All Articles tagged high-school.

Taking Notes About College Visits

October 1, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Type “college tour bingo” into Google Images, and up pop rows of gridded phrases such as “A capella groups!” “The library is open 24/7 during finals!” “Lots of students enter with undecided majors!” Jokes like these related to college visits are no surprise to anyone who’s toured a few colleges — the ubiquity of these phrases is the point.

But the cards highlight a more serious reality. Even as colleges strive to stand out from their rivals, once an applicant has toured a few campuses (virtually or in person), they can start sounding the same. And the colleges’ problem later becomes the applicant’s problem. If the schools sound the same during the tours and information sessions — while the applicant is on campus — they will be even harder to distinguish months after the visit, when the student is completing applications, and months after that, when the applicant is choosing where to enroll.

Our solution to this dilemma: take college visits notes.

We advise students to always bring two pens and a notebook on their campus visits. If it’s cold outside, bring a pencil too, as pens freeze easily. The notebook should be small enough to hold in one hand, to make it easy to write while walking. As for what to write down, students should record the names of any faculty or staff they meet. If they visit a dorm, they should jot down the name. If they sit in on a class — which we recommend — they should write down the course title and the professor. If the student asks a question during a tour or information session, they should take notes on the answer. Not only will the notes jog the student’s memory later, but the act of taking college visits notes keeps the student engaged in the moment. And we do specifically recommend that students use paper for campus visit notes. Taking notes on a phone looks a lot like texting, so an applicant working on their screen runs the risk of appearing disengaged and disrespectful.

We advise a bit more note taking as soon as the applicant leaves campus. On the visit, applicants take notes based on observation — who they meet, what they learn. Afterwards, it’s time to reflect. How does the applicant feel about the school? Why do they feel that way? What did they think of the academic programs they heard about? That class they observed? The chance to pursue their favorite extracurriculars? The general mood and vibe on campus? What do they not want to forget? Gut feeling: would they be happy here?

The reflection doesn’t have to take long. We recommend writing for 7 to 10 minutes, just long enough for the student to work out their initial impressions. They don’t need to compose paragraphs, or even complete sentences. A list is fine. And while writing by hand has cognitive benefits, they can write this part on their phones, if they like. They can also snap photos of their notebook pages, to store all of their notes from college visits together digitally.

Ultimately, of course, not all colleges are the same. Occasionally, applicants step onto a campus and immediately feel at home; that’s an experience they won’t forget. But students generally apply to several schools, and the entire concept of applying to college — and choosing one, the biggest decision of applicants’ lives so far — can be so intimidating that the details of the schools get flattened in the applicant’s memory. Taking notes about college visits helps to demystify and deescalate that process. The little notebook will help students’ applications go more smoothly, and it will make it easier for students to choose the right school in the end.

Then, with this informed decision made, they can begin preparing for the next “game.” We’re referring, of course, to “first-year orientation bingo.”

By Elizabeth Walters, MFA, and Faya Hoffman, College Counselor and Board Certified Educational Planner

Simple Advice for a Great School Year: Planning and Organizational Systems

September 28, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

If you ask students what it takes to get good grades, many would probably say “being smart” and “studying hard.” But after years of working with students of all ages, it is clear that the key to scholastic success really comes from developing a plan and working hard to stick to that plan. We often support this planning and persistence with executive function coaching in order to help our students develop strong organizational systems and systematic processes. Here is some simple advice for students to help start the school year off right.

Take Stock of Your Strengths and Areas for Growth

To start, it is important to take stock of your strengths and relative weaknesses as a learner. What do you already do well and where can you improve? What types of organizational systems do you already have in place? What were your pain points last school year? Be introspective. No one is perfect. We all have strengths and relative weaknesses, and identifying them early in the school year can be extremely helpful.

Take Responsibility for Yourself

Part of identifying room for improvement and then setting goals and developing organizational systems means taking responsibility for yourself, your decisions and your actions. While this means different things for students of different ages, it’s important to understand that while other people can support or distract you from this responsibility, it is essential to focus on how to improve yourself rather than only looking at others’ actions. Obstacles present opportunities, and you can’t let your plan be thwarted because you don’t like a particular teacher, or you find a particular text boring, or you can’t seem to ignore certain peer influences. You have to take control and acknowledge that you are making conscious choices.

Focusing on your own actions means, as the old saying goes, “honesty is the best policy.” This means both being honest with others and yourself about, for example, how much work you have and what your other responsibilities are. Be realistic when planning how much time to set for each assignment. Misleading yourself or others about how much homework you have will only create more stress in the long-run. You don’t want to be in a position where you are handing in late or incomplete work. Meeting deadlines is an important lifelong skill that takes practice. It’s almost always a bad idea to penalize yourself unnecessarily with reduced grades because of late work. To mitigate this sort of situation, it’s critical to have strong organizational systems in place.

