Spencer Blasdale
THE TAKEAWAYS
"I'll do it later" is a skill gap. The teen may genuinely not know how to start, how to prioritize, or how to sustain effort on something that doesn't interest them at the moment.
Growth mindset without executive function infrastructure is just a poster on the wall. Most schools have the language. Almost none have the structures.
You can't just hand over a set of strategies. The real work is the ownership dance: getting teens to notice their own patterns and take ownership of either changing or building habits.
Spencer Blasdale has spent over 30 years in education, starting as a teaching intern at The Park School in Brookline, Massachusetts. He served twice as Executive Director of the Academy of the Pacific Rim Charter Public School in Hyde Park, a grades 5–12 school serving 540 students. He was CEO of SchoolWorks, a national educational consulting firm, and later served as Chief Program Officer at The Calculus Project, a nonprofit working to dramatically increase the number of students of color and low-income students who complete AP Calculus. He currently serves as General Manager of RESET. He is a father of two daughters.
I. The Thread
What's the through line across thirty years in education?
Looking back, my career arc was sparked by my personal journey in education and particularly dropping out of a prestigious university after sophomore year. While I did return to finish my education, my "time out" was the best thing that could have happened to me. I joke that I was an inspiration for the term "gap year," which wasn't a thing back then. In that crucial year I worked in a classroom and then became a City Year pilot corps member. I started to actively pursue the questions that were deeply personal: What is my education for? Why am I not able to thrive in this environment? What kind of learning organizations do we need? I keep looking at the same questions from different angles.
When did executive skills specifically come into focus?
Over time I've become more convinced that executive skills are at the center of learning. I've always been fascinated by the learning process. In my first teaching job I taught history and computer science — how to use Apple IIe computers and get sixth graders to take care of floppy disks. I built a ritual at the outset and end of each class called the "Metacognitive Moment." As my daughters grew up I would always coach their teams — hockey, soccer, lacrosse — and while other coaches drew up plays I would teach and reinforce learning skills: setting goals, regulating emotions, recovering from setbacks. The through line is that for the past number of decades I've loved working with teenagers — I laugh a lot in these interactions — and I've continued to be drawn to how they learn. When my daughters became teens I saw that so much of their struggle, and their success, was due to executive functioning. For the past ten years I've become increasingly passionate about this focus.
II. The Phone
Jonathan Haidt has argued that attention fragmentation may be a bigger effect of the phone-based childhood than depression or anxiety. Does that ring true from your seat?
I absolutely agree with the hypothesis. More importantly, the teens that I work with would generally agree. Last night I was working with a student who literally said:
"The problem is that I HAVE to do all my work on the computer. I wish it were paper and pencil because then I wouldn't be tempted by Discord and YouTube. It's way too tempting and I have to do mental gymnastics to fight my brain all the time."
I hear versions of this all the time.
III. The Texture of Real Kids
The public conversation about teens tends to deal in averages. What gets lost?
This is a great question because I work with 15 teens currently and each of them is completely different. For each one I try to build a relationship and validate their interests — for one student this means she shares a funny meme that I have to ask her to explain to me (I'm old). For another student I ask him to read his speech to the Carthaginians because he spent two hours writing one paragraph and was proud of it. I have to build the relationship of trust and interest so that I can not only see what motivates the teen but also have the relationship capital to push them to do hard stuff.
The real nitty-gritty happens when we do the ownership dance. I am always trying to have them own the process and build their agency. I continually name strategies and ask students how they would like to apply them, or to describe them in their own words, so that they take ownership. For example, we've just scoured the LMS — 27 clicks — to understand what is due and what's missing. We then navigate what the list will look like: notes, a Google doc, a calendar. I add an item and my student adds an item. Some teens are at a point where they will say, "I don't want to but I know you'll tell me to print this out NOW, right?" I laugh and say, "YES! You know the strategy — print it out now and put it on your desk immediately." In this ideal scenario we are both laughing a bit and the end result is that the student has offloaded everything from his brain and from the LMS into one place that he'll tape to his desk. That's the win.
IV. The Step Function
What do the big transitions look like through the lens of executive function?
The former math teacher in me describes this as a step function. A teen walking through middle school goes up a ramp. And then the step to ninth grade is literally a leap. The same is true for college. The jump to high school involves lots more structured time and independent work requirements. In ninth grade suddenly you are playing a sport or in a production that takes up three hours after school. Suddenly you have assignments that require multiple drafts over time. You have to manage your small amounts of free time when you are desperate to hang out with friends or do anything NOT school related. The jump to college is the opposite. Suddenly you have long stretches with no structure, and you have to schedule things that mom and dad may have done for you — eat, laundry, sign up for classes, pay your bills. It's massive.
