What is Academic Coaching?
Academic coaching is a partnership between the student and their professional academic coach that focuses on the process of learning. By concentrating on the student’s unique strengths and individual learning style, students become more motivated, productive, and successful.
Benefits of Academic Coaching
Students diagnosed with Executive Function Disorder, ADHD, learning disabilities and anxiety can show great improvement from academic coaching such as:
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- more effective study strategies
- increased motivation
- less procrastination
- more consistent homework completion
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Academic coaches teach students organization, time management, note-taking, prioritizing, and effective study strategies. ACA students learn to be accountable, leading to greater confidence and independence.
A Typical Academic Coaching Session
At ACA, we use our student centered, reactive approach to teach effective skills and strategies using their authentic assignment. Although each session is tailored to the individual needs of each student, they follow a similar format.
- Reconnecting-this is the time for coaches to ask students about how their week went, discuss successes and challenges and talk about what expectations for the upcoming.
- Grade review- Students screenshare their grading portal with their coach and compare grades this week with the previous week. During this time the coach guides students to reflect on which strategies were used which were successful and possibly where to recalibrate.
- Accountability- Did the student follow the plan that was created at the last meeting? This generally centers on homework completion, implementation of strategies, or asking a teacher for extra help.
- Skill Development-Using the students own authentic assignments, coaches teach the skills and strategies for success. This could be a plan to turn in missing homework assignments, reaching out to a teacher for extra help, working on active study strategies for an upcoming test, breaking down tasks to complete a project etc.
- Creating a Plan-The coach guides the student in creating a very specific plan to tackle the tasks needed to be completed in the coming week while incorporating organization and time management skills.
- Weekly Goals-Using the SMART goal method, students will identify their main objectives for the week and create a plan to accomplish them.
- Continued Support-After each session, the coach sends lesson notes to parents, which a summary of what was addressed. Coaches will continue to provide support by checking-in with students between sessions when necessary.
Many students who come to us have been using maladaptive habits for quite sometime before becoming an ACA student. Our job is to help students break those bad habits and replace them with new, productive ones.