January 4, 2015
Dear St. Raphael School Families and Parishioners,

Happy New Year, and Welcome to 2015! With the Christmas holidays almost complete, we are refreshed and ready to begin our 3 ^rd Quarter of school on Monday, January 5, 2015. The teachers and I appreciated the nice long break, but we are anxious to get back to school and begin our learning for the second half of the school year.

One of the things you hear educators talk about these days is the need to teach and develop 21 ^st Century Skills in their students. There are many different definitions of precisely what is meant by the term 21^st Century Skills, but I believe the gist of it is this: Students today are growing up in a world that changes at such rapid speed, and they need to have skills to deal with and adapt to ongoing rapid change. What are those skills? Again, it’s not crystal clear, but we know what they DON’T need. They don’t need to memorize endless bits of information; today’s students have a wealth of information literally at their fingertips. They DON’T need to learn to conform all the time; students who simply follow and conform will not have the capacity to change nor adapt to change easily. Students DON’T need to be told every little detail about how to accomplish a task every time they perform the task; students will need to be able to think and organize themselves quickly.

Students DO need to be able to find, sort, analyze, and use information. Students DO need to be able to work both independently and in groups. They must be able to think creatively and problem solve. They must be independent and self-directed. And they must be ever-flexible and ever-growing and changing. That’s a pretty huge task for educators and schools to accomplish. I read an article last year that claimed over 75% of the jobs our current students will have when they are working adults have not even been thought of yet!

We do know that students need good executive function to be able to do all the things described above. Executive Function is a neurological function, but we consider it in education all the time. Think of Executive Function like this:

• The executive functions all serve a "command and control" function; they can be viewed as the "conductor" of all cognitive skills.
• Executive functions help you manage life tasks of all types. For example, executive functions let you organize a trip, a research project, or a paper for school.
• Often, when we think of problems with executive functioning, we think of disorganization. However, organization is only one of these important skills.

So we work on Executive Function at school all the time, everything from organizing and writing a research paper, to gathering everything we need for lunch and recess before going to the cafeteria. We provide lots of guidance to students, just as parents do, but we want the students to eventually be able to practice these executive functions on their own. There is recent research that suggests a relationship between self-directed executive function and the time that children spend in less structured and more structured activities. The authors of the study found that 6 and 7 year olds who spent more time in less-structured activities (like trips to museums, libraries, parks) displayed better executive function than those who spent more time in structured activities (like camp, classes, sports practices). The reasoning is that these less-structured activities seem to give children more opportunities to practice self-direction. More structured environments seem to slow the development of self-directed control because adults are continually reminding the children what they need to do and when.

These are some interesting points to think about in family and school life, and I hope you will consider them seriously. Helping your children to gain the Executive Function skills that they need to be successful is a great gift to them for their entire lives!

Thanks for all of your prayers and support – we couldn’t be the school we are without you!
Peace & Blessings,
Kim Vangel
Principal