What’s the difference between tutoring and academic coaching?

There’s a fine line between the two. Tutoring typically focuses on helping a student succeed in a particular course or field of study, while academic coaching aims at building broader skills, mindsets, and habits that support success in all academic areas (and success beyond academics). 

I treat tutoring and coaching as a continuum. When I’m tutoring, I do so with an eye to the student’s long-term development, not just the concrete goal in front of us. (For example, I’ll never do a student’s work for them, as doing so would give them an unearned short-term “win” at the cost of personal growth.) Likewise, successful academic coaching often requires some tutoring on specific coursework when modeling or practicing new skills.

What is a typical tutoring/coaching session like?

It depends on the student. One might have a long-term goal of becoming a novelist; I might help them plan and execute their first long-form story while interspersing lessons on advanced grammar and critical thinking skills. With another, whose goal is to stop being overwhelmed by schoolwork, I might aim to be responsive to whatever comes up each week—sometimes guiding them through focused work to catch up on overdue assignments, and at other times just talking with them about emotional and cognitive barriers to productivity. Each student is unique, and each tutoring relationship is equally so—formed as a collaborative project between the student, the parents, and me, together.

What subject areas do you tutor?

Primarily, I tutor the subjects in which I’m highly competent: writing, literature, and history. I’ve sometimes been effective as a math/science tutor (usually due to my personal connection with a student), but they’re not my areas of expertise. In general, I would say that if your child is struggling with how to approach mastering a subject, I can be helpful even if it’s not my specialty. If they need someone with encyclopedic knowledge of a subject area I’m not well-practiced in, I’ll do my best to refer you to an expert.

What ages do you tutor/coach?

My experience is mostly with upper elementary, middle school, and high school students. If your child is outside this age range, I’m open to exploring whether I will be a good match, so please do reach out! If I’m not a good fit, I might be able to help you find someone who is.

Is tutoring worthwhile for students who do well in school?

It can be! Often, when people think of tutoring, they think only of remedial tutoring. That’s one reason someone might have a tutor, but there are others, including:

• To take on new challenges

• To pursue specific, personal interests not supported by their educational program

• To optimize skill growth through hyper-individualized attention 

King Philip II of Macedonia didn’t hire Aristotle to tutor his son, Alexander, because Alexander was “falling behind.” He hired him because he wanted the best possible education for his son—who would later come to be known as Alexander the Great. Tutoring can be about catching up, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s about providing one-on-one support for the next step—whatever that step is.

For academic coaching, do you use a pre-made coaching curriculum?

No. I have principles and well-tested tactics, but I tailor my approach to the individual student in front of me. Every student is different and deserves an approach customized to their specific situation, challenges, and growth opportunities. 

What sorts of things might you work on during academic coaching?

Just some examples:

• Organization techniques

• Time management

• Handling procrastination

• Reorienting perspectives on academics (e.g., motivation issues or academic insecurity)

• Setting up for success through schedule and work environment

• Side-by-side work to improve work processes

• Navigating challenges presented by ADHD, ASD, or other learning differences

• Managing stress

• Foundational skill-building (e.g., note-taking and study skills)

What sorts of students do you work best with?

I’ve worked with an incredible variety of students over the years, so it’s rare that I can’t work well with a particular student. That said, I’ve been told I’m especially effective with:

• Gifted students in need of a challenge

• Students who are ADHD and/or on the spectrum and looking to work with someone calm, patient, understanding, and flexible

• Students who are frustrated with their current educational experience want to aspire to deeper understanding

How do I find out more about tutoring/coaching?

Email me at [email protected], or use the contact page to reach out.

What are your class sessions like?

My classes are highly interactive. I keep group sizes small so that each student can get personalized attention and time in the spotlight. I don’t “lecture”; I tell stories, ask thought-provoking questions, and carve out space for open discussion and curiosity. (For more on what this might look like in a particular class, see the Classes page.)

Working independently gives me time to prepare a customized learning experience for the particular individuals in a group. If I see the students on fire for a worthwhile topic, we’ll adjust course to pursue it; if something isn’t hitting home, we’ll move on quickly. Frequently, the students and I will make decisions collaboratively about how we spend our time.

What work will students do outside of class?

