Welcome back to Progressively Incorrect. I’m your host, Zach Groshell.
Executive functioning has become one of the most frequently discussed topics in education, yet it remains one of the most misunderstood. Teachers are increasingly expected to help students manage attention, organization, memory, planning, and self-regulation, but questions remain about what these skills actually are, how they develop, and what schools can realistically do to support them.
In this episode, I’m joined by Sarah Oberle and Mitch Weathers, co-authors of Executive Functions for Every K–3 Classroom. Their work focuses on helping educators understand the cognitive processes that underlie successful learning and on creating classroom environments that make those processes visible, teachable, and sustainable for young learners.
The book explores practical approaches to supporting working memory, building organizational habits, and establishing the conditions that allow students to focus and engage in learning. It also raises larger questions about the role schools play in developing these foundational capacities. Are executive functions best understood as skills, habits, dispositions, or something else entirely? How much can they be taught directly? And what would it look like for schools to approach executive functioning not as an intervention for a few students, but as a core component of teaching and learning for all students?
Whether you’re a classroom teacher, instructional coach, school leader, or simply interested in the science of learning, executive functioning sits at the intersection of cognition, instruction, and school culture. It is a topic that has implications far beyond student organization or classroom management, touching on some of the most fundamental questions about how learners become increasingly independent and capable over time.
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Love what you heard? Inwood Academy is hosting my The Explicit Teaching Institute—a five-day deep dive into the science of learning and the highest-leverage moves in explicit instruction – in New York City this summer.
We’ll spend our mornings unpacking the research, our middays studying expert teaching on video (courtesy of Steplab!), and our afternoons rehearsing the moves that make instruction clear, efficient, and reliable—so you leave with a practical toolkit you can use on day one.
🗽 NYC | July 27–31, 2026
👉 Learn more + register here: 🎟️ Explicit Teaching Institute registration
Check out my latest book, Just Tell Them: The Power of Explanations and Explicit Teaching.
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