Executive Function and Social-Emotional Learning: Reducing Stress to Promote Students’ Success

Why do our students feel so anxious and stressed in school? How can we engage students in the learning process by promoting self-understanding, strategic learning, and self-confidence?

This presentation will focus on practical approaches educators can use to promote metacognitive awareness, executive function, and social-emotional learning, processes that are critically important for every student in every classroom. We will also discuss ResearchILD’s unique classroom-based survey system which provides teachers with visual summaries of all students’ EF profiles along with recommended strategies for promoting students’ goal-setting, flexible problem-solving, organizing, prioritizing, and self-monitoring.

Dr. Lynn Meltzer, President and Director, Research Institute for Learning and Development (ResearchILD)

Lynn Meltzer, Ph.D. is the Co-Founder and President of the Research Institute for Learning and Development (ResearchILD) in Lexington, MA. She is a Fellow and Past-President of the International Academy for Research in Learning Disabilities. She is the Founder and Program Chair of the Annual Executive Function Conference which she has chaired for the past 37 years. For 30 years, she was an Associate in Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Child Development at Tufts University. Her 40 years of clinical work, research, publications, and presentations have focused on  understanding the complexity of learning and attention problems.

Her extensive publications include articles, chapters and books, most recently, Executive Function in Education: From Theory to Practice (2018), Promoting Executive Function in the Classroom (2010) and The Power of Peers in the Classroom: Enhancing Learning and Social Skills (2015), co-edited with Karen Harris. Together with her ResearchILD staff, she has developed SMARTS, an evidence-based Executive Function and Peer Mentoring/ Coaching Curriculum for middle and high school students (www.smarts-ef.org). She has been an invited speaker at numerous national and international conferences, including the International Association for Cognitive Education conference in South Africa. She has been honored with a number of awards including the Council for Learning Disabilities Outstanding Research Award in October, 2015 and the Innovative Program of the Year Award from CHADD (Children with Attention Deficit Disorders).