Commit To Organizational Systems That Work For You

But how do you stay on top of everything? Commit to organizational systems that work for you. Whether you prefer a paper planner, keeping track of your assignments online, or a hybrid system, choose the method that works for you and stick with it. Make sure you update your planner every day and actually check it. While digital planning and calendaring works for many students, sometimes “old school,” more concrete methods are better, such as a wipe-off wall calendar using markers and/or post-it notes.

In order to avoid academic burnout, be sure to make time to do the things you love during the school year, whether it’s sports, music, video games, or just hanging out with friends. But also make sure that you aren’t using your favorite activities to procrastinate your school work too much. Moderation is key. On busy school nights, set timers for how long you are going to spend on breaks. Successful organizational systems include time for self care and recharging, though not every week may be equally well balanced.

Most importantly, remember that learning is a process, not simply checking things off of a list. This is particularly important on writing-based tasks where you should not be satisfied until you have edited, edited, and done more editing (and sought feedback from others!). In math, keep trying different ways to solve a problem until you have figured it out. The process in both subjects — or any subject — is more important than just getting the answer or completing the task.

And if you need help, don’t be afraid to ask! Organizational systems need continuous refinement at all stages of life as we incrementally take on more responsibility. Executive function coaching, content support, and test preparation can take on many shapes and sizes in order to best fit the situation. Ask your teachers, parents and/or academic coaches for help when you need it and take advantage of help when it’s offered.

For more information about academic tutoring, executive function coaching, and school planning, please contact Brad Hoffman and Faya Hoffman at My Learning Springboard.

By Brad Hoffman, Board Certified Educational Planner and Learning Specialist, and Laurie Gross, Educational Consultant and Reading Specialist.

When To Consider Executive Function Coaching

September 20, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

With parents and educators growing more attuned to the broad range of factors that affect students’ success, executive function coaching has become an increasingly popular part of families’ educational planning. Based on explicit instruction to develop strategies for organization, time management, and effective task completion, executive function coaching is often used when relative weaknesses or significant deficits in these areas are impeding students’ school success. However, executive function coaching isn’t just for students and families in crisis; this holistic professional support can be invaluable for all learners at any age. Executive functioning is as essential and teachable as reading or mathematics, and it’s worth considering even when your student isn’t actively struggling in school.

Here are four situations in which you might want to consider executive function coaching:

1. If your student is about to start at a new school.

Whether transferring to a completely new school or even just entering middle or high school, school transitions can be stressful for even the most successful students. New schools (and new grades at familiar schools) often come with new scheduling systems, different teacher expectations, unfamiliar online portals, and a whole host of other nitty-gritty details that can be overwhelming and difficult to manage. Executive function coaching is a great tool for making these transitions easier on the whole family. During dedicated time with an executive function coach, students have the opportunity to plan out new routines, parse the details of unfamiliar requirements, and integrate effective scheduling and organizational tools into their academic plans. This kind of preparation can turn transitions into productive new beginnings rather than stressful setbacks.

2. If you have a hectic family schedule.

Executive function coaching isn’t just for academics; its benefits transfer readily from the academic arena to the rest of a student’s life. Most extracurriculars involve the same need for planning and organization that school does—think scheduling piano practice or keeping soccer gear tidy—and it’s often easier to get students invested in extracurricular success than academic success. Consequently, executive function coaching can help students develop more effective routines and habits around all of their extracurriculars, which is often an enormous asset to families balancing multiple busy schedules. When students are able to take full charge of their own passions, there’s less burden on parents and siblings, making day-to-day activities easier for everyone. What’s more, practicing executive function strategies outside of school also helps students succeed in applying them at school.

3. If your student is being treated for anxiety, ADHD, or another emotional or behavioral challenge.

Executive function challenges often correlate to ADHD diagnoses and can sometime exacerbate the difficulties of students with conditions like anxiety or OCD. If, for example, an anxious student lacks the executive function skills to keep her school papers in order, the resulting confusion can increase her anxiety around school and homework. Conversely, having a robust toolkit for staying organized and planning tasks can be an especially meaningful asset for such students. Executive function coaching can be a helpful complement to mental health treatment, and executive function coaches can even work collaboratively with mental health professionals to ensure a consistent, sensitive approach to each student’s unique challenges and strengths.

