Helping Children Develop Effective Self-Monitoring and Self-Regulation
Effective self-monitoring and self-regulation empower children to take ownership of their learning. You may not know it, but those skills are part of a healthy executive functioning system. In this article, I explain some basics of executive functioning as key to understanding self-monitoring and self-regulation. Then I provide tips for developing these important skills that I have honed over thousands of hours of my highly successful therapy practice.
What is Executive Functioning?
In the simplest terms—and the way I explain it to the kids I’m working with—executive functioning is the boss of what we do. Like an orchestra conductor, or the director of a play.
Imagine a play or musical performed on a stage. Picture the experience—entering the theater, sitting and waiting for the curtain to rise while the orchestra tunes up then plays some tidbits to give you a taste of what’s coming. The lights dim in the hall, the curtain rises, the stage lights up, the scenery gives you a clue of where you are and the time period of the play all before a single actor speaks a word. Then the actors speak. They interact, they exit and re-enter the stage, sometimes they change clothes. They make us laugh and cry.
As a casual audience member, a normal person on the street who goes to a play once every few years, I would immerse myself in the experience, absorb the story as it unfolds in front of me. I would probably remember the story and the characters—did I laugh? Cry? Was it believable? Memorable?
A theater fan might discuss the performance in more depth afterward. Maybe I saw the same play produced by someone else. How did it compare? Were the best lines delivered effectively? Which actors did I prefer? Did the costumes and set enhance the experience or detract from it?
There’s a person behind how it all ties together that most of us don’t even think about, especially if watching the play was an enjoyable experience. The timing, the way the actors work together, the way the lighting and sound complement one another—all of that is the product of directing. While everyone in the audience experiences the effects of the director’s work, only a few can see it well enough to identify it. It takes a certain level of knowledge and experience to see the hand of the director.
Before rehearsals had even started, the director was figuring out what she wanted the complete picture to look like, who goes where and who says what with what timing. What the emotions are behind the lines the actors recite. How to use the lighting to help deliver the message of each moment in the play. In the weeks and months of rehearsal leading up to the event you see on stage, the director was telling the actors, “Now, you enter from stage right. And then when Bob runs on from stage left, your characters are surprised to see each other, and you pull out your swords.”
Executive functioning (EF) is like the director. The director doesn’t do the acting on the stage or play the music or focus the lighting. The director is not the “doer” of the tasks. In the same way, the executive functions of our clients’ brains don't do the tasks with which our clients are struggling. Executive functions don’t do the math or process language or letters or produce speech, but they tell us when to do those actions, in what order, in what kind of environment, and how.
Executive functioning isn’t the doer of the task, it’s the “cuer.” It’s the part of our brains that helps us recognize when a task is necessary or appropriate and kicks it off. (Okay, I made up the word “cuer,” but it’s the best word for it. Catchy, isn’t it? I’m going to stick with it.)
Like the director of a musical or a play, executive functioning is usually invisible. When it goes well, we aren’t necessarily aware of it, even when it happens in our own heads.
When executive functions aren’t working well, it shows, but it is not immediately obvious what the source of the dysfunction is. We’ve all seen a poor performance in a movie or play from an actor we usually like. What’s your first thought when that happens? Geez, Tom Hanks must have missed his coffee that day. Or maybe that just wasn’t the part for him. Sometimes, though, it’s directing decisions that make the acting look bad. Similarly, executive dysfunction may masquerade as a poor actor in speech, language, reading, writing, math... many activities that educators, speech-language pathologists, occupational therapists, psychologists and other professionals target daily.
What Does Executive Functioning Look Like in a Learning Environment?
Let’s envision what this might look like in real life. Picture a classroom. It’s Monday morning, the first day back from winter break. The teacher gives her students an assignment: write a paragraph about what they did over winter break.
Imagine what goes on in children’s heads even before the teacher finishes describing the assignment. There’s Carla, who immediately starts envisioning her life over the winter break. She pictures herself playing games (and can feel herself getting mad again thinking about her brother cheating), eating snacks (Mmmm! She can still taste the yummy Oreos!), and visiting with family. Not only that, as she re-experiences her winter break in her mind, she makes a mental checklist of her activities. Then she mentally maps out her steps to complete the assignment and estimates how long each step might take. All of this happens in a matter of seconds, or even milliseconds.
Mark is sitting next to Carla. Mark is playing with his sock. There is a string unraveling that has him distracted. He might think about his winter break activities, he might not. He is not mentally mapping out his ideas, and he is definitely not thinking through how he will complete the assignment.
You don’t have to be an expert to guess who will succeed at the task with ease and who will struggle. It’s easy to imagine what will happen a half hour later: Carla will read her paragraph to the class with pride, and Mark will shrug and try to hide under his desk, embarrassed that he only has a few random words scribbled on his page.
Success begins before any of the students in that classroom put their pencils to paper.
