An Open Letter to College ADHD Service Providers

 

 

Dear College Service Provider,

It is my pleasure to announce the Coach Approach for College Counselors, a program specifically designed for counselors, advisors, service providers – anyone who works with ADHD students in any capacity to assist and support them in navigating all aspects of the college experience.  This is not a program designed to train coaches.  It is to help professionals already skilled in their respective fields understand what is currently known about ADHD and its effects on college students, and to offer approaches used in the field of ADHD coaching that can greatly enhance the effectiveness of the work they already do with these students.

Students with ADHD, while often highly intelligent, curious, and innovative, are often at significant risk in a college setting. From 1990 to 2006, I served at the Duke University Academic Resource Center as a learning skills instructor, academic advisor, and, for the last 10 years, ADHD coach.  Early on, I became aware of a student population that did not respond to the usual learning-skill instructional approaches.  These students were bright and motivated, and they often already knew effective study strategies – they just weren’t using them.  They would dutifully fill out weekly time planners and lose them before they had gotten back to their dorms.  They would stay up all night to finish a paper – and then forget to turn it in during class.  They would, for reasons unclear even to them, suddenly stop attending a class.  Virtually all of these students had ADHD.

During these years, I found success in helping these students by first learning all I could about the nature of ADHD, then combining this knowledge with skills obtained through formal coach training.  Coaching, and its subset ADHD coaching, are now established professions, and provide formalized