Full PreFrontal (2026)

A Podcast About Exposing The Mysteries Of Executive Function with Sucheta Kamath

Are you interested in understanding how mental health, physical health, school readiness, and job success are inextricably linked? Curious about how training your brain can impact your quality of life? Want to know more about how to improve your focus, organization, working memory, decision-making, or self-control? W

elcome to my podcast, Full PreFrontal: Exposing the Mysteries of Executive Functions! You are tuning into my conversations with researchers, neuroscientists, learning experts, and thought leaders. Some have expertise in cognitive/educational/social psychology, social anthropology, learning and education, psychiatry, neurology, behavior economics, special education, while others are noted professionals in the field of leadership development and motivational speaking. This podcast is my effort to address the challenges and complexities of organizing one’s life. Life’s success is an intricate balance of orchestrating talent and effort. However, failing to uncover or to mobilize your inner tools and strategies can get you off path. Self-doubt presents itself and you begin to question your own capacity. How do I objectively investigate myself? or How do I tweak my thoughts, habits and attitudes to enhance my future thinking? What missing pieces of the puzzle, when properly placed, will connect the life successes I see in others to help me succeed in my own journey? We are not just in charge of our own life but are responsible for lives of many. Guiding others in hopes to see changes in them is how we mentor others, but what should we do when that doesn’t work? Is there a “secret sauce” to help others strive for excellence? Life has many moving parts; some create utter chaos while others bring sheer joy. To keep up with the moving parts, make listening to my podcast a new habit!

20/08/2025

Reading comprehension isn’t a checklist skill. It’s an active process shaped by what students know and how they think. With the nation's attention laser focused on promoting literacy outcomes in K-12 education, too often, comprehension is treated as a skill to be mastered through activities such as finding the main idea or making inferences. Rather than viewing it as a one-size-fits-all skill, reading comprehension needs to be recognized as an active process that involves both the text and the reader and that emphasizes its complexity, context-dependency, and developmental nature.

In this episode of Full PreFrontal with Sucheta Kamath, Dr. Hugh Catts, professor at Florida State University School of Communication Science and Disorders, highly published researcher, prolific author, and leading investigator in literacy and language development, challenges the way we think about reading comprehension and shares insights from decades of research that have practical implications for educators, parents, and anyone invested in promoting student competence and confidence as readers and learners. Dr. Catts explains why comprehension actually is an active process and why strong executive function skills like attention, working memory, and self-regulation, together with robust language abilities, are critical for helping students move beyond decoding words to truly understanding texts.

http://www.fullprefrontal.com/1080614/17704707

13/08/2025

Children in general, and students to be specific, are incredibly sensitive to the expectations of the adults in their lives; particularly their teachers. A study by Rubie-Davies and colleagues showed that in two sets of 2nd through 7th grade students, in spite of the similar levels of reading achievement at the start of the year, the achievement results at the end of the year markedly differed ~ simply driven by one variable ~ the teacher's expectations. Those with teachers who overestimated the students’ ability outperformed those whose teachers didn’t have high expectations.

On this episode of Full PreFrontal with Sucheta Kamath, 2020 Grammy Music Educator Award Recipient, seven-time Teacher of the Year, Cannonball Saxophone Educator, Assistant Director of Instrumental Arts at The King’s Academy and author, Mickey Smith Jr, not only has high expectations from his students but has made it his mission to show his students that they matter. Mickey unveils his educational philosophy that modern day teaching is a relationship-based approach, and that more than ever, teaching cannot simply be about the subject matter, but also about showing students that they matter and good teachers help learners “know their sound.”

http://www.fullprefrontal.com/1080614/17665196

06/08/2025

As students get ready to return to school this fall, the post-pandemic norm of plummeted student engagement rises to the top as a deep and wide concern for teachers, parents, families, educational leaders, and policymakers. However, we should be careful about HOW we describe, assess, or remedy engagement. Stakeholders need to be cautious in not letting students’ behavioral engagement in the form of physical signals of attentiveness or compliance with class activities take precedence over their cognitive engagement in the form of love for learning, curiosity around challenges, and a willing exploration for personal satisfaction.

In this episode, Garry McGiboney, Chief of Operations for Health Security Dynamics, Executive Director of Government Programs at Sharecare, consultant for the United States Department of Education and past Deputy State Superintendent for the Georgia Department of Education, discusses with host Sucheta Kamath what gets students engaged and how educators and school leaders can reimagine learning environments by building relationships and modeling ways in which learners can become agents of their own success. We all play a role in improving educational outcomes in all children and we have to rise above the sentiment that ‘everything is falling apart’ or ‘nothing will have a lasting impact.’ Dr. McGiboney invites us to invest our effort in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the system, build on what works, and build on our strengths to move the needle forward.

http://www.fullprefrontal.com/1080614/17625907

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