneous processes completed at the request of their instructor. PICL helps students remember what to do throughout a task:

Axiom Learning conducted a multi-year reserach pilot funded by the Gates Foundation where our curriculum supported students that were in the bottom third of standardized testing. Our research included intervention and control groups drawn from the same population of students. Over time, our research expanded from a single school to 15 schools in California and Washington state. As you can see below, the results of our study were significant and noteworthy.

Standardized test scores in Math increased 8.1% more than the control group:

Standardized test scores in Reading increased 8.3% more than the control group:

After just one semester, Executive Functioning increased an average of 21.8 percentile points. By the end of the year, every student in the intervention group improved, with the average student scoring 1.5 full standard deviations higher than at the start of the year!

ELL students in particular saw an average increase of 34.3 percentile points in their Executive Functioning:

In addition to the academic results, the intervention showed positive changes in student behavior. School administrators credited the Axiom program with increased attendance, decreased behavioral issues, and most notably the attrition rate falling to ZERO.

Our team of experts is standing by to answer any questions and help you bring the curriculum to your school. Please fill out the form below and someone will get back to you as soon as possible.