HayU Blog

With the school year finally behind us, it’s a great time to pause and reflect on our children’s academic progress.  Let’s talk with them about what went well and where they can strike a better balance between school and extracurricular life.

In the quietude and essential recharge that only summer brings, students can also crystallize their goals for the next school year.  Is it time to turn the volume up or down on academic support services to meet those goals?

In this article, Assistant Director Annika Guy flags some of the key warning signs when it might be time to change an academic support plan—or even reevaluate the time and treasure of tutoring altogether. 

When is it time to take a break?

Deciding to take a break from academic support or coaching is always difficult. Parents and educators both want to see students succeed. Any time a student works with an educator for extra support, the goal is to see them empowered to learn, grow, and reach their goals. But if you’re not seeing the desired changes, it can be hard to decide whether it’s better to keep going or hit the pause button. 

Most of the time, it’s worth it to stick it out longer. Student progress occasionally comes easy and quickly, but more often it comes slowly and incrementally over long periods of time (months and years, not weeks.) 

But there are also situations where tutoring or executive function coaching just isn’t working, and trying to stick it out may not be the right choice. 

Deciding when to call it and take a break is always complicated. Here are a few signs it may be time to stop:

1. You see consistent backsliding 

It’s a deeply frustrating truth that progress is rarely linear. All students backslide sometimes, and some slide further than others. It’s always frustrating and demoralizing for everyone–student, family, tutor–but it’s often temporary. When it’s short term, it can be a great opportunity for growth and reflection, especially for students working on executive functioning. The normal ups and downs of learning help build resilience and grit. It’s never fun, but it’s an important and necessary part of the process.

Sometimes, though, students backslide and stay there. In the past few years especially, kids hit with major losses, personal crises, and mental health struggles had a much harder time regrouping and resuming forward momentum than before. And when the obstacle isn’t that a student doesn’t know the tools or tricks for success but simply cannot gather the motivation or energy to use them, it may be better for them to take a break from tutoring or EF coaching until they’re mentally and emotionally ready. 

2. Your student is plateauing

Similar to backsliding, plateauing is often temporary. But sometimes students make a lot of initial progress, and then just stay there. Maybe they haven’t reached the point they wanted to, or the target everyone else hoped they would, but progress has leveled off. If the level is still high enough for them to be reasonably successful as independent learners, this is a great time to fade out the support. Done right, fading out the support allows a student to maintain the gains they made during tutoring or EF coaching with increasing independence.

If a student plateaus before they’re ready to be independent, it may be a sign they’re not emotionally or developmentally ready for the higher level of skillbuilding. In some cases, it will make sense to continue with a more general kind of support (such as homework help instead of EF coaching) to stay on track with classes until they’re ready to level up. In other cases, it might make more sense to take a break completely.

3. You feel like the student-educator relationship is fraying

In a one-on-one situation, the relationship between educators and students is everything. Educators work hard to build those relationships and establish rapport because we know it can make all the difference for student success! If a student hates math but loves their math tutor, they’ll be a lot more willing to show up and put in the effort during sessions. 

But sometimes, despite everyone’s best intentions and efforts, the student-educator relationship can sour. There are several reasons this can happen, and many of them are no one’s fault. Sometimes a relationship can be salvaged and repaired, and it’s often worth it to try. In other cases, it may feel like a relationship is beyond repair. When that happens, it’s usually better for both student and educator to pause working together and establish a relationship with a different educator.

4. There are too many cooks

I once worked with a student for EF coaching when there were just way too many people involved. I was brought on for multiple weekly sessions and regular text check-ins with the student, but he was also working with a learning specialist at the school during his daily free periods and his parents were doing several check-ins every evening. As a result, this student felt over-monitored and micromanaged, and became highly resistant to EF skillbuilding and systems. He wanted the chance to make mistakes and learn from them, but with so many people involved, he didn’t feel like he had room to grow.

I ended up stepping back from that case for a combination of reasons, but one of them was that I felt that I wasn’t helping the student by continuing. I hated doing it, but I think it was better for the student that I did. 

Concerns about academic development and long-term college and career prospects can make it especially hard for families and educators to decide to cut back on support for a struggling student. It feels counterproductive and counterintuitive–why would you take away academic support when grades are low, assignments are missing, or important skills remain undeveloped? 

But more support isn’t always better support. Some students thrive with a lot of scaffolding, and in those cases a robust team is the perfect system. But in other cases, students getting too much support feel overly controlled and stifled, and may disengage from or reject growth opportunities. On top of that, a larger team increases the likelihood that a student will get conflicting messages about what they need to do to succeed. 

When too many people are involved, it’s a good idea to consider letting a student take a break from one or more of the support systems in place.
 

5. Your student doesn’t need support anymore

Yay! This is everyone’s FAVORITE reason to take a break! Your student did the work; they gained the skills and tools they needed to be self-supporting, independent learners. They’re ready to thrive on their own. It’s a bittersweet situation–it’s always hard to say good-bye–but our goal for all students at Hayutin is to see them ready to fly solo. 

So what do you do when you feel like it’s time to take a break?

A good place to start the conversation is with your child as well as a director from the Hayutin admin team. Sometimes everyone involved will agree that a break is best. Sometimes they won’t. Educators, parents, and students often have different perspectives on what’s working and what isn’t, and open conversations are key to charting the path forward.

~Annika Guy

Assistant Director at Hayutin