4. If your student is just starting to struggle with time management or organization.

Often, students start executive function coaching long after they begin to have difficulty with time management, organization, and related issues. But executive function coaching is just as helpful—and arguably more helpful—for students who are showing only early signs of executive function challenges. This might be an elementary schooler who likes school but can’t keep her desk clean, a middle schooler who gets good grades but starts losing homework when his class schedule becomes more complicated, or a high school freshman whose new extracurriculars are causing her worry over getting everything done. A little bit of intervention early on can go a long way toward keeping these minor issues from becoming major ones, so it’s worth considering professional support whenever you start to notice challenges like these.

It’s easy to overlook the key role that executive function plays in all students’ success, but it’s always worth considering when a little extra support in this crucial area might be the small step that makes all the difference.

Please contact our office to discuss your student’s needs in more detail.

By Hannah Sheldon Dean, Private Tutor and Executive Function Coach

Why Write A Five-Paragraph Essay?

September 16, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

Among the genres of writing projects that students experience in upper elementary, middle and high school, the five-paragraph essay is one of the most popular. Well, it’s popular with teachers. With students, just saying the phrase “five-paragraph essay” can evoke audible groans. For those writers, it calls to mind themes of dullness and standardization, a static formula. Yet the form is a valid one for a number of reasons, and in the right conditions, it can encourage creative thinking instead of stifling it. In fact, among the benefits of the five-paragraph essay are valuable opportunities for writers in terms of cognition, rhetoric, and culture.

There’s a reason that Bloom’s Taxonomy, a hierarchy of thinking processes, lists “creation” as its most complex category: whether a student is investigating a hypothesis, building a contraption, or writing an essay, creating something new is a difficult task. A major component of this difficulty is what educators and psychologists call cognitive load, the amount of working memory resources a task demands of the person performing it. In her widely cited article “A Capacity Theory of Writing: Working Memory in Composition,” the educational scholar Deborah McCutchen illustrates the cognitive load of writing: “to compose a text, skilled writers coordinate within working memory planning goals (e.g., plans for content, audience, overall tone, etc.) and product goals (e.g. requirements of grammaticality, plan fulfillment, etc.) while language generation processes retrieve words to express content and organize those words into appropriate text (see Flower and Hayes, 1980, 1981, 1984 McCutchen, 1994).” Understandably, it can be difficult for a writer to attend to all of these processes at once, and if the cognitive load is too high, the writer might not be able to complete the task. One way to lighten this load is to focus on different aspects of the writing process and product at different times; educators have adopted this principle in frameworks like the 6+1 Writing Traits or Judith Hochman’s Teaching Basic Writing Skills. Because it offers a consistent structure, one of the major benefits of the five-paragraph essay is that once a writer is familiar with it, using that framework for planning frees more of their cognitive load. With their basic organizational scheme already chosen, the writer can attend more fully to other aspects of their work, such as ideas, voice, word choice, sentence fluency, conventions, and presentation.

In thinking of the rhetorical power of the five-paragraph essay form, rather than the total number of paragraphs, we should consider a different number, a bit of a magical number: three. In his book Writing Tools: 55 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, Roy Peter Clark discusses the hidden power of numbers in language. Citing examples such as “Moe, Larry, and Curly. Tinkers to Evers to Chance. A priest, a minister, and a rabbi. Executive, legislative, judicial,” he notes that “In our language and culture, three provides a sense of the whole.” There’s just something about a set of three things that resounds with people. In allowing the writer to use three body paragraphs to set forth three main points, the five-paragraph essay invites the writer to tap into this power. It is worth noting that three is not the only powerful number. For instance, before they learn the five-paragraph essay form, many students learn the four-paragraph essay, which reemerges occasionally in high school. This form allows students to graduate from three-paragraph essays, whose single body paragraph generally explores one major point, to use two body paragraphs to explore a duality within their topic.

The cultural argument for the five-paragraph essay may, at first, seem self-serving: It is useful because it is widely used. But just as it serves a purpose for writers, it serves a purpose for readers. Faced with this familiar form, readers know to look for a guiding claim or thesis statement at the end of the first paragraph. Anticipating how the structure works makes it easier for the reader to comprehend the piece. This is not to say that all five-paragraph essays work the exact same way. As we noted above, the advantage of a familiar structure is to let students concentrate on other aspects of writing, so as students progress, their ideas should grow more sophisticated even within this same form. Their order of body paragraphs should have a perceptible logic, their analyses should be complex, and rather than serving as a simple summary, their conclusion could emphasize the significance of their argument. Even after writers move on to longer and more complex forms, they may still find occasion to access the benefits of the five-paragraph essay. Two of the highest-stakes pieces in high school, the ACT or SAT essay and the main Common Application statement, lend themselves well to the form. In both the ACT and SAT, testers must compose a complete essay in less than an hour. If they enter the test already tentatively knowing what their structure will be, they will save valuable minutes of writing time. The urgency of time is also a factor for the essays’ audiences. Both the test essays and the Common Application essay are read by people who are consuming a high volume of pieces and consuming them quickly — in the case of the application essay, in just a few minutes. It is to the writer’s advantage to make the reader’s job easier by giving them a vivid, specific essay in a structure that is easy to follow.

