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Our Educational Philosophy:J&K Methods:Our educational method focuses on teaching, reflecting and communicating. Additionally, our mentoring approach integrates what John Gottman refers to as "emotion coaching."Mutual Goal Setting: At the onset of our work, we explore the goals of students, parents, and teachers, including our own goals for the student. We then actively seek ways to integrate these goals, to find their common grounds, and to revise them according to what makes sense to the student's unique development. We track our progress toward these goals through regular emails, reports and/or conferences. Communicative Alliances: Because strong and consistent communication is the key to generating the kind of support that allows a student to feel confident to take the kinds of risks necessary to learning, we form communicative alliances with students, parents and teachers as we move forward with a student. In these communications, we describe the academic and interpersonal content of the lessons, our hypotheses about our student's learning dynamics, and the results of testing out our hypotheses. Each of these activities allows us to regularly reflect on the hypotheses we are forming about our student's progress. Unique Individual Development: We emphasize the right of students to determine where their educational journey ventures, and we take a role as guide in helping them construct meaningful understandings of the areas they wish to explore with us. Usually this is accomplished by working with them over long periods of time and teaching them various subjects in a highly customized manner. Creatively Supportive Environment: We help students find out what kind of setting is conducive to their learning, and we explore with them how they learn. We utilize a dialogical teaching method that emphasizes the teacher-student relationship as the nexus at which learning occurs. Our teachers utilize authentic and personally meaningful dialogue with students to explore our students' motivations and mental representations. We employ emotion-coaching strategies to help students work through motivational struggles, and various scaffolding techniques to help students work through their zones of proximal cognitive development. Adaptive Problem Solvers: Our ultimate goals for our students are to help them foster a love of learning, learn how their minds work and how they learn, and apply the problem solving strategies they learn with us to any variety of contexts. We feel this is the outcome of providing a safe environment in which they can "play" with learning to the extent they discover their own agency in the learning process and the potentials afforded by their unique constitutions. In learning how to solve problems or original complexity, without resort to memorized patterns, students develop a confidence in learning that becomes a lifelong asset. Emotion Coaching:Often students coming to us struggle with impediments or challenges that prevent them from easily entering a position to learn, or pedagogical stance. Thus, we may spend considerable time helping them explore their resistances, motivational struggles, or learning differences (or disabilities) until they feel comfortable enough to enter a pedagogical position.Theories of emotion suggest that when an individual (student) experiences a particular emotion whose expression is thwarted or frustrated, the person may manipulate her social environment in order to re-experience these feelings, often in a repetition compulsion that seems completely irrational to others (and even that person). These environmental manipulations will trump all other conscious concerns, meaning that students may intentionally (even if unconsciously) disrupt their academic environments if such disruptions facilitate the playing out of desired emotions. Emotion coaching seeks to identify such disruptive tendencies, with special attention to how they arise during sessions with the student, and helps the student through a five step process for learning to manage such emotions:
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