Cultivating Executive Functions IS developing Self-Monitoring and Self-Regulation
Now that you have a clearer picture of how executive functioning is foundational to all learning, I want to make a very important point about what we’re helping our kids with when we work on developing their executive functioning.
When we address executive functioning, we cultivate self-leadership and independence. We develop self-monitoring and self-regulation.
We are cultivating self-leadership because we are developing an internal behavior. We are helping our clients develop the Boss, the Director inside their own heads that recognizes and cues activities and behavior in all aspects of their lives. As speech-language pathologists, parents, and educators, we sometimes work on specific skills, activities, and external behavior. We can teach a child to read a word or make a specific sound—that is important and rewarding. But when we also work on executive functioning as we coach them, we are tackling the inner workings of their brain that make it difficult for them to learn that word or sound on their own. Our goal should be more than tackling that word or sound. Our goal should be that the next time they encounter the new word or sound, they will be more prepared to learn it on their own and/or self-correct their own mistakes.
When we focus on executive functioning, we make their brains fertile ground for learning from the input they get from the different parts of their own body, from their environment, from other people, and from the symbolic world of books, toys, and computers.
When we address the executive functions that are foundational to how our clients learn and interact with the world—when we help them exercise the executive functions that order and make sense of everything else they do—we are helping them become more independent.
Here are Some Tips for Developing a Child’s “Boss” or “Director” in Their Own Brain.
Tip #1: Know that Telling Kids What to Do Doesn’t Help Develop Self-Monitoring and Self-Regulation
In fact, the more you direct a child to do something (or to stop doing it), the more it may impede the development of their self-awareness.
Think about it. If I tell a child “Pick that up,” or “Pay attention,” or “Sit still,” does it help her notice anything about herself or her environment? No.
Self-awareness typically doesn’t come from other people observing our actions and commenting on them. It has to come from within, from our own thoughts! It has to be internal. Otherwise we would always rely on someone else to tell us what we should be doing.
Tip #2: Use Reflexive Questions to Focus on and Model Self-Awareness
Reflexive Questioning is a key part of my practice and my 4-step therapy technique for addressing executive functioning. (You can learn more about my 4-step therapy technique in my online educational community!) Getting started on this is SO easy, and many people see results almost immediately. It’s not just for therapists–parents and educators of all kinds use it. I use it so much at home that now my whole family uses reflexive questioning, too. Yes, even my kids.
Some really great starting points are just about raising the child’s own awareness of the situation:
What activity are we doing right now?
Is what you’re doing part of the activity?
What do you think might happen if you do that?
With practice, the child will learn to ask the questions herself. So many times, after practicing this with clients for a while, they’ve told me, “I heard your voice in my head asking, ‘What activity are we doing right now?’ and I knew what to look out for!” Or I’ll even hear them asking themselves the questions out loud.
I have a great YouTube video all about reflexive questioning.
Tip #3: Provide a Positive Environment that Builds Self-Confidence and Self-Trust
Self-confidence and self-trust are critical to a child’s ability to self-monitor and self-regulate. Think of it this way: If we are developing the boss in the child’s brain, the child needs to feel like he can trust that boss and what it tells him, right?
One thing I LOVE about reflexive questioning is that there are no wrong answers. How is that? When a child answers a reflexive question, the best responses are:
Praise
Another question
You can use either or both, regardless of whether the child’s answer is “correct” or not.
Imagine this conversation:
Adult: What activity are we doing right now?
Child: Eating lunch.
Adult: Great observation. Is playing with the cat under the table part of eating lunch?
Child: No.
Adult: That’s right. Where do you think your hands and feet should be for eating lunch?
Child: My feet should be in front of my chair and my hands should be on my sandwich.
Adult: Great! Can you show me?
Isn’t that a much more positive experience than repeatedly telling the child to stop playing with the cat? It helps build self-trust and develops that internal awareness.
Tip #4: Model Detailed Visualization
One of my go-to techniques with reflexive questioning is to describe to a child what I’m visualizing and ask her whether what I’m describing is what she sees in her head. Say we’re talking through the steps to complete a homework assignment:
Adult: What do you see yourself doing first here?
Child: Doing the homework.
Adult: When you say ‘doing the homework,’ I picture you at your desk writing. Is there anything you need to do before that?
Child: Go to my desk!
Adult: That’s a good start. What else?
Child: Get my homework out of my bag.
Adult: Great. What else?
Child: Um…
Adult: Do you have something to write with?
Child: No…
Adult: What do you see yourself doing about that?
Child: Getting a pencil out of my desk!
Adult: Great!
Visualization is key to developing executive functioning skills. You can learn more about it in my online educational community.
Tip # 5: Encourage Self-Evaluation After the Fact
When a child completes an activity, use reflexive questioning to encourage him to self-evaluate. Here are some questions to ask:
How did that go?
Would you do it that way again?
What would you do differently next time?
I hope these tips help you empower the child in your life to self-monitor and self-regulate!
