How can I help you?
Academic and life uncertainties are hard and can leave us feeling emotionally depleted, especially if we try to face them alone. A coaching relationship can be exactly the right fit as it supports the practical skills you need for academic or personal success as well as the underlying emotional complexity associated with untangling a challenge. My objective as a learning specialist and coach is to demystify, normalize, and verify the validity of each person’s learning process. Supportive coaching - and coaxing! - offer guidance as you take an active role in your development as a learner and apply new skills, behaviors and habits of mind. With consistent practice, you learn self-advocacy, positive self-talk, and the application of effective executive function skills such as organization and time-management, and these skills gradually become integrated into personal problem solving routines. Educational coaching is a powerful tool to support the development of confidence and the building of flexible strategies that can be applied in novel contexts.
What is the difference between coaching and tutoring?
Sometimes an awesome tutor is just what you need to address an information gap - answering the ‘What’ details of the course. But what if the information gap is the result of an insufficient or immature approach to learning - the ‘How’ of the learning process itself?
Coaching focuses on strategies over information, which can interrupt the tendency of students to become overly dependent on a tutor for translating what happened in class. Too often, I’ve heard, “I don’t need to meet with my teacher; my tutor will explain it to me.” This passive mindset invites superficial processing that undermines the real work of learning - consolidating and synthesizing information to make meaning beyond the facts. In contrast, deep learning demands an active approach and requires time, patience and persistence.
Isn’t procrastination just laziness?
Emphatically, no! I don’t believe I’ve ever encountered a truly lazy student or person. Behind procrastinating behavior, there’s always an emotion, which often is fear.
Procrastination is a single term that encompasses a whole world of feelings. Sure, occasionally, we just don't feel like doing what we’re supposed to do. But if you find yourself all-too-regularly saying, “I’ll do it later”, you would do well to dig a little deeper into the emotional underpinnings of that choice. I find that people are willing to take action if they believe the task is doable. It’s when we are overwhelmed and fearful that we search for a way to opt out. Looking lazy, bored, or disinterested is so much safer than finding out we are incompetent or unable to accomplish the task!
So, the next time you catch yourself saying, “I’ll do it later”, stop and notice that emotional flicker at the base of your brain. What emotion was it? And how did it contribute to your decision to “do it later”? When you learn to recognize and acknowledge how you are feeling, you can begin to choose behaviors to take better care of yourself.
What practical strategies?
Practical strategies are the frameworks and systems that work for YOU and YOUR life. To determine what’s right for you, we begin by examining your questions in order to increase understanding of your strengths and challenges. Depending on the questions you choose to address, practical strategies can include ideas as varied as specific academic strategies for analytic reading and writing to the development of systems to stay organized in your home. Executive Functions (EF) is an umbrella term for the multiple skills involved in mental control and self-regulation. These functions are the foundational mental processes and the basis of practical strategies that enable you to plan and organize, focus and maintain attention, resist the impulse to become distracted, and integrate multiple ideas to achieve YOUR goals. Learning effective executive function skills helps you to anticipate and manage the unique challenges you face. Combined with robust metacognition, EF skills prepare you to make a plan, reflect on its effectiveness as you get underway, and course correct as necessary throughout the process. The interplay of robust executive function skills and metacognition supports the application of practical strategies.
What is metacognition, and why is it central to effective learning?
Metacognition is an essential tool that enables a student to take ownership of their own learning. In our daily lives as we move toward a goal, metacognition is the mental awareness - the self awareness - by which we reflect on what is working and what isn’t working, and then, actively create a plan for what to try next. In other words, metacognition is thinking about our own thinking. Through guided practice as we work together, you will learn to reflect on the effectiveness of your approach to learning AND course correct as necessary.
How does self-talk affect our learning?
Self-talk is the voice in our head we use to narrate the daily activities and events of our lives. It is our explanation to ourselves about what happened, what’s happening now, and what we imagine might happen in the future. To tell this story, we have incorporated into the tone of our own narration the voices of people in our lives - the encouragement and congratulations, the criticisms and fears. Importantly, through this narration, we actually rehearse and solidify our expectations of ourselves and the reality in which we live, making it urgent that we monitor and modulate those voices.
I’m not advocating a saccharine commitment to blind optimism. However, I know that we can be our best selves and most effective learners when we learn to recognize and balance the messages we give to ourselves about who we are and what we can accomplish. Learning the skill of positive self-talk - to coach and encourage ourselves - is a powerful step toward embracing with confidence the learning challenges we face. Many of my clients have benefited from first, noticing and dampening the negative voices in their mind that undermine their confidence, and then, replacing those old voices with more realistic voices grounded in practical strategies.