If you see your child struggling with homework and receiving disappointing test results, you may feel worried that they won’t get the grades they need! If you teen has ADHD, their school challenges may be even more extensive… and concerning! It’s likely that your child needs some extra support, but it can be difficult to know which option is best: coaching or tutoring.
Coaching vs. Tutoring
The difference between coaching and tutoring isn’t always clear cut. Tutoring tends to focus on a specific academic subject and aims to improve subject knowledge and understanding in that subject. By working on mastering specific academic content, the goal of tutoring is often to improve performance in the short term, for example to pass a particular test or raise exam grades in a specific subject. Tutors may cover learning and study skills as they relate to that specific subject, but application to other subjects and contexts will generally be limited. Helping students learn how to get organised and manage their workload effectively, is rarely part of what a tutor offers. Yet that is what many students with ADHD need. Executive function coaching, by contrast, has far wider benefits and potentially a greater impact on your teen’s performance. In this blog post, learn more about executive function coaching, so that you can make the best decision for your child.
What is Executive Function coaching?
Executive Function (EF) coaching teaches vital brain skills that enable each of us to organise and manage ourselves in our daily lives. These important brain capabilities also help students keep on top of their studies. They are called executive function skills and their development in children with ADHD tends to lag behind their neurotypical peers – by about three years! (You can find out more about other causes of EF dysfunction here.) If you see your 15 year old struggling to manage their workload, then it’s not surprising when they’re trying to do so with the executive function skills of a 12 year old. They might struggle to:
- get learning materials organised (organisational skills)
- plan and prioritise their workload (planning & time management skills)
- start tasks even when it feels difficult (task initiation skills)
- stay focussed to completion (attention skills & goal-directed persistence)
- submit homework on time (time management & working memory skills).
Fortunately many of these lagging EF skills can be developed through coaching. During EF coaching sessions students learn to repeatedly practise and apply these skills directly (not in an abstract way) through managing their workload under the guidance of their coach. This empowers students to build sustainable habits to manage their learning and schoolwork effectively. Students will also develop a bank of learning and study skills that they can apply across the curriculum to achieve academic success. Mastering these executive function skills also enables young people to better manage their personal lives, serving them well for years to come.
Assessing lagging executive function skills
I start each coaching engagement by asking my students: “What’s hard for you?”. Many teens have a good understanding of where their challenges lie. Others can see the impact of their difficulties but have no idea why they are struggling. Our intake process includes an executive function skills assessment, which assesses the full range of executive function skills. I also gather information from student reports and talk with parents to gather their insights, in order to build a 360° picture of each teen’s difficulties. Next we prioritise working on the most pervasive problems which have the widest impact on your teen’s academics and their wider life. This is where you will see the biggest difference between EF coaching and tutoring. Through coaching, you will notice progress in multiple areas of your teen’s life, not just in one particular academic subject.
An example: How EF coaching benefits student time management
The EF skill of time management
Time management is one key area of executive dysfunction common to teens with ADHD (or other source of EF challenges). Lagging time management skills are one of the main reasons for missed homework deadlines and chronic lateness. They can also create a sense of overwhelm for your teen around managing multiple tasks in a timely way. Stress arising from rushing and running late, can also feed into disorganisation and forgetfulness. Therefore solving time management problems with your teen can feed forward into fewer issues with disorganisation. Also you may notice your teen exhibiting a calmer, more collected frame of mind… and fewer issues with memory recall.
Developing self-awareness of the root of the problem
Through coaching, your teen will come to a better understanding of how their ADHD negatively impacts their perception of time. This is often referred to as ‘time blindness’. Difficulties can lie with a poor internal clock. It can be hard to accurately estimate how much time has passed or how long tasks will take to complete. Furthermore key daily time periods, such as ‘transition time’, can be overlooked. These difficulties often lead to your teen committing to unrealistic daily schedules – and then being consistently late! They can also cause your teen to miss academic deadlines or run out of time to revise thoroughly for exams. A daily time log or time estimation activities can help teens see the impact of these lagging skills first hand. This can then create motivation for change.
