🔧How Skills either GEL or CLICK with Executive Function and 2e / Twice-Exceptional students

This one is for you parents and teachers.

Hey, what’s up everybody? My name is Seth Perler. I’m an executive function coach based in Colorado, and I help struggling students navigate this thing called education so they can have an awesome future.

Now, this video is a pretty short one. I’m going to talk about “gel” versus “click.”

A lot of times, parents and teachers have certain expectations about how quickly a student or child will learn how to do something. This is a very important distinction because there’s a lot of misunderstanding about how kids learn.

Every kid is different, and you can’t compare one kid to another. There are often very different things happening beneath the surface.

The problem comes when parents and teachers think that it’s a “won’t” when it’s actually a “can’t.”

What that means is that sometimes parents and teachers think the kid isn’t learning something because they’re not trying hard enough, they’re being lazy, they’re being willful, they just don’t care, or they just need to “pull themselves up by their bootstraps” and try harder.

When parents and teachers think that it’s a “won’t” — that the child is simply being difficult — when it’s actually a “can’t,” that can be very destructive. The student feels really bad, and it can have a lot of negative consequences in the long run.

Understanding the difference between “gel” and “click” can really help us understand how learning works.

Sometimes you’ll see something *click* with a kid.

Let’s say you’re working with a student on the Pythagorean theorem. You work on it and work on it, and then suddenly the student looks up at you and says, “I get it! I get it! It makes so much sense now!”

That’s a click. It clicked for the kid.

Sometimes, though, learning *gels*.

That’s when you watch a student struggle with something for a long time. Maybe summer break ends, fall starts again, and all of a sudden you see your student using a planner consistently. They’ve never been able to do it before. They’ve tried, they’ve hated it, they’ve resisted it — and then suddenly, when fall starts, they’re doing it fairly well.

It has gelled.

Obviously, gel and click can happen in many different ways, over different time periods, and in all sorts of areas of life and learning.

What I want parents and teachers to take away from this video is simply this:

Everybody moves at their own pace.

You really have to honestly ask yourself:

* Is this a “can’t” or a “won’t”?
* If it’s a “can’t,” how can we better support the student?
* If it truly is a “won’t,” what’s going on underneath that resistance, and how can we support the student given that information?

And can we, as adults, be patient enough to let go of our own expectations about where we think kids *should* be?

Can we allow kids to go through their educational experiences so things can gel or click naturally, in their own time, in the different areas we are trying to help them grow in?

My name is Seth Perler. If you like what I’m doing, give me a thumbs up, leave a comment, subscribe, share it — whatever feels right to you.

I put a lot of heart into what I do.

Thank you for being here, and thank you for helping kids.

Take care.