Ted Talks to Teach Executive Functioning Skills

Executive functioning skills are key for our students to find success in the classroom and throughout their lives. EF skills include working memory, time management, organization, task initiation, emotional control, planning/prioritizing, and sustained persistence (note: these categories vary depending on which EF resource you are reading).

Executive functioning skills don’t always fall into a curriculum, so they are sometimes missed. As a result, students go out into the world either learning the skills themselves or struggling through life without them. To help prevent this, I’m rounding up some engaging Ted Talks to be used in the classroom to help teach some of these much-needed skills.

1. Feats of Memory Anyone Can Do

Executive Functioning Skills: working memory and sustained persistence

Summary: Turns out master memorizers (it’s a thing!) are just average people like you and me. They’ve trained themselves in the Ancient Greeks’ memory palace technique where they visualize what they want to remember. What they are visualizing is always unique and shocking; it also occurs in order in a setting they are very familiar with. For example, in order to remember a number sequence, 1752345, I would visualize walking around my house. The first thing I would approach in my foyer is a girl singing and dancing to ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” then as I go through the living room I see a terrifying monster in bright yellow underpants who wants to high-five me…and so on.

Key takeaways:

1. Memory is very visual and it’s based on context. If you are trying to remember things that mean nothing to you and don’t connect to anything in your brain, you will not have much luck. I tell this to my students who rely solely on flashcards and don’t have any success. It’s time to try a new tactic.
2. When people are training for these memory contests, they often wear earmuffs and other accessories to block out all distractions. Note to students: you do not study better with the TV on in the background!
3. Master memorizers tend to have average memories. They developed their skills through hard work and persistence. When your students say studying doesn’t work for them, make sure to add “yet.”

2. Why Our Screens Make Us Less Happy

Executive Functioning Skills: emotional control and time management

Summary: We’re giving up more and more of our precious downtime to our devices. This wouldn’t be so bad, but most of what we’re doing online is making us unhappy. The speaker, Alter, lists the data on which apps tend to make us happy, and which tend to make us sad. Towards the end Alter offers some hope: create end times for your device activity. In the past TV shows ended, newspapers ended, cassettes had to flip to the other side. There were many naturally end times that signaled time had past and it was time to move on to something else. Now we scroll and watch endlessly. Alter suggests a few ways to create end times for yourself, discusses the difficulties in implementing said end times, and offers up the benefits of gaining control of unhealthy screen time.

Key Takeaways:

1. We don’t have that much free time so we shouldn’t waste it doing something that makes us unhappy.
2. Screen time is an addiction. Decreasing our screen time can result in withdrawal symptoms. It is not easy, but it’s worth it.
3. You need a specific plan in place to decrease your time. Saying “I’m going to spend less time on my device from now on” will not result in you spending less time on your device.

3. How to Gain Control of Your Free Time

Executive Functioning Skill: time management, planning/prioritizing, and task initiation

Summary: My favorite quote from this talk –

“I don’t have time,” often means “It’s not a priority.” If you think about it, that’s really more accurate language. I could tell you I don’t have time to dust my blinds, but that’s not true. If you offered to pay me $100,000 to dust my blinds, I would get to it pretty quickly. 

Vanderkam, L. (2016, Oct.). Laura Vanderkam: How to gain control of your free time [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/laura_vanderkam_how_to_gain_control_of_your_free_time 

It’s true. I’ve heard this before in reference to brushing your teeth and putting on pants. We always have time for that because it’s a priority to wear pants and have teeth. Throughout the talk, Vanderkam gives advice on how to figure out what is truly a priority and how to fit those priorities into our schedules so they actually happen.

Key Takeaways:

1. Don’t try to find more time in the day. Fill your day with priorities and there will be enough time.
2. Many of us don’t actually know what our priorities are until we sit down and try to put them into our calendars.
3. You need to put things into your calendar for them to happen. Vanderkam gives great advice on how to do this.

4. How to Get Better at the Things You Care About

Executive Functioning Skills: planning/prioritizing and sustained persistence

Summary: Throughout our days we’re either in the learning zone or the performing zone. When we’re in the performing zone – where we usually land once we’re comfortable – we’re not actually improving anymore even though we do it all the time. Typing, for example. After a decade of typing, I’m still performing at the same speed; in fact, my accuracy appears to be decreasing. To improve, I need to occasionally go back to the learning zone. In the learning zone, I’m not typing for a finished product; I’m typing with a targeted outcome of improving a specific aspect of my typing. Maybe I’m typing my numbers over and over again until I get them right. Briceño gives more examples of deliberate practice versus performance and finishes the talk with a few steps for students to follow in order to incorporate more deliberate practice and learning-zone time into their lives.

Key Takeaways:

1. You need to have a growth mindset. You will not improve if you don’t believe you can improve.
2. Deliberate practice (learning zone activities) often look very different from your actual performance. A soccer player never juggles the ball during a game, but it’s done during practice to help master ball handling.
3. All successful people continue to hang out in the learning zone. You just don’t see it because it’s behind the scenes. Watch the talk for a specific Beyonce example of going back and forth between the performance zone and the learning zone.

Want the worksheets?

I’m shamelessly adding a link here to my TpT store where I sell my worksheets for the above talks. Sorry – those bills won’t pay themselves.

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