Skillsville Mission

Equip children and families with self-regulation strategies  to enhance their executive function skills and broaden their understanding of diverse career options, preparing them for future career opportunities.​

Expected Outcomes:

• More children will participate in media-enhanced informal learning opportunities that focus on building foundational workforce-aligned skills for diverse career options.
• More children will demonstrate measurable increases in foundational workforce-aligned EF skills. 
• Children will show increased interest in pursuing activities that build workforce-aligned EF skills. 
• An increased number of parents/caregivers will value and support EF-enhancing activities that build their children’s workforce readiness. 

CURRICULUM

Skillsville content is developed with 3 curricular pillars: executive function skills, self-regulation strategies, and career exposure. 

What does executive functioning look like?

Executive functioning is a set of mental skills that we rely on every day to help us learn, work, and manage activities of daily living. Our child and family facing content refers to EF skills as “Success Skills” to offer an accessible term for these important, everyday skills. “Pause” serves as the foundational skill of our curriculum and content and is the childfriendly term we use to refer to the following EF skills: self-monitoring, impulse control, and emotion recognition. “Pause” is introduced before a self-regulation strategy is enacted. Self-regulation strategies are tools and techniques that help achieve calmness and concentration, to prime the brain to effectively use executive functioning skills.

What do self-regulation strategies look like?

Identification of strategies was based on categories outlined in the Children's Coping Strategies Checklist (CCSC-R1; Program for Prevention Research, 2009) and other peer-reviewed resources. These strategies are accessible for children of various backgrounds and lived experiences and cater to a myriad of learning styles.

What does career exploration look like?

Our research findings indicate that children in our target age demographic are not thinking or talking about career pathways. Instead, they are learning that there are a variety of careers in the world, questioning how and why they are distinct from each other, and exploring various careers’ alignment with their current interests. Recent children’s media trends also support this developmentally appropriate exploration of passions and interests. We model Skillsville content after the 16-career cluster model (ONET, 2022)

Executive Functioning Skills as a Foundation for Skillsville Curriculum  

The Skillsville curriculum focuses on best practices around developing executive functioning (EF) skills that support future career readiness. Executive functioning is a set of mental skills that we rely on every day to help us learn, work, and manage activities of daily living.  Research indicates lifelong benefits when children have had consistent opportunities to develop executive functioning skills. 

Our EF curriculum begins with Pause, which is the foundational skill that enables the practice and activation of all other EF skills. This is the child-friendly term used to refer to the following EF domains: self-monitoring, impulse control, and emotional recognition. Our formative research found that our target audience of 5-8 year olds struggled the most with practicing these skills. Therefore, we found it crucial to categorize these EF domains in a manner that highlighted these fundamental skills within the curriculum.  

Beginning with Pause, our EF curriculum includes eight areas of executive functioning skills that form the building blocks of the 5 Skillsville EF categories: Focus, Organize, Think Differently, Remember, and Feel.  

Focus: Paying attention to something, even when there are distractions happening around you. 

• Task Initiation and Persistence is the ability to independently motivate yourself to complete tasks by directing behaviors and actions. Our capacity to stick with a task, even if it is difficult or non-preferred – concurrently ignoring distractions.  
• Executive functioning helps children retain focus, complete long-term assignments and problem- solve. Research also shows that children with stronger task initiation and persistence skills perform better on literacy assessments. When children are first learning to read and write, their executive function and determination is related to important pre-literacy skills, such as recognizing letters or learning the sounds that letters make (Sesma et al., 2009). 

Organize: Keeping track of different information and belongings and putting them in an order that makes sense to you. 

• Planning and Prioritizing is our daily plan for tasks to meet our short and long-term goals. The ability to determine the appropriate order for completing tasks based on important and logical sequence.  
• Children demonstrate improved self-directed executive function (EF) skills when they understand the choices available to them and participate in activities where they have a significant role in decision-making. When they independently plan, prioritize goals, and choose options for play, this increases their sense of autonomy and cognitive processes. Allowing children to practice deciding what they do and when, is critical to their overall development (Barker and Munakata, 2015) 
• Organization is the process of gathering and keeping track of belonging, information, and time – both physically and mentally. 
• Executive functioning increases children’s potential for future workforce success because they are better organized, able to solve problems, plan, and deal with change, and are prepared to adjust to changing circumstances on the job (Center on the Developing Child, 2023). 

