Why Do I Need a Teacher When I’ve Got Google

is a unique and characteristic feature of that part of the brain, it is its ability to structure the present in order to serve the future.
    (Fuster 2008)
    In other words, tapping into our innate teleological or goal-oriented cognitive faculties is when we really start to tap into what the PFC can do for us. Once again, with brain research catching up with the best advice from the wise man in the Ferrari, goal setting is a vital tool for helping us to move closer to our potential.
    The third of the PFC’s main functions is, according to Fuster, the executive functioning 3 we met in chapter 8 . We employ the PFC to prepare ourselves properly for the task in hand, to have enough ‘working memory’ to be able to process what we are doing and to be able to stop ourselves from drifting off to go and find something more interesting to do part-way through.
    Sheldon H. Horowitz, Ed.D, director of professional services at the National Center for Learning Disabilities, 4 goes further, explaining that:
    Executive functioning involves activating, orchestrating, monitoring, evaluating, and adapting different strategies to accomplish different tasks. … It requires the ability to analyze situations, plan and take action, focus and maintain attention, and adjust actions as needed to get the job done.
    For children with Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and other learning difficulties, it is often issues to do with this part of the brain that are leading to their problems in the classroom. A report entitled ‘“Executive Functioning”——New Research About Familiar Behavior’ from the 2003 Independent Educational Consultant Association conference in Washington, DC, reported on the website www.strugglingteens.com , describes how problems with executive functioning can lead to learning difficulties in ‘reading, writing, math skills and content area learning’, outlining the problems as follows:
    For example, dysfunctions in working memory, an important aspect of executive functioning, can cause difficulties in reading comprehension. Also, poor readers have trouble suppressing the activation of irrelevant information. Writing is adversely affected by problems with sequencing, organizational and self-monitoring skills, and holding ideas in working memory. There is also a strong overlap between dysgraphia and ADHD. Students with poor math skills have trouble with multi-ple-step procedures that require working memory. Executive dysfunction can also cause difficulties using mental strategies involved in memorization and retrieval.
    ( www.strugglingteens.com/news/executivefunctioning.html )
    Take another look at that list and have a think about how much of what goes on in your classroom involves being able to master these skills. Then imagine how hard it must be to be asked to do these things – to want to do these things – but, for whatever reason, simply not to have the tools to do them.
    Consider, too, research on executive functioning in children and adults with dyslexia from the University of Greenwich. Researchers here found that:
    dyslexic individuals show deficiencies in executive functions relating to inhibition of distractors and to sequencing of events, a set of tasks associated with left prefrontal cortex functioning.
    (Brosnan
et al
. 2001)
    In other words, and I have seen this so often with my dyslexic daughter, it is not their brainpower that means they get the answer wrong and feel stupid but their brain process. They don’t need extra maths lessons, they need extra ‘how to focus and organize things properly’ lessons. 5
    As we have seen, the twenty-first century teacher does not teach subjects; they teach children. You may be helping them to learn a particular body of subject-specific knowledge (a process that may include, but not exclusively, teaching) but remember the premise of this book – they can get that body of facts from Google without getting out of bed. What you can do, though, is to help them develop the skills they need to be able to find, identify, co-opt, employ, store and recall as necessary the new knowledge they are acquiring under your guidance. In other words, your number one priority is not so much teaching them as helping them reduce the obstacles to learning, so many of which relate to the functioning of the PFC. As the Struggling Teens website goes on to point out, citing the research as it goes:
    There is evidence that aspects of executive function can be improved,