V. For Schools
What are the highest-leverage changes school leaders can make?
First I'd look at mindset in the school culture. I'd start by asking a question before offering any advice: "What do you and your teachers actually believe about student effort?"
In my travels to schools I've found that most have adopted the language of growth mindset and grit. But in practice, I still see significant vestiges of adults interpreting struggling students as lazy. That belief is worth surfacing directly, because it shapes everything downstream: how teachers respond to missed assignments, how administrators design consequences, and whether students feel seen or judged. I'd be surprised if the common language included some iteration of "laziness is about lack of skills."
Second, I'd lean into the question: "What actual structures and routines do you have in place, not just to teach growth mindset as a concept, but to help students practice the skills that growth mindset assumes they have?" A student who believes effort matters but doesn't know how to break a project into steps, manage their time, or recover from distraction is still going to struggle.
This leads to my core recommendation: invest in structured study time and make executive functioning skill-building explicit. This means dedicated, coached practice time where students are working on the actual mechanics of organization, planning, and follow-through. The good news is that I do see some teachers who scaffold big assignments and teach these skills. A seventh grader I coach has a social studies teacher who is not only putting in milestones but teaching students how to chunk the material for the project — helping students externalize what their brains struggle to hold internally: checklists, visual schedules, implementation intentions, and consistent routines.
The bottom line: if you want growth mindset to be more than a poster on the wall, you have to build the executive functioning infrastructure to support it.
VI. For Parents
What's the most useful reframe you offer parents?
As a parent you desperately want your kid to be healthy, happy, and successful. And there's a lot of frustration that I experienced as a parent — I get it. There were absolutely times when I thought my daughters just weren't working hard enough. It IS true that your kid isn't lazy. "I'll do it later" is a skill gap. The teen may genuinely not know how to start, how to prioritize, or how to sustain effort on something that doesn't interest them at the moment.
The frustration of working with your own teens is the natural dynamic of teenage wiring for independence and the search for autonomy. That means that telling them what to do doesn't work too well. What is possible is to curate the environment and set up routines. Where does your kid do homework? When? With what around them? Consistent routines, a dedicated workspace, and reducing friction at key transition points — like getting started after school — can make a big difference. You're not making them do it. You're making it easier for them to do it.
VII. The Blob
Executive function questionnaires parse out specific domains — time management, planning, prioritization. Are those distinctions real in practice?
It's a blob. I've experimented with questionnaires and surveys and the best thing that comes out is the conversation with the teen about their specific strengths and challenges. It can be a starting point or entry into some action — "ok, let's try this strategy to initiate a task." But that's the tip of the iceberg.
I recently piloted an assessment with a student and she scored lowest on time management. This led to weeks of work to identify whether it was an issue of prioritizing, estimating task duration, chunking material, or something else. In this case, it turns out she's working on setting her bar for "good." She's a self-identified recovering perfectionist, and while my work is not to uncover why that's true, it has been to help her set time limits and just continue to have her name "recovering" out loud.
VIII. Building Habits
How do you balance parents' desire for quick results with the reality that habits take time?
When I talk to parents I often frame their urgency as a good thing. But I try to adjust the target. If it's urgency about a quick outcome I refocus on the urgency of finding some small wins and building habits. And building habits takes time. An early win could be that the student agrees to separate the phone from her study area; it could be that a teen has a streak of four days using a planner. Over a period of months the process wins will hopefully add up to some bigger outcome wins such as no late work or grade improvement.
Perhaps underappreciated is the fact that you cannot just hand over a set of strategies. There's so much nuance in what I previously called the ownership dance, which is about getting teens to notice their own patterns and take ownership of either changing or building habits. I continually ask students to think out loud or name what's going on. Most adults get the analogy of how hard it is to break or build a new habit — going to the gym, sticking to a healthy diet. Teens are doing the same thing, with less practice and more at stake in the moment.
This interview was originally published by the Center for Teen Flourishing.
REFERENCES
Dawson, Peg, and Guare, Richard. Smart but Scattered Teens (2013)
Duckworth, Angela. Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance (2016)
Dweck, Carol. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (2006)
Geraghty, Sean, and Goldstein, Mike. I'll Do It Later: Surviving School (and Renewing the Love) with Your ADHD Son (2025)
Haidt, Jonathan. The Anxious Generation (2024)
Haidt, Jonathan, in conversation with David Remnick. "Jonathan Haidt on the Plague of Anxiety Affecting Young People." The New Yorker Radio Hour (2024)
Lembke, Anna. Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence (2021)