Sharing practical strategies and tools
After developing self-awareness, my coaching focus turns to practical time management strategies and tools to compensate for lagging skills. Making time visible is one strategy that can help. Whilst many clocks and watches are now digital, switching back to analogue clocks can aid time-blind students by showing the passing of time visually. TimeTimers are one particularly useful tool I often recommend. As a teacher, I regularly used visual timetables to support younger learners develop their time awareness throughout the school day. Older students can also benefit from a visual schedule. I encourage them to use colour coded time blocking or time boxing to organise their day and homework/study schedules. I share different options which students trial, reflecting and making refinements until their schedule works well for them. Digital tools also help, with alarms marking the end of a time block and helping prevent time problems from ADHD hyperfocus. These tools and strategies benefit not just one academic subject but translate across the whole curriculum, as well as into real life outside school.
The impact of time blindness on planning
Time blindness can also impact your teen’s ability to plan ahead as they have a shorter time horizon. If you worry that your teen has no strong vision for their future, this could be why! Or they may have a vision but struggle to plan how to get there, causing you to feel frustrated that they are leaving it all to chance. This difficulty with planning also affects schoolwork, so EF coaching will teach your teen to break larger tasks with a distant deadline, down into smaller chunks with more immediate due dates. By providing accountability check-ins at these interim points, EF coaching can help keep your time-blind teen on track. As a result, they will become better able to meet homework assignment deadlines, keep on top of more complex ongoing projects and make a revision schedule that works for them. Again, unlike in tutoring, each of these positive coaching outcomes will benefit all subjects!
Example: How EF coaching improves student thinking (metacognition)
The EF skill of metacognition
Another example of the benefits of coaching over tutoring, can be seen in how coaching encourages students to improve how they manage their thinking. This EF skill (called “metacognition”) relates to how we self-evaluate and self-monitor our thinking, as well as being about how we make connections in our learning and see the big picture. Coaching encourages a habit of self-reflection as we start each session by reviewing the preceding week’s agreed action steps. We celebrate success and identify what didn’t go so well. This information then feeds into our future work together. This process benefits a student’s wider academic and personal growth as they develop greater self-insight, more informed decision-making, and increased agency in their own lives. Learning to think metacognitively has other academic benefits too. It encourages students to inquire into and reflect on how they learn best. Discovering which revision strategies work best for their unique brains is just one of many benefits.
Developing positive self-talk
Self-monitoring our thinking is also important as it helps us notice how we engage in self-talk. If you’ve heard your child repeatedly calling themselves stupid or lazy, you’re not alone. Many teens engage in negative self-talk, particularly those with ADHD. (Research has shown that by age 12, children with ADHD have often received 20,000 more negative messages about their behaviour than a neurotypical child.) Developing a strong, positive internal voice is important for all students. For those with ADHD it is crucial to counteract the excessive number of negative comments they often hear. Without a positive self-image developed through constructive self-talk, students are at risk from poor self-concept, low motivation and mental health problems. EF coaching will help your teen reframe their thinking more positively, by learning to use more kindness and self-compassion in how they talk to themselves.
Executive function coaching grows transferrable skills for life!
Throughout the examples above, you can see how executive function skills are also true ‘life skills’. Their impact is wide ranging, extending beyond your teen’s experiences in school and college. Organisation and planning skills translate from planning homework and study whilst at school, to budgeting and meal planning as a young independent adult. Mastering task initiation skills, particularly when the task in question is difficult or boring, translate into the world of work. Another obvious example is how problem-solving skills developed in relationships with peers at school, continue in relationships in the workplace.
Whereas tutoring improves learning and skills related to a specific focus subject area, EF coaching offers so much more! It is invaluable for young people, particularly those with ADHD, as it improves their learning across all subjects. Beyond the school domain, EF coaching also develops essential life skills for the future!
If you see the benefits and think executive function coaching, rather than tutoring, may be helpful for your child, please connect with me here. Or book a free consultation to find out how executive function coaching can help your teen get organised, develop effective homework and study systems, and improve their grades.
