What I Provide
Executive Function Coaching
I offer executive function coaching to students from fourth grade through college. The purpose of executive function coaching is increasing independence through skill-building and self-awareness. It entails support in goal-setting, planning, and execution, including instruction in homework initiation and completion, preparation for tests and quizzes, organization of materials, self-scheduling, self-evaluation, and effective communication with teachers.
Learning Support
I offer learning support spanning elementary through college levels. This includes multisensory math tutoring and remediation from basic arithmetic through high-school geometry and trigonometry; support for standard high-school science courses; and writing and reading comprehension instruction through college. I can also provide enrichment in mathematics and the humanities, making advanced content accessible for twice-exceptional students. I integrate training in assistive technology as appropriate.
Social Coaching
I offer social coaching for students from fourth grade through high school. Social coaching can include direct instruction, and I can also use schoolwork as an occasion for building social cognition, which, in addition to being efficient, may be more acceptable to the child. For example, writing requires anticipating readers’ needs, literature and history require social inference, and math and science involve communications conventions and, typically, group work.
Social coaching will have the greatest impact if it includes a school-consulting facet, in which parents arrange for me to communicate with their child’s school and perform one or more observations, after which I meet with the child’s school team to frame the situation productively and, as an experienced teacher, to make workable practical suggestions.
Training and Consulting
I can provide professional development on a broad range of topics, including autism in the independent school environment, accessible materials on paper and online, accessible enrichment for twice-exceptional students, and auditory processing disorders in the classroom.
With experience not only as a classroom teacher at special schools, both autism-focused and LD-focused, but also as a learning specialist supporting regular-education teachers, I have a feel for the perspectives of all concerned; and I maintain a practical focus on “news you can use.” As desired, I can present in a traditional fashion or take a case-study approach, discussing general principles through the lens of a particular student or students; or I can combine the two approaches.
I can also present on and provide continuing consulting regarding protocols for identifying children with potential exceptionalities for referral to evaluators, with particular reference to hidden cases, such as when students are twice-exceptional.