Imagine asking students to locate the article you handed them yesterday. One student opens a binder, turns to a color-coded tab, and finds it in fifteen seconds. A classmate takes three minutes to find the right binder, with crumpled papers sticking out in every direction. Both students might be able to read and understand the handout equally well; however, their executive functioning, the skills involved in planning, organization, prioritizing, time management, self-regulation, and even just how to get started, can make a significant difference in their success.
The transition to middle school places new demands on students’ executive functioning. Students often have to move from one classroom to another, navigate multiple teachers and digital platforms, manage a more complex schedule, and begin taking greater responsibility for their learning. At the same time, they are still developing the cognitive and emotional systems that support executive functioning. As Mitch Weathers writes in Executive Functions for Every Classroom, “It is unfair to expect students to thrive in new learning environments, those full of unspoken expectations, without equipping them with the skills and habits they will need to succeed” (p. 97).
That raises an important question for us as middle level educators: Are we expecting independence from students before we have explicitly taught them how to be independent?
Independence Must Be Taught
We often tell middle school students to manage their time, keep track of assignments, plan ahead, or advocate for themselves. These are reasonable expectations, but expecting them does not teach students the skills they need to meet them.
Instead, we can strive to make the process and the thinking behind it visible. We can model how to look at the final deadline, identify the intermediate steps required, estimate how long each will take, and work backwards to establish reasonable checkpoints. With practice, students can help establish those checkpoints and eventually develop their own plans.
The goal is not to organize students, but to teach students how to organize independently.
The Successful Middle School: This We Believe describes an empowering middle school as one that facilitates environments in which students take responsibility for their own learning. Independence, then, should not mean removing support and hoping students just figure it out. It means intentionally developing the skills that allow students to assume increasing ownership for their own learning.
Make the Invisible Visible
Many executive functioning skills become nearly invisible once we have mastered them. Adults routinely prioritize tasks, estimate time to completion, identify when we are distracted, and adjust accordingly without thinking too much about the process.
Young adolescents need to see and hear the thinking if they are going to learn to do it for themselves.
A teacher might think aloud: “This assignment looks overwhelming, so I’m going to figure out what I need to do first.” Another might model what happens when a plan doesn’t work: “I thought that this would take 20 minutes, but it took 35. What should I change next time?”
These moments turn misconceptions and missteps into opportunities for learning. Weathers argues that teachers should identify and celebrate students’ misconceptions because doing so brings clarity to the thinking that needs to be developed (p. 61). The same principle applies to executive functioning. When students reveal that they cannot estimate time, initiate a task, organize materials, or recover from frustration, we identify skills to teach, not behaviors to correct.
Build Structures and Gradually Release Them
Consistency matters, especially when students are navigating multiple teachers and systems. Common routines for organizing materials, naming digital files, recording assignments, or preparing for class can reduce unnecessary cognitive demands. If students know what to expect, they can spend more of their mental energy on learning.
A visual timer can help students develop a sense of how long a task takes. A checklist can help a student remember the steps in a process. Chunking a larger assignment can make a seemingly daunting task manageable. These supports are valuable, but the ultimate goal is for students to internalize the process.
The progression might look like this: We do it together. You do it with support. You do it on your own. You teach someone else how to do it. That gradual transfer of responsibility is where scaffolding becomes empowerment.
Common structures should not be about making every classroom look the same. Rather, they can provide a predictable foundation that allows students to spend less energy figuring out how school works and more energy learning how to manage themselves within it.
Give Students Opportunities to Practice Productive Struggle
Executive functioning is not developed in a single lesson or through a single planner, checklist, or organizational system. Students need repeated opportunities to practice across contexts, with adults reinforcing the same underlying habits even when the particular tools or routines differ.
Perhaps the most difficult part of developing independence is knowing when to help and when to step back. When a student forgets materials, misses a deadline, or becomes overwhelmed, it is often easier for the adult to solve the immediate problem. But if we continually rescue students from the consequences of underdeveloped executive function, we may inadvertently deprive them of opportunities to practice those very skills.
The alternative is not to abandon students to struggle alone; it is to make the struggle productive. We can ask: What happened? What support would help you build a better system? The goal is not perfection. It is progress: students increasingly recognizing their own needs and developing strategies to meet them.
This is where the challenging and empowering aspects of a successful middle school intersect. We want students to experience genuine responsibility, but we also want to provide the responsive support that makes that responsibility attainable. The appropriate level of support may change from student to student, and for the same student from day to day or class to class, but the goal remains the same: gradually increasing ownership.
Ultimately, executive functioning is much more than completed assignments or organized binders. It is about agency. As The Successful Middle School: This We Believe reminds us, empowering young adolescents means creating environments where students take increasing ownership of their own learning. Our role as middle level educators, then, is not simply to expect independence, but to intentionally develop it – to provide instruction, structures, practice, and productive struggle that make genuine independence possible. If we do that well, we help students develop the habits, confidence, and agency to navigate learning environments beyond a particular class, teacher, or system. That is the real promise of teaching executive functioning: not simply helping students manage middle school but helping them learn to manage themselves.
Want to talk more or share what’s working in your classroom? Join members of AMLE’s Teacher Leaders committee at the Teacher Talks Roundtable on Wednesday, October 14 at 4 pm EST to discuss how to help students build executive functioning skills. Register here.
References
Bishop, P.A. & Harrison, L.M. (2021). The Successful Middle School: This We Believe. Association for Middle Level Education.
Gamino, J. F., Frost, C., Riddle, R., Koslovsky, J., & Chapman, S. B. (2022). Higher-order executive function in middle school: Training teachers to enhance cognition in young adolescents. Frontiers in Psychology, 13, 867264. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.867264
Jacobson, L., Williford, A., & Pianta, R. (2011). The role of executive function in children’s competent adjustment to middle school. Child Neuropsychology, 17(3), 255–280. https://doi.org/10.1080/09297049.2010.535654
Weathers, M. (2024). Executive Functions for Every Classroom: Creating Safe and Predictable Learning Environments, Grades 3-12. Corwin.
Join the discussion LIVE!
Teacher Talks: Helping Students Build Executive Functioning Skills
Wednesday, October 14, 2026
4-5 PM EST
Register for the Zoom Meet Up here.