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

Adults can have unrealistic expectations about what they think a student “SHOULD” be able to do, and this can cause a lot of harm when a student isn’t supported properly due to a lack of understanding. This short video explores the important distinction between GEL and CLICK and why it matters.


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Video Transcript: Click here to download the transcript PDF.

This one is for you, parents and you teachers. Hey, what’s up everybody, my name is Seth with SethPerler.com. I’m an executive function coach based in Colorado and help struggling students navigate this thing called education so that they can have an awesome future. Now, in this video, this is a pretty short one, I am going to talk about ‘gel’ versus ‘click.’

So a lot of times parents and teachers have certain expectations about how quickly a student or a child will learn how to do something. And this is a very important distinction because there’s a lot of misunderstanding about how kids learn things. Every kid is different, and you can’t compare one kid to another, they’re often very different things happening. And the problem comes when parents and teachers think that it’s a ‘won’t’ when actually, it’s a ‘can’t.’ So that means that when parents and teachers think that the kid isn’t learning something because they’re not trying hard enough, they’re being lazy, they’re just being willful, they just don’t care enough, they just need to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and they just need to try harder, type of story. When parents and teachers think that it’s a ‘won’t’, that they just won’t, they’re being willful. And it’s actually a ‘can’t’, that’s very destructive to the student. It feels really bad and it has a lot of negative consequences in the long run.

In understanding the difference between gel and click, this can really help sort of understand how these things might work. Sometimes you will see something click with a kid. So let’s say that we’re working with a student, and we’re learning about the Pythagorean Theorem, and then we’re working on it, working on it, working on it. And one moment happens, the student looks up at you and says, “I get it, I get it, it makes so much sense!” That’s a click. It clicked, it clicked for the kid. Sometimes though, it gels. And that’s when you’re watching a student struggle for a long time, and maybe summer break is over, fall starts again. And all of a sudden you see your student using a planner. They’ve never been able to do it before. They’ve tried, they’ve hated it, they’ve resisted it, and all of a sudden fall starts and they’re doing it fairly well. It has gelled. Okay.

Now, obviously, the difference between gel and click can happen in all different domains and all different time periods, and all this stuff. But what I just want you to leave this video with, parents and teachers, is just remembering everybody’s at their own pace, you have to really, honestly, look at this. Is it a can’t or a won’t? And if it’s a can’t, how can we better support the student? And if it’s truly a won’t, if it’s truly a won’t, then what is going on that makes it a won’t and how can we support the student given that information? And can we as adults, be patient and get off of our own expectations of where we think people should be, and allow kids to go through their educational experiences, so that it can gel or click as it will happen naturally with every student in these different areas that we are trying to educate them in.

Anyhow, my name is Seth Perler. If you like what I’m doing, give me a thumbs up, comment, subscribe, share it, whatever, please support me. I put a lot of heart into what I do. Thank you for being here and helping kids. Take care.