Helping Students Thrive

Education has changed, placing more responsibility on students to manage their assignments, schedules, and deadlines.

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This shift can be especially challenging for those with ADHD, learning differences, or executive functioning struggles, who may feel overwhelmed by juggling multiple online platforms, varied teaching styles, and increasing academic expectations.

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At the same time, parents are balancing work and family life, making it difficult to provide the support their children need. That’s where we come in. We equip students with the tools to stay organized, manage their time effectively, and develop strong executive functioning skills—reducing stress at home and setting them up for long-term success.

What is Executive Functioning Coaching?

The student-parent battle has always been prevalent when a parent is managing the student’s education, but deep-seated issues are amplified now that many parents are expected to be their students’ teachers. 

 

Executive Functioning Coaching is a mash-up of targeted executive functioning support, tutoring, the teaching of study skills, and helping a student manage his or her education. A new structure must be built to accommodate each child, and it looks different than the structure of the usual school year. Each student can benefit from learning how to organize themselves, manage their tasks, chunk assignments into manageable parts, and initiate daunting work. 

 

There are so many implicit skills needed to succeed with this new format, and without them being explicitly taught in the context of our current lives, many kids are struggling (as are their parents). Now, more than ever, this is a crucial provision for students, as they are essentially on their own for a third of their school year. 

 

Learning loss is real, and it has long-reaching negative effects when not addressed in a timely manner. Even though we can hope that teachers will meet students where they are when they go back into the traditional classroom environment, the reality is that standards must be met, and that students will be coming into the next school year with various levels of skill. Students who are receiving individualized support will undoubtedly be in a much stronger academic position whether distance learning continues into the next school year or the students are back in the classroom setting.

Executive Functioning Coaching vs. Tutoring

While Executive Functioning Coaching has the spirit of traditional tutoring, the goals and process of this kind of intensive support reach further and delve deeper to teach students to become more effective, efficient learners --not simply to get through the current COVID-19 crisis, but to emerge with a stronger executive functioning foundation. 

 

We focus on planning and prioritization, organizing time, materials, and ideas, while focusing on productivity, and learning how to manage a “plate” full of various responsibilities. Of course, we understand that students also need help with academic content to get started, and this subject support is weaved into sessions as well. Along with daily classwork and homework, we teach students how to write essays/research papers, break down long-term projects, and comprehend their reading. Advocacy is another important component of our work with students, as they must communicate with their teachers to let them know how they are faring and if they need any specific assistance, extensions, or guidance. We also understand and acknowledge the whole child, which requires taking a child’s social-emotional health into account when working together. 

 

Using current school challenges and other qualitative and quantitative information from the student’s learning profile as a base, we help students build strong habits that will allow them to generalize their success in and out of the classroom (whatever format school takes).

How Our EF Coaching Works

While we are all virtual, our Masters-level Executive Functioning Coaches see students in 1:1 online sessions that are consistent, systematic, personalized, prioritized, and meaningful. No two sessions are the same, as each student has distinct needs that are addressed. 

 

Knowing how important it is to find the right fit, we match the student with the Executive Functioning Coach based on multiple factors and encourage rapport-building for student “buy-in” and comfort in exposing weaker sub-skills. 

 

We highly recommend sessions at least twice weekly to have the ability to go deep and to be able to follow through with our students. We assist students in identifying, understanding, and utilizing strategies and tools that are tailored to their own learning profiles and academic needs.