I design my classes to optimize for various levels of work commitment. In most classes, busy students can engage fully even if they only have time for between-class readings. For families that want more, most of my classes include access to comprehensive guidance on follow-up work. (Please see the Classes page for details on specific offerings.) I take great care to ensure that students at all levels of participation experience themselves as full members of the class.

How are students assessed?

Observationally, I assess the students continually—it’s how I ensure my teaching fits their needs and interests. However, I don’t provide grades or report cards. My goal is for students to become knowledgeable and skilled and for them to enjoy the process, not for them to prove themselves to me. 

Homeschool families can certainly use the work suggestions as the basis for their own more formal assessments—but please know that I develop them based on my own judgment of what’s most interesting and valuable, not based on state standards.

Where do you get your curriculum?

I make it. I do use some outside resources—novels in literature, selected readings for history, etc.—but my lesson plans and many of the resources I’ll give to students are my own. For most classes, you can expect a lot of original content, and I don’t teach a class the same exact way twice.

"Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." – David McCullough, historian

What sort of writing support do you offer?

Excellent writing is purposeful and refined in its conception, its structure, and its word-by-word execution. Depending on a student's needs and capabilities, my tutoring can provide support at all of these levels. I can walk a student through the process of conceptualizing and planning a piece of work, provide tools for and feedback on the outlining and drafting process, and/or I can give lessons on grammatical fundamentals.

What are some specific areas of writing you might focus on?

• Honing critical thinking through persuasive writing

• Mastering grammatical fundamentals through proofreading and sentence diagramming

• Exploring characterization and dramatic structure through fiction writing

• Developing analytical skills through literary analysis

• Building media literacy and integrative thinking through research-based writing

• Improving writing fluency and creativity through journaling and free writing

• Strengthening precision of thought and communication through editing and revision

• Expanding vocabulary through study of etymology/roots

How much work will students have between writing tutoring sessions?

This depends entirely on the student. If a student has time, it’s often helpful for us to agree on writing commitments as practice and fodder for lessons. Often, though, students seeking tutoring in writing already feel overwhelmed. In these cases, I usually focus on skill-building through targeted revision of the work they’re already doing.

How do you make history interesting?

Step one: don’t get in history’s way. History is already interesting—it’s the study of the most important people, events, and ideas ever! Many students dislike history classes (as I did, even though I loved history itself) because they associate them with dry, committee-written textbooks, endless tests of memorization, and only a few platitudinous attempts to imbue the subject with meaning. (Has your child ever been given a reason to care about knowing history other than “so it doesn’t repeat itself”?)

I aim to immerse students in a vivid historical reality—for them to understand and feel how it impacted the real humans who lived through it.

Step two: tell history as a coherent story rich in ideas and perspectives. Learning history in order, while highlighting the causal through-lines, is the low-hanging fruit of history education. The past is the context for the present, and this was true for every period of history. You can’t really understand a period of time if you don’t understand what led up to it, nor can you understand it if you can’t “step into the minds” of the people who lived through it by understanding what they believed and what they cared about. As much as possible, I teach history in order, and I aim to emphasize the causal, thematic, and cultural threads that tie the past together. 

Step three: in every way, center the content and process of learning history around its value in our lives today. Here are a few key ways I do that:

• Storytelling—historically accurate storytelling, of course!—draws out the human drama of history, allowing students to see it vividly and to care. (This is one of the reasons that my students often get readings that I’ve hand-crafted for them, instead of “off the shelf” textbook handouts.) 

• Connections to the modern world help students regularly “cash in” their historical knowledge. These connections range from the very concrete (how many different types of Christian churches did you drive by this month that exist only because of the Protestant Reformation?) to the more abstract (how does your understanding of the theory of mercantilism help you understand the debate about tariffs today?).

• Historical problem-solving makes history an engaging challenge of inference. How might the Peloponnesian War—which left both Athens and Sparta bloodied—be bad for both city-states, even the winner? Given what you know about the experiences of the colonists in the 16th-17th centuries, what would you expect the founders to include in the “list of grievances” against King George III in the Declaration of Independence? Questions like these give value to factual mastery and historical logic, and they model how history can be used to better understand and make predictions in the world today.

What sources do you provide to students?

