Picture this. A specialist sits down with a student for an executive functioning session. They have an hour together. The plan is to work on planning skills, prioritization, and getting ahead on a big project that is coming up.
Instead, the entire hour is spent just trying to find the assignments.
Which platform was it posted on? Is it Canvas or Google Classroom? Did the teacher email it separately? Was it written on the board and the student forgot to write it down? What is the login again?
By the time they have tracked everything down, the session is over. No planning happened. No strategies were practiced.
This is, sadly, not an unusual story. Dr. Erica Warren, a learning specialist and co-host of the Executive Function Brain Trainer Podcast, shared this exact experience in a recent episode—and it points to a serious shift in how schools now operate.
The Load Used to Belong to the Teacher
For most of the history of formal education, the organizational structure of learning was managed at the classroom level. The teacher wrote the assignments on the board, and told the class clearly what was due and when. Students were responsible for doing the work—but the scaffolding that made the work findable and organized was built into the classroom itself.
Children and teenagers are still in the process of developing executive functioning skills—the cognitive abilities that allow a person to plan, organize, prioritize, and manage time effectively. These skills are not fully developed until the mid-twenties. Expecting students to independently manage complex, multi-platform information environments while those skills are still forming is asking them to run a race they have not yet learned to walk.
The teacher-managed structure was a form of scaffolding. It held things together externally while students developed the internal capacity to do so themselves.
Something Changed—and the Shift Happened Fast
Over the past several years, and especially in the wake of COVID-era disruptions, that scaffolding has moved. Teachers are now working across multiple digital platforms. One teacher posts on Canvas. Another uses Google Classroom. A third sends email reminders. A fourth still expects students to copy things down from the board.
The information that used to live in one organized, teacher-managed place now lives scattered across five or six platforms. And the responsibility for consolidating it has been transferred, largely by default, to the student.
For students with strong executive functioning, this is inconvenient but manageable. They figure it out.
For students with ADHD, learning differences, or underdeveloped EF skills—which is a significant portion of the student population—it is a fundamentally different challenge. These are students whose brains are still developing the exact capacity needed to manage that complexity.
Why This Matters More Than a Missing Assignment
The consequence that most parents see is a missing grade. Or a late submission..
But the deeper consequence is what happens to a student who experiences that cycle repeatedly. They get labeled as unmotivated or forgetful. They start to believe it. They begin to lose confidence in their ability to manage school. They argue with their parents about school.
As Dr. Warren puts it: the problem is now placed almost entirely on students – when previously, and more aligned with developmental needs, the burden was shared.
What Good Support Looks Like Right Now
The answer is not to remove all structure and hope students rise to meet it. And it is clearly not sustainable to have a specialist spend every session just hunting for assignments, or a parent patching together information from five different portals every night.
The answer is to rebuild the scaffolding—in a form that works in today’s digital environment — and then use that scaffolding intentionally to develop the student’s own skills over time. That is the core of effective executive functioning coaching. And it requires a starting point that is organized enough to actually work with.
When a student has a clear, consolidated picture of what is due, organized by priority and broken into actionable steps, the real work can happen: building the habits of planning, the awareness of time, and the confidence that comes from consistently being on top of things.
Onit by Dynamic Tutoring Solutions was built for exactly this. It consolidates the fragmented school environment into one clear daily plan—organized, prioritized, and connected to the tools students and parents already use—so that the time spent with a specialist or a parent can go toward actual skill-building, not the scavenger hunt.
A Note for Parents
If you have been the one hunting down your child’s assignments—checking the portals, texting the teachers, piecing together information from multiple places—you are not overinvolved. You are filling a real gap.
The goal, over time, is to transfer that capacity to your child. But that transfer has to happen intentionally, with the right tools and the right support. It does not happen by pulling the structure away before the student is ready for it.
The students who build genuine independence are the ones who have solid scaffolding now—and a clear, gradual plan for reducing it as their own skills grow.
Want your child’s next session to be about skills, not scavenger hunts?
Dynamic Tutoring Solutions works with students, parents, and schools to build executive functioning skills that last. Contact us at dynamictutoringsolutions.com/contact to learn more about our EF coaching and Onit.
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