22 Mar What is Academic Coaching and how is it different from tutoring?

What is Academic Coaching and how is it different from tutoring? This is a question that we get all the time.

We are all familiar with the concept of tutoring. Maybe you took Spanish in high school and started to struggle, so your parents highered a tutor to meet with you once a week. During your tutoring sessions the tutor would explain the concepts that you were struggling with in class: How to conjugate verbs. Or how to use ser and estar. The tutoring helped with specific challenges in your specific class and the boost in confidence and grades correlated to that specific class or unit.

Tutoring is great that way; it provides students with subject based assistance on an as needed basis.

Academic Coaching is different. Academic Coaches work with clients to support skills and habits that impact all of their classes. When a student works with an Academic Coach they learn to step back and look at what they are doing in their life and classes that may be hindering their success and what they can do to create more success. An Academic Coach doesn’t just help with studying a particular concept, but rather teaches their student the skills to learn that concept for themselves, or plan and organize their work to be better prepared for the new concept or project or test that is coming up.

Tutoring teaches skills specific to a class. Academic Coaching enables students to take-on the demands of daily life by developing executive function skills. These skills will be applied to and useful for all future endeavors as well.