Remember: Holding new information in your mind to use when you need it. 

• Working Memory is a short- term brain function that helps us complete the task at hand. This skill allows the brain to briefly hold new information while it’s needed. We then use this newly acquired information to help us in some way before it is potentially transferred into our long-term memory. We can do this while following instructions and without losing track of what we were initially doing. 
• Working memory is connected to information processing, comprehension, executive functioning, and learning throughout the lifespan. All learners have different levels of working memory capacity, which can be improved upon with exposure to working memory tools and adjustment of educational materials to facilitate learning and increase academic success (Cowan, 2014). 

Think Differently: Trying new things and finding creative ways to solve a problem or learning from your mistakes and making changes. 

• Flexible Thinking is our ability to think about various ways to solve problems, appropriately adjust to new situations, learn from our mistakes, cope with changes, try new things, transition from one task to another, and learn new information. 
• During the preschool years and throughout adolescence and young adulthood, cognitive flexibility, also known as flexible thinking, undergoes significant development. This growth in flexible thinking abilities is linked to various crucial life outcomes such as academic success, including proficiency in subjects like mathematics and reading, as well as overall health status in adulthood (Buttelmann and Karbach, 2017). 

Feel: The way we check and show our emotions. 

• Emotional Thinking is the ability to connect with our “heart” by regulating and expressing our emotions. We can choose which emotions are appropriate to display in any given situation. 
• Increased executive functioning promotes improved social-emotional competence, such as emotional thinking. Children who engage in emotional thinking show increased awareness of their own and others’ feelings. This aids children in their ability to adjust and blend their behaviors, actions, and emotions to effectively navigate social tasks that are relevant to their developmental stage (Riggs et al., 2006). 

Among various sub-skills within executive functioning, we selected these areas for Skillsville due to their significance in relation to academic achievement, behavioral patterns, health outcomes, and future career prospects – among other benefits. Additionally, their selection was based on their alignment to developmental milestones and learning objectives for the children within our target demographic. Furthermore, our formative research indicated that educators and caregivers identified these domains as areas requiring the most attention, given observations of their students' and children's behavior and development. 

Moreover, within the Skillsville curriculum, our child and family facing content refers to EF skills as “Success Skills” to offer an accessible term for these important, everyday skills. Each Success Skill combines EF domains, or presents a singular EF domain, and defines them using family-friendly language for our target audience (see Skillsville Framework). In Skillsville, a “Pause” is introduced before a self-regulation strategy is enacted. Self- regulation strategies are tools and techniques that help achieve calmness and concentration, to prime the brain to effectively use executive functioning skills. While we recognize that there are various methods of categorizing EF skills, we thoughtfully developed the present set of “Success Skills” to align with our Skillsville programmatic objectives, while staying true to EF literature. Similarly, we recognize that there are numerous self-regulation strategies that support EF skills and provide strategies in relation to success skills only as a suggestion but encourage audiences to use strategies in a manner that fits their EF needs.   

Commitment to Equity

TPT’s Ready to Learn team recognizes the importance of having equitable and inclusive production practices. In order to achieve this for Skillsville, the Equity Council was formed. The Equity Council is a group of children’s media professionals, with an impressive history of creating culturally relevant content and making change in the areas of diversity and representation in children’s media and outreach programs. In collaboration with TPT’s Ready to Learn team, the Equity Council created "The Equity Principles for Production of Children's Media." These principles consist of four steps and 10 goals, along with action steps for each, to ensure the creation of equitable children’s media from inception to dissemination. The Equity Principles for Production of Children's Media are foundational to the team's work and inform every aspect of the production process.

Equity Council members include Priya Desai (Illumin Media, LLC), Aya Gallego (Perception Institute), Dr. Ed Greene  (EMGreene Educational Connections Associates), Dr. Amina Jaafar (TPT), and Alice Wong (Disability Visibility Project).