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What is Academic Coaching?
Academic coaching is a comprehensive approach to help struggling students master essential skills for academic success
How does it work?
Academic coaching includes creating an Academic Plan, which is a detailed plan for how to approach each course you are taking.
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The Academic Plan incorporates your strengths, new skills, and the requirements of your courses into one comprehensive plan.
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We will do a deep dive on each course syllabus to figure out exactly what you need to do. We will use the Learning Cycle, a research-based system designed to maximize your learning potential, to integrate all of the moving parts of your courses.
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What skills will you learn?
Academic coaching includes three skill groups- executive functioning, academic, and life skills.
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Executive functioning skills include time management, organization, and meta-cognition. Learn how to boost motivation and cut down on procrastination.
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Academic skills include reading, writing, taking notes, and studying.
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Life skills include supportive skills that help you thrive in school, such as sleep hygiene, healthy eating, and balancing social life with academics.
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All skills are rooted in what the research says is most important for student success and well being. We will prioritize what is most important for you.
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How are skills taught?
The coach will explain and demonstrate a new skill and have you practice it in session with guidance.
Next, you'll practice using the skill outside of session when you are doing your school work.
Finally, during subsequent sessions, you'll discuss how it went practicing the skill and we will problem solve for what was difficult.
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The coach will use research-based methods to facilitate your skill development and behavioral change.
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What are executive functioning skills?
Executive function skills are all of the skills we need to get things done
*Exceptionalities is the term used to refer to all students with diagnosed or suspected unique learning needs, including ADHD, learning disabilities, and other conditions that impact learning
Research shows that students with exceptionalities often have underdeveloped executive functioning skills. This can make school more challenging and increases the risk of mental health issues and burn out.​
When students develop executive functioning skills, they improve their academic performance and mental health.
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Executive functioning skills are essential for success during and after school. Post secondary is an ideal opportunity to strengthen these skills.
Time Management
Time management is widely considered the most important executive function skill for student to develop. Time management involves identifying what needs to get done, prioritizing, and planning. Students with exceptionalities benefit from using tools such as planners and task lists. These tools help to externalize the information that is otherwise stored internally. Externalization greatly enhances our ability to accurately perceive our work load and decide when to do tasks.
Initiation & Persistence
Task initiation and persistence is the ability to get started and keep going with your work. Task initiation is the opposite of procrastination. Most people struggle with some amount of procrastination. Persistence is the ability to keep going with a task despite internal and external distractions. Concentration is a closely related concept. It is easier to persist with a task when we easily remain concentrated. However, you can still be persistent and get your stuff done even if your concentration comes and goes. Task initiation and persistence are influenced by motivation. When you feel motivated it is easier to get started and keep going. But, you can also feel motivated and still struggle to get started and keep going. When this happens, you likely have some things that are motivating you, and some motivational factors that could be improved to enhance motivation.
Metacognition
Metacognition is our ability to think about our thinking. Metacognition is the last executive functioning skill to develop. Because of this, many students are lacking metacognitive skills. Metacognition is essential for school success for several reasons. First, it enables students to implement and monitor their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors as they do their school work. This self-monitoring is essential for rapid skill development. Therefore, it is typically included as an executive function to develop in coaching. The format of coaching sessions inherently promotes the development of metacognitive skills because the coach will ask the student to reflect and report on their thoughts, feelings, and behaviors.
Organization
Organizational skills help students in all areas of academics. Organization facilitates smoother application of academic skills. For example, to take notes, students need to arrive to class with their note taking device. Similarly, organization of notes facilitates studying. Having techniques to organize articles and notes for writing assignment allows students to focus on developing their research and writing skills.
Emotional Regulation
Emotional regulation is our ability to influence our emotions in a manner that serves our best interest. Students often need to learn how to tolerate boredom and frustration. This can be especially challenging for students with ADHD. Students can benefit from learning strategies such as the First Five Minutes, breathing techniques, leveraging their environment, and more.
Time Awareness
A unique challenge that some people with ADHD face is a phenomenon called time blindness. Time blindness is when you struggle to know how much time tasks take, how much time has passed, and how long it will be until something in the future happens.
What are the most effective coaching methods for students with exceptionalities?
Strategy Instruction and Universal Design for Learning are proven techniques for driving learning results for students with exceptionalities
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Strategy Instruction
Research shows that Strategy Instruction is the best way to help students with exceptionalities learn and develop new skills.
With Strategy Instruction, we move beyond talking about how to do a new skill, and instead apply the skill to the students school work. ​
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This speeds up the students ability to do the skill themselves because they get guidance and troubleshooting help on the spot.
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Universal Design for Learning
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Universal Design for Learning is an approach to coaching (and education) where the coach provides students with multiple sensory pathways to develop skills.
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In addition to talking about and practicing new skills in session, we also provide students with written materials about the new skills, and videos and visual representations where possible (such as diagrams).
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This approach significantly boosts skill development by making new skills easier to learn.
What is the learning cycle?
The Learning Cycle is a research based system designed to maximize your learning potential
The learning cycle includes four steps:​
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Priming: Previewing content prior to attending class. Priming significantly improve comprehension during class, speeds up deep learning, and saves time studying later.
Attending class: Attending class helps students retain and process new information more effectively than only reading the textbook or lecture notes.
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Edit notes after class: Editing notes after class frees you from feeling like your lecture notes need to be perfect. Instead, you can keep up with the lecture and edit the notes right after. Editing notes within 24 hours of class helps reduce the forgetting curve, a phenomena when information quickly degrades after learning unless it is reinforced. This helps save you time when you are studying.
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Studying: Study using techniques that are proven in the research to be more effective than re-reading and highlighting. These techniques include pre-testing, active recall, using the Blooms Taxonomy of Learning and more. Save time and get better results with evidence based methods.