Goals
- The first step in making progress toward self-management and self-advocacy is identifying goals. These may look different for parents and their child, so finding common goals is essential. This step requires practicing the skills of compromise and respectful communication.
- Everyone is a work in progress. Change does not happen overnight. Forming new work habits takes time, practice, and patience.
- The goal of this work is to help people find ways to manage their work (for students, the job of school) that take all factors into account– family, educators, other members of the academic support team– all while building toward goals for the future.
Family/Student/Learning Coach Partnership
- Students and families are expected to implement one or two new strategies each week, then return to discuss how they worked.
- A foundational component of this work is to foster positive and effective communication between the student and family, educators, and other members of the student’s support team. Regular communication between family, student and learning coach is required.
- Other members of the support team– educators, therapist, doctor, tutor, etc.– are also welcome to participate at the family and student’s discretion.
Tools and Assessments
- Informal assessments may be used to clarify concepts. These may include learning style preference quizzes, interest analyzers, motivation indicators, and creativity tasks. and all results will be shared with the student and family.
- The learning coach does not offer ability or achievement testing, or any type of neuropsychology testing.
Confidentiality
- The learning coach will only discuss the student with the Mr. Gelston team, the student’s family, and other professionals identified by the family, unless the Learning Coach has significant cause to believe the student is in danger or poses a danger to others.
- Results from ability or achievement testing and neuropsych evaluation reports can be shared with the learning coach to help identify challenge and strength areas. All data will be held confidential, and results from outside testing will only be used to inform the process. For instance, the learning coach will not share IQ numbers with the student, but may use information about processing speed to help the student develop strategies for work time.
Attendance
- Meetings must be cancelled or rescheduled 24 hours prior to the start of the meeting. The meeting will be charged as planned for a no-call/no-show.
- If the student is not online within 10 minutes of the meeting start time, the session will be closed down and the family will be charged for the meeting
- If a meeting is missed for illness or another unavoidable cause, the Learning Coach will use her discretion on charging for the class. Prior notice via email or text will factor in to this decision.
- Repeated cancellations and lateness may cause forfeiture of balance and loss of spot with the
Google Drive
- The Learning Coach shares documents using Google Drive.
- You need to have a google account to access Google Drive.
- Billing and other document downloads are stored in Google Drive.
- Mr. Gelston’s One Room Schoolhouse maintains a private mailing list on Google Groups for families to receive announcements and to share thoughts as a group.
Learning Coach Availability
- Carol Malueg travels frequently to give workshops and presentations, but strives to maintain a regular weekly schedule with students. The Learning Coach will notify you about schedule changes and work with you to find an alternate meeting time when the schedule will be disrupted. She will update her calendar regularly.
- Spots are filled on a first-come basis.
- Families can hold a spot for fall by pre-purchasing and scheduling sessions for the fall.