Cerebrate’s parent company, Lively Minds Institute, has been teaching educators how to develop their students’ executive function skills for over a decade. We have witnessed struggling students, seen as unmotivated, unfocused, or low performing, develop strategies to achieve greater academic success through executive function instruction. Without lowering our educators’ expectations, we have watched our students transform using our proven process. These remarkable student transformations led us to seek this impact on a larger scale, leading to the development of Cerebrate.

The Cerebrate curriculum was born out of leading research in the executive function field, including how executive functions affect and impact learning, how a student’s brain develops from pre K-adulthood, and how executive functions are fundamentally tied to 3 core skill areas – behavior, emotion, and cognition.

Each Cerebrate lesson includes an Educator Guide, and the two pieces work together to incorporate the seven best practices of executive function instruction: assessment, engagement, collaboration, instruction, metacognition, motivation, and application.

 Each lesson includes:

• An introduction statement to communicate the lesson objective and its benefit
• A lesson activity to engage in active learning to master the lesson objective
• Opportunities to trigger metacognition by relating student thoughts to lesson experiences

Each Educator Guide includes:

• A lesson objective to communicate the measurable outcome of the lesson related to the challenge it addresses
• Methods for instruction and collaboration specific to the lesson objective, content, challenge, and executive function skill
• Methods for application of lesson content to allow for practice of strategies for skill development

Each of Cerebrate’s executive function skills has eight student challenges, for a total of 64 challenges related to learning. The challenges for each skill are represented by student behaviors that are observable by educators, making it simple to identify which challenges need to be targeted through instruction. 

For example, if an educator notices that their students frequently speak when it is not their turn, the teacher can choose to address the Cerebrate Self-Monitor challenge, “Student has difficulty waiting for a turn to speak.”

Cerebrate can be incorporated into daily schedules across different grade levels in numerous ways. Cerebrate lessons do not require a certain amount of time to teach; they can be taught quickly or extended, depending on the needs of the educator.  Two simple ways to incorporate Cerebrate are scheduled routines and content connection.  Scheduled routines can include times like morning meetings, community circle, flipped learning, bell ringer assignments, small group centers, and homeroom.  Content connection involves teaching executive function skills needed for upcoming assignments, projects, or classroom activities by integrating them into content instruction. This allows students to be preloaded with skills necessary to be successful and provides them the opportunity to practice their skill development through an authentic application.

Cerebrate addresses eight executive functions skills which include self-control, self-monitor, flexibility, emotional control, task initiation, working memory, planning, and organization. Each of these executive function skills is broken down into eight commonly found student challenges that occur due to skill deficiency. Each challenge is then addressed by two or more lessons that provide targeted instruction to help students overcome the challenge and develop desired behaviors and habits. 

Evaluations within the platform are unlimited. Students and groups can be evaluated as frequently as you would like to meet your needs.

Cerebrate provides a variety of student reports, including:

• Initial student evaluation report
• Progress reports
• Individual lesson reports
• Curriculum reports

Collaboration on student progress between general education and special services is simplified using the Cerebrate platform. Individual students or groups are easily shared from educator to educator, allowing collaboration for student goals, assessments, lessons, successes, and challenges. 

With the purchase of Cerebrate, all users have access to our online training on executive function instruction and the use of the Cerebrate platform. Additional training courses for implementation, train-the trainer, and professional development are also available. Visit our Training webpage or contact us for more information.

School and district licenses are available for purchase. Each license includes but is not limited to:

• Access to evaluations
• Customize curricula
• Access to lessons for all grade levels
• Access to all educator guides and application ideas
• Customized implementation plan and support materials
• Access to online training, guides, and resources

For more information on licensing visit our Purchasing page.

To place an order, visit our purchasing page to view and select purchasing options or contact us.