If you’re curious about a specific course, please see the Classes page for details. More generally: when there is an existing source that is excellent, I’m happy to use it. When I’ve found nothing good enough (which is unfortunately frequent), I create my own readings.

I also make heavy use (in some courses more than others) of primary sources. Where it will help students, I create “translations” of these sources. (For example, in my US History course, I provide both the original version of an excerpt from John Smith’s The Generall Historie of Virginia and a modernized version of it, so that each student can choose the “difficulty level” they wish to approach it at.)

How do you navigate controversies?

Controversial topics are usually the most interesting ones to learn about! I eagerly embrace them as opportunities for students to develop their own informed views of the world, and often play devil’s advocate to help them build the skill of approaching these topics in an evidence- and logic-based way. 

Educators hold a privileged position in the classroom: if they convey bias toward a particular point of view (even subtly and unintentionally), they can have a “freezing effect” on students’ willingness to speak and to explore ideas. I do my best to ensure that my students don’t know what my religious, political, or philosophical views are. My role is not to advocate or propagandize, but to help guide them through the process of drawing their own independent conclusions.

Propaganda is fragile. Given the choice between a student who reaches a faulty conclusion while doing their best to use evidence and reason, or a student who reaches the “right” conclusion because they feel pressured or because they’ve been presented with no alternative, I’ll take the one who gets it wrong for the right reasons every time. A poor thinker is vulnerable to the next strongly-stated point of view they hear, but a good thinker can self-correct—and so my aim, above all else, is to help my students be great, independent thinkers.

How are your literature classes different than the ELA classes most students take at school?

I have two core goals in my literature classes: I want students to love reading, and I want them to build a deep understanding of themselves and the world around them through their studies of literature.

The educational deck right now is stacked against readers. Many students tell me that, if they engage with literature at all at their schools, it has little personal meaning: they study literary form rather than literary substance. They might learn to identify symbolism and point of view, but they don’t get to the moral, psychological, and philosophical questions that are at the core of great stories—and which are a big part of what makes them exciting to read! Even worse, a lot of schools no longer include full books in their programs; instead, their students read out-of-context excerpts which are treated as fodder for repetitive, mind-numbing comprehension exercises.

Literature should be enjoyable, and it should mean something. In my classes, we read exciting books that will stick with their readers for years to come, and we discuss them in a way that aims to draw out every ounce of value.

What sorts of books do you pick for your literature classes?

I pick books that are great at all levels. I don’t develop a class around a novel unless I think two things are true: it’s enjoyable to read, and it has depth. That means that I don’t bother with beach reads or critically-acclaimed grinds. Some of those have their own sort of worth, but I’m not personally going to build a class around them.

You can see a few examples of the sorts of books I have in mind on the Classes page. Not every book will be perfect for every reader, and my selections certainly reflect my own preferences as well as the criteria above. I have many more options on the back-burner, though, so if you’re interested in a class but don’t see something compelling on my list, reach out to me and let’s talk!

What do you actually do in literature classes?

The formula for my literature classes is, on the face of it, simple: we read a book, and we talk about it. There’s a bit more to it than that, though. I ask students to prepare their own discussion questions, which orients them to thinking deeply about a book. To that extent, our discussions end up being guided by the students’ own interests and what seemed salient to them in the novels. I also come prepared with my own topics to guide discussion: these usually aim to draw out deeper ideas or themes within a story, and to help the students connect the novel to their own lives.

Through the course of a book, the work we do adds up to more than the sum of its parts. Each event becomes part (as the author intended) of an integrated, cohesive story; each character’s choice becomes a part of their arc. And all of these lead into the real meat of literature—the moral, psychological, and philosophical questions that these events and characters provoke.

I don’t spend much time checking on comprehension: mine are literature classes, not reading classes. If there’s confusion, we’ll pause to address it, but otherwise we keep our focus on the more interesting work of analyzing the story itself!

What sort of work can students expect from your literature classes?

As with all the classes, I accommodate a range of time commitment. Students who join a literature class should plan to put aside enough time to complete the agreed-upon chapters before each class. I will also provide writing prompts for students/families who want to go deeper. Typically, these will form part of the basis for our class discussions—meaning that everyone can participate, but those who do the extra work will be extra prepared.