Learning how to learn is a skill not always addressed in school. When students get home they sometimes struggle with what teachers want them to do. Lorri specializes in equipping students with instructional scaffolding strategies to grasp underlying concepts and skills. Over time, these supports are gradually removed as students’ own cognitive learning skills and knowledge develop.
Tutoring for All Ages
My services for students include but are not limited to:
- specific subject area tutoring and homeschooling in English, Language Arts, or Humanities, Spanish, and K-6 Science & Math
- tutoring in executive functioning skills for school and homework success in all subject areas
- how to organize calendar, check and organize online assignments, organize backpack, locker, notes
- how to study for tests, how to manage homework load
- time management, note-taking, homework completion, and self-advocacy
- tutoring in active reading and critical reading
- tutoring in persuasive (analytical) writing
- tutoring in expository writing
- the college essay
- creative writing
“The teacher is of course an artist, but being an artist does not mean that he or she can make the profile, can shape the students. What the educator does in teaching is to make it possible for the students to become themselves.” — Paulo Freire
A Bit About the Executive Functioning Work I Do With Students:
I work with students, mostly upper elementary school on the cusp of transitioning into middle school, and all the way into college age. Along with any test data and parental input, I generally use a constructivist approach mixed with critical and culturally relevant pedagogy to find out what is of value to the child as we construct a work plan together.
I approach executive functioning as a skill learned in the context of some greater purpose or goal, as I can think of few topics more dull to a child than learning these skills in isolation. We artfully weave them into whatever it is they face for the week(s) ahead and get some buy-in for what needs to get done. I think kids find me pretty funny and fun, and that helps, along with a full-sized dose of mirroring back to them any misery or frustration they feel. Empathy takes us far.
Many of my students are gifted students who have been or not yet been diagnosed with ADHD. Many, I think, would qualify as 2e, and part of the problem they face lies in the dogmatic adherence to a traditional sequence they encounter in schools (even those that claim to be progressive). Additionally, they struggle with teachers who have their own executive functioning challenges — whereas some students are able to navigate such discombobulated instructions, mine often get lost or check out.
I utilize many educational, psychological, and philosophical thinkers in my work with students. Essential concepts such as Vygotsky’s zone of proximal development, Bruner’s scaffolding, Ogbu’s oppositional behavior, Gardner’s Multiple Intelligences, Dewey’s constructivism, and Freire’s critical consciousness.
I offer both support and instruction to children in these ways. I also help parents to understand some of the greater contexts for their children’s challenges and how they might better assist them between our sessions (both in terms of logistics and in terms of the artful dance of handling teenagers who don’t want interference). My role is often liaison as much as anything else.