As coaching increases in popularity, many wonder how it differs from therapy and other more traditional models of counseling. Following are some basic facts about coaching and what it offers:

Coaching is a growing profession. Some psychotherapists are becoming full-time coaches or added coaching to their practices while universities, including Georgetown and George Mason, offer coaching courses. And the American Psychological Association (APA) sponsors coaching workshops for continuing education credit.

Coaching assumes you are healthy and whole. While many people seek therapy to heal their past or overcome an incident of trauma or disappointment, coaches help people who are already functioning well to function at a more optimal level. It’s forward-thinking and action-oriented simply asking, “What do you want to do with your life?”.

Coaching champions personal growth and leadership. The coach’s role is to help them access that inner knowing, since they what is best for themselves. Coaches hold their clients to become the best person they are capable of being through life-work balance; goal setting, from losing weight to switching careers; personal fulfillment; and negotiating your personal “edge”. Coaches help people see what’s possible while identifying behaviors and attitudes that may be self-limiting.

Coaching can be customized. While many coaches are generalists, there are corporate coaches, coaches for small business, life/personal coaches, executive coaches, and specialty coaches, like parenting or working with young adults.

Coaching should be selective. When selecting a coach, ask the same kinds of questions you would when hiring someone to be a key member of your company or team. Check credentials, check references, and then check your own instincts. The best coaches are those whose clients work with them because they click together.

Carol’s Summary:

In New York City, the number of students required to repeat grades in  elementary and middle school multiplied by nearly five times this year due to the city’s broadened promotion policy.

Even more unfortunate is budget cuts have made it so there are no funds to put toward helping the 11,321 students who failed this year get back on track. The city has allowed for teachers to team-up and use 37 minutes of their allotted tutoring time each week to develop strategies for addressing student failures, along with assigning one intervention specialist for every 60 schools to develop a plan with the principal.

A spokesman for the Education Department said the city does not plan on changing the promotion policies even after seeing the rising numbers of student failures and budget cuts. He said they feel strongly about not promoting a student who is unprepared.

The promotion policy was passed in the 2003-04 school year, to make it so students who received a 1 on either the state math or English test were retained or given the chance to score better in summer school. Last year, state test scores were rising and the city had less than 1 percent, about 2,400 students, being retained.

Then, city officials decided the standards had been set too low and were raised in hopes of increasing college readiness. This summer, only 50 percent of students were promoted and less than three-quarters of third through eighth graders even attended.

Article: City Reports Nearly Fivefold Increase in Students Repeating a Grade

The number of New York City elementary and middle school students who failed to move on to the next grade skyrocketed this school year, as weak students faced a higher bar on state tests and the broadening of the city’s tough promotion policy.

Read the full article at: nytimes.com

Unemployed graduates can tap into their college career and alumni associations to make valuable contacts for finding their next job. If you have been unemployed for several months or you may be laid off soon, the following suggestions can ease your transition and help you make important connections for the future.

1) Visit the college’s career website. Most colleges feature tips on resume writing, alumni links, listing of national employers who actively recruit from that campus, and other information to help both undergraduates and post-grads find work.

2) Attend an alumni function. Most colleges host active alumni functions on a monthly or a quarterly basis. While the purpose of these events may be social, they still offer an excellent, informal way to make contact with people in fields which interest you. Or someone you meet may be able to direct you to a job lead, once you let them know you are actively looking.

3) Follow through on connections. If someone from the career center, the alumni office, or an alum you have met through one of these connections gives you names and contacts, follow-up. You may lose valuable credibility if they have made a call or had a conversation on your behalf and you haven’t followed through.

4) Connect with college organizations. If you belonged to a sorority or a fraternity or any other campus organization that offers national membership, check in with them as well. Many fraternal members have started their own companies or are influential community and business leaders.

5) Graciously thank people who help you. Follow up with notes or emails to the people who help you and do it within 48 hours. Recognizing another person’s time affirms that you are someone who is really worth the effort.

Carol’s Summary:

The Palm Beach County School District is removing student letter grades from 13 elementary schools and replacing them with a new system that more effectively rates student performance and progress, which they hope will spread to all 107 elementary schools in the district by next year. Educators are concerned that the damage behind receiving an F or low mark as a young student is hard to shake as the student matures. “If you say to a student, ‘You’re failing,’ they start to wear that internally,” Superintendent Art Johnson said of the stigma. “They become that.”

This year, students will be receiving “performance codes” — exemplary, proficient, approaching or needs development — instead of the old A, B, C, D, F. This grading system will also apply to work done in the class. Currently, most students bring home two grades to show their parents – one that represents their work done in the class and another that represents their progress toward moving to the next grade. This old grading system has been confusing for parents because a student can get a B on an assignment but still have too low a score to move to the next grade.

There has been controversy over this system since it was originally implemented five years ago, due to parents worrying there will not be an accurate enough measuring tool to track their children’s mastery of certain objectives and by teachers who are unwilling to change. However, parents and teachers have to be patient to see if the grading system works until a student reaches higher levels of education. Already, parents like Andrea Sandrin whose elementary student is now a ninth-grader, says her daughter who has a learning disability would have been taking home F’s. Now, after finding her learning disability early on in elementary school, she is taking advanced placement classes in high school.

This concept has some similar threads to Dr. Robert Sternberg’s theory of “successful intelligence.” If you are able to understand that your effort and energy can make you smarter, than you are more likely to “grow” your learning potential and skills. The downside of grades and standardized tests is that labels can contribute to entrenched student concept of inability. Whether or not the performance-based system works, it deserves investigation. In the world of work, performance-based assessment is how employees are evaluated and considered for more sophisticated work.

Article: Letter grades vanishing from some Palm Beach County report cards

Palm Beach County administrators and principals say the timing is right because the report card had to be revised this year to match new state standards.

Read the full article at: sun-sentinel.com

Carol’s Summary:

In the article, “The Changing Role of the Teacher in the 21st Century,” Dr. Brad Johnson and Tammy Maxson McElroy, compare the method of school and teacher reform to the likeness of creating a new and improved 8-track tape player. The point is not that the education system is antiquated but that new initiatives are still fighting to perfect the antiquated classroom instead looking to  21st Century solutions.

As technology advances, our culture is constantly adapting to new ways of doing business, being entertained, and searching for knowledge. In the old classroom, the teacher opened the gateway to knowledge, but now we have instant access to information and we don’t even need to leave the house. These days, students are exposed to more information by the age of five than their grandparents were by the age of twenty. But the authors of the article ask: “if that information is never given relevance to the real world or made applicable to other learning, then how effective is the information?”

Research shows students are unprepared for college and the real world, which has, in turn, exposed the disconnect between learning in the classroom and the world outside the classroom. A reason may be that technology has put teachers at a disadvantage. With all the multi media students are exposed to, it’s harder to keep their attention. However, this should be a challenge for the teacher of the 21st Century to focus on “personalization and application of relevant knowledge rather than simply filling them with random facts.”

Article: The Changing Role of the Teacher in the 21st Century

The irony of this quote is not the fact that our educational system is antiquated, but that most new initiatives and programs are still focused on perfecting the antiquated school of 1965 rather than transforming formal education to be relevant in the world of today.

Read the full article at: teachers.net