Mitch Weathers saw his multi-language students struggle in school and asked himself one question: What helps students be successful?
Thus began a quest to identify the most significant impacts on academic achievement and success.
The result is Organized Binder, a program that helps teachers create predictability as they help students develop executive function skills.
“If you go class to class and each has wildly different procedures and you’re a multi-language student, that’s a huge cognitive load and mental calories you’re expending just getting through the school day,” Weathers says.
“The short-term memory is finite. The more you tax it, the less available it is to focus on learning. But if you adopt a routine, you can free up mental calories.”
Appropriately, Organized Binder uses a binder as the central tool.
“I firmly believe students need to see (organization) modeled. Time and task management, how to keep a calendar, how to keep yourself organized, set goals,” Weather says. “The binder brings clarity to executive functioning within the context of what they’re trying to learn.
“There’s something about that physical color-coded binder,” he continues. “If you hold students accountable organizationally and they can participate in the routine, then you’re laying the foundation for success. It all comes back to that binder as a way to make it far more likely you’ll develop the skills and habits for academic success and the empowerment that comes with that over time.”
Weathers admits school was never a strong point for him, which is why he finds empathy with struggling students.
He graduated from Del Campo High School and studied geology in college, assuming he would become a high school science teacher. After getting married and running a nonprofit for at-risk kids, he realized he needed time to figure out his path. He and his wife traveled Europe by rail until they ran out of money.
The time away allowed Weathers to figure out he wanted to work in classrooms. He earned his teaching credential and master’s degree in cross-cultural pedagogy while working as a long-term substitute teacher.
He and his wife spent 15 years in the Bay Area until family called them back to East Sacramento 10 years ago. By then, Organized Binder was taking shape. Weathers tested different binder configurations on students to see what worked best.
“It started to coalesce around routine,” he says. “There can be gray areas of undefined time in lesson plans. Some students can ride through that, but for others, they feel lost with too much ambiguity. Classroom management issues breed there.
“I needed to figure out how to paint these gray areas black and white to reduce ambiguity and bring about clarity. Then engagement goes up and management issues go down.”
Organized Binder has spread across the globe. There’s a Spanish program for the U.S. and Guatemala. The company is launching a French pilot in Ontario, Canada.
In March, Weathers published a companion book, “Executive Functions for Every Classroom.” His timing was impeccable. Parents and educators saw students struggle with self-regulation and motivation coming out of the pandemic. The book addresses these issues in a relevant, practical way. The book hit No. 1 on Amazon its second week.
“Regardless of what continent you were on, the pandemic paused life and interrupted learning,” Weathers says. “It was a reminder that what we do as teachers matters. We were collectively seeing that we needed to focus on executive function skills, and the book answers how to do that. Schools in China are contacting me to say, ‘We’re all reading your book!’ It’s a weird little vehicle for this universal message.”
For information, visit organizedbinder.com.
Jessica Laskey can be reached at jessrlaskey@gmail.com. Follow us on Facebook and Instagram: @insidesacramento.
