Our HIT Coach, Howard, details the importance of community in helping students become self-motivated learners.
Having the opportunity to be an Academic Coach at H.D. Woodson High School continues to be a rewarding experience. I have found great joy in serving Lana’s High-Impact Tutoring (HIT) program in this community. The high-quality relationships that I have been able to build with school administrators, teachers, support staff, and the students shows the importance of seamless relationship building supporting the universal axiom, “It takes a village to raise a child.”
Building Relationships with School Staff
A high-quality relationship with a teacher who students respect is a key element of helping students develop intrinsic motivation. Realistically, not all students will open themselves to the valuable opportunity to strengthen their relationship with their teachers for multiple reasons. However, when they do, their educational experience blooms with a beautiful array of valuable learned experience that benefit them far beyond the classroom.
I’ve witnessed the entire school staff and support staff at Woodson Senior High School display a genuine interest in students. Asking them about what is happening in their lives. An excellent display of leading with their ears and not just their mouths. Students allowed me to share some of my stories with them that created a two-way street of learning.
A Story of Self-Motivation
A memorable coaching experience I had recently is when a student had never written an essay in his school career. He was intent on maintaining that record during an assignment to write a persuasive essay. The goal of the essay was to describe what students thought was the worst natural disaster. Because I knew two of his passions were football and video games, I told him that as long as he used the writing techniques we’d studied, he could write an essay on why his favorite football team was better than its rival or on why he particularly liked one video game. He ended up writing an essay on both topics.
The entire Woodson learning community support student’s confidence in becoming self-motivated learners by being flexible and keeping their eyes on the learning goal prize!