Why “Keel”?

I started teaching in the early 2000s, right after my second daughter was born. I taught science to grades K-5 at a small parochial school with just one class per grade, which meant I taught the same children year after year. Back then, I might have one or two kids a year in my classroom who needed extra support with focus, organization, or self-regulation. It was manageable. Over the next two decades, that changed, not just in my classroom but in every veteran teacher’s classroom I talked to. More kids were struggling with the same invisible thing, and most of us didn’t have a name for it yet. And because I had the same children for years, I saw something many teachers don’t get to see: the kids who struggled with executive function in the early grades didn’t grow out of it. They kept struggling as they moved up through the grades.

I didn’t need a classroom to see it up close. My first daughter was easy, the kind of kid who did what you asked, mostly when you asked it. My second daughter was not. At three, she was asked to leave daycare over behavior no one could quite explain. At home, mornings were a battle, homework was a battle, getting out the door was a battle. But at school? She was the model student. Teachers were confused when we even raised a concern, because her behavior in their classroom was never a problem. For years, we tried therapy, evaluations, and every strategy a well-meaning professional suggested. Some things helped a little. Nothing fully explained why she could hold it together for seven hours a day at school and then completely fall apart the second she walked through our front door.

The pattern didn’t fade as she got older. It followed her through elementary school and into middle school, even with regular therapy. Honestly, the middle school years are a blur to me now, but the pattern is the part that stays with me: she was great at school, and home was where it all came apart, especially around homework and projects. We knew it wasn’t only hard on us. It had to be exhausting for her to work that hard all day just to look fine.

It wasn’t until she was about to leave for college that we finally got an answer that fit: executive function deficits. Not defiance. Not a discipline problem. A gap in the underlying skills (planning, self-regulation, working memory) that let her push through all day at school on pure effort and left nothing in the tank by the time she got home. I’d never heard the term “executive function” before that. Once I did, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much of it explained things I’d been managing by instinct for years: the routines we built, the way I broke tasks down for her, the systems that worked when nothing else did. I just didn’t have a name for what I was doing. I was teaching executive function before I knew it was a real, teachable field.

That’s what brought me here. In 2025, I started digging into executive function research and training, and I realized this wasn’t only my daughter’s story. Between my classroom and my own kitchen table, I had watched the whole arc: what it looks like at six, and what it looks like at eighteen. It plays out at kitchen tables everywhere, and it tends to break wide open in middle school, when a child goes from one teacher who knows them to six, from a day someone else structures to one they’re expected to run themselves, and from short assignments to long-term projects. A kid who got by on effort in fourth grade suddenly can’t keep up, and the adults around them, who have only ever seen a good kid, can’t figure out why.

I don’t want another family to wait until their child is packing for college to hear the words “executive function.” I work with students from first grade through high school, and I’m especially drawn to the middle school years, because that’s when kids have to become far more independent and get ready for the transition to high school, and the skills they build then shape how that goes. I work with parents alongside their kids, too, because I know what it’s like to be the person holding the whole system together.

I’m certified by the National Board of Executive Function Certification in its Neurocognitive EFTech System™, and I bring two decades in the classroom alongside it, including years teaching science to grades K-5 and teaching the same children year after year. I’ve spent my career building the same kind of routines and scaffolding for students that I once built, out of instinct, for my own daughter. That combination of lived experience with a child whose struggles went unseen, years of watching it unfold in a classroom, and formal training in how to teach these skills is why I’m not guessing at what works. I’ve seen it in my classroom and at my own kitchen table.

I believe kids with executive function struggles aren’t lazy, defiant, or careless. They’re working harder than anyone realizes just to keep up, and they deserve tools built for how their brain actually works, not more willpower. If that sounds like your child, I’d love to talk.