The students who rail against five-paragraph essays might be surprised to hear that the form is controversial in academia as well; in fact, a new book by the college instructor John Warner, titled Why They Can’t Write, is subtitled Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities. While we don’t want to kill the five-paragraph essay, we agree that the form has at least one downside: the potential for overuse. If every piece a student composes is a five-paragraph essay, that’s a problem. No single structure, essay or otherwise, should encompass all of a student writer’s experiences in a school year, or even in a single class. Writers of all ages need opportunities to wrestle with form. We don’t want writers to believe, as even some first-year college students do, that big ideas always come in threes, or that one paragraph is always sufficient for sharing their thoughts on one of those ideas. Notably, hardly any pieces of “real world” writing, including published essays, take the form of a five-paragraph essay. That’s another downside: ultimately, the structure is too simple for public discourse. Even as we help students understand and access the benefits of the five-paragraph essay, we must emphasize that the form acts like a set of writerly training wheels. Eventually, with instructors’ guidance, students need to shift from letting form determine their ideas to letting their ideas determine form. At that point, the training wheels should fall away, and writers will zoom forward, perhaps a little wobbly at times, but entirely under their own power.

By Elizabeth Walters, Private Tutor and Writing Coach

Preparing For In-Person Learning and the 2021-2022 School Year

September 5, 2021 Brad Hoffman Leave a Comment

For students and their families, the past year and a half has been extremely challenging. And for educators, it has been grueling. They’ve had to throw out lesson plans and start from scratch, learn new technology on the fly, and attempt to keep students virtually engaged during a stressful and scary time. This September, students in New York are finally returning to the classroom (in some parts of the US, they have already been in school for weeks), but with the Delta variant raging just as in-person learning is set to resume, a whole new set of issues have arisen for teachers and school administrators to manage. Some states are mandating masks in the classroom, while others–against all scientific evidence and public health advice–are banning them. Despite these challenges, the educators we spoke with are excited to get back into the classroom after so long. Here’s their advice for successfully managing the transition back to school.

“Having a stressful, complicated year under our collective belts, the conversation is now about how to get back to the real work of instruction and curriculum,” says Marisa Krohn, Vice Principal at PS 110 — The Florence Nightingale School — on the Lower East Side. “How do we help transition students back to the building, meet them where they are, and in a year that only highlighted inequity, level the playing field?”

For Krohn, this means focusing not just on delivering lessons, but helping students re-learn how to go to a physical school. From her conversations with families, many students are eager to return, but may be out of practice with in-person learning. Rising second graders, for example, only logged a few pandemic-months of school before switching to online or blended learning. After two years at home, Krohn realizes that many students will have issues re-adjusting, or just remembering how school works. “‘Where is the bathroom?’ and ‘How do I sign up for school lunch?’, become real worries after such a time lapse.” Teachers and parents need to remember that it may take some time for kids to get used to the new routine, but they are also surprisingly adaptable. “Our biggest takeaway last year was how amazingly resilient our community was–everyone worked together to make sure policy was implemented and safety was the priority.”

For Maggie Sisti, a classroom teacher in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC, facing this September has been unusually taxing. Teachers are battling “a sense of weariness” from having to continuously adapt to new plans and mandates, but there is also “a sense of determination” to manage in-person learning. She and her colleagues have been working hard since the moment the school year ended in June to figure out “how to put our kids first and create a school year as close to normal as possible.”

In practice, what this means for many teachers is a return to basics in an effort to get everyone up to speed after such a long absence from the classroom. Though Sisti learned a lot from teaching virtually and through hybrid models, and she plans to use technology like choice boards, NearPod, and FlipGrid to enhance collaborative projects–her main strategy is to “go old school” to catch up on the traditional learning skills they missed in the last year and a half. “I want them to be practicing handwriting and lining up numbers when they add. I want to meet with small guided reading groups and really observe them using reading strategies,” she says.

Ultimately, both Sisti and Krohn believe the best way to enter the new year is to be open to students’ concerns. Let them know “that whatever they are feeling is okay,” says Sisti, and don’t promise that this will be ‘the best year ever’ or ‘in-person school will be better than virtual learning’ because it may not be true.” The pandemic has injected uncertainty into what used to be the things we most took for granted, but it’s critical that parents not dump those concerns on their kids. Instead focus on the positives, including how resilient your kids have become. “Be honest with your children, tell them that the transition to in-person learning will be challenging, but they have learned to do a lot of hard things during the pandemic.”

By Daniel Penny, Private Tutor