September Unit Plan: Introducing Executive Function Skills for Writing

A note: This month is on me. For everyone.

I want to be able to show and share what members of the Moving Writers Community experience every month. As is our custom, we are offering one year of full membership free to any student teachers or first-year teachers. Please share widely!

If you are not currently a paying member (and you’re not a student or first-year teacher), we would love to have you join ! Members receive one complete unit plan each month, two peeks into my classroom with daily lesson plans, and a Q+A article generated by community member questions. We also have an incredible monthly chat where we share and support one another.

I hope you find something here that will help you in September!

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Oh, welcome back, friends! I am so happy we are all here together again. And I’m extra excited to share the first unit I am teaching in my seventh grade classes this year!

You may remember that toward the end of last year, I stumbled my way into a unit on teaching executive function skills with reading. And now, of course, I’ve become obsessed.

It really seems to me that lack of strong executive skills is so very much of what we are struggling against with our students. It’s the ability to self-regulate and be metacognitive and create plans and build working memory, etc., that has gone by the wayside since Covid School. And these are all these skills we need most when we sustain Big Projects and Hard Thinking. Namely, reading and writing.

So, I am researching. I’m doing a lot of reading. I am learning more about executive function skills and the ways our brains are made. And I’ve started the year by applying it to writing.

The best thing is this: when you explicitly teach and practice executive skills, you aren’t just building up your students for English. You are building them up for every single class.

Unit Plan

In this unit, we are starting the year by using a blog post by Mari Andrew (“100 Things I Know”), as a way to practice the writing process, introduce the rhythms of writing workshop, and learn executive function strategies.

Tips, Tricks, and Things You Might Notice

• This year, I am going to have an executive function skill focus in every unit I teach. This is mostly for me — to make sure that I am being intentional about teaching strategies to strengthen these skills. You can find A TON about this online, but here is a site that has been particularly helpful to me.

• This unit begins with a few days of notebook time … and then it disappears. But why!? I start the unit with some informal, mentor-text-driven quickwriting as a way to help students generate ideas for the forthcoming writing assignment. But, once students are in the midst of drafting, I switch warm-ups. Keep in mind: you’re seeing my unit plan, not my complete daily lesson plans. Once flash drafting has happened, our warm-up becomes independent reading. That way, we are reading AND writing every day.

• We’re going to be talking about AI and ChatGPT in this month’s Q&A post. You’ll see one way I’m using it here: students will revise ChatGPT’s version of a “100 Things I Know” essay to make it more like the mentor text. This, in turn, helps them see their own drafts with new eyes and more easily identify the ways they need to make their own drafts more like the mentor texts. Kids LOVE interacting with AI — they are as fascinated by it as we are. By teaching them productive ways to interact with AI, hopefully we are also revealing its weaknesses and making it less attractive as a vehicle for pure plagiarism.

• After learning a few executive functioning strategies, students begin to have a choice of which strategies they would like to try to better proceed through the independent work time and a daily reflection about that work. I’ve suggested some exit ticket questions on the slides; I use a Google Form to collect this data. The goal here is to build in metacognition and help students begin to recognize which strategies work for them and when.

I’m SO Curious!

I’m dying to know how you might use this! Will you just use the mentor text? Fold the EFS skills into something else you’re doing? Take the unit and run it as a whole exactly as I am. PLEASE let me know your thoughts and questions and intentions!