Communication is a Key Ingredient to Successful Collaboration and More Effective Academic Coaching

Whenever we meet a new student to do an informal or formal assessment, we always ask for the parents’ observations and insights regarding the child’s behavior and performance at school. We have learned that parents, therapists, teachers, and coaches can provide very useful feedback and insight into what is going on with the kids and students. The more perspectives that we can include in the conversation, the better able we are to make informed, prescriptive decisions regarding the child’s curricular and academic interventions.

Communication ends up being the critical component to this system. If everyone is going to contribute and provide their feedback, there must be an open exchange of ideas among all of the parties. We want to know if a student is underperforming in one of his classes or excels on the football team. We need to know if the student is acting out at home when it is time to work on homework assignments or has been skipping class on a regular basis. All of this data equips us to paint the most complete picture of the student, allowing us to be more precise with our suggestions and effective with our academic coaching and interventions .

It has been said that it takes a village to raise a child. We concur that it takes a team of caring, engaged people to educate a child and teach him to be a confident, resilient and motivated learner. The objective has always been to build momentum through small successes. It is certainly a reasonable, achievable goal.