Tackling Executive (Dys)function In a School Campus

(The video at the top of this post features a conversation with a school counselor reflecting on the realities of executive function challenges on campus.)

Jenny is a school counselor in Nashville, Tennessee. She started learning the Anti-Boring Toolkit last fall and has had almost perfect attendance at the Rock Your Coaching calls throughout the school year.

In the video above, she reflects on the extreme needs she’s seeing in her magnet school—particularly around student disorganization and growing mental health concerns.

There’s a lot of gold in this conversation if you, too, are working on a school campus and feeling overwhelmed by the escalating needs of students. The sense of “there’s more here than I can hold by myself” will likely feel very familiar.

I was particularly moved by Jenny sharing that the Anti-Boring Toolkit not only helps her talk to her students who are most in need…

…but also gives her language to talk to administrators and colleagues about executive function–friendly changes that are needed in both policies and expectations.

That part matters.

Because executive function coaching doesn’t live only in 1:1 conversations with students. It also shows up in how schedules are built, how expectations are communicated, how policies are written, and how much cognitive load we quietly ask students (and educators) to carry every day.

Jenny describes how her school has begun making meaningful changes based on the ideas she’s learning and sharing—changes that make it easier for neurodiverse learners to function, not just comply.

If you want to watch with intention, here are a few moments you might jump to:

• 0:54 — Introduction to Jenny and her role as a high school counselor

• 4:19 — How Jenny fit learning the Anti-Boring Toolkit into an already-full life

• 6:20 — How I’ve been thinking about making support more accessible for educators like Jenny

• 8:43 — Impacts on Jenny’s daily work and on school-wide change

• 10:41 — Shifts in how Jenny thinks about executive function

• 12:02 — Increased creativity and action-taking at her school

• 14:37 — How understanding executive functions opens more doors to student support

• 17:03 — Why the Rock Your Coaching meetings felt like a fascinating, nurturing support group

What stands out to me, revisiting this conversation, is how clearly it captures a tension many educators are living inside of: wanting to help students build executive function skills while working within systems that weren’t designed with executive function in mind.

This is the work of executive function coaching inside schools—and it’s deeply relational, deeply practical, and often deeply exhausting. It’s also where small language shifts and shared frameworks can ripple outward in powerful ways.
If you’re curious to learn more about the kinds of tools and frameworks referenced here, you can explore free learning resources in the Visitor’s Center of the Anti-Boring Learning Lab.

And if you’re looking to connect families with educators trained in this approach, you can browse the Trained Coaches page.

A version of the following article was originally published here on May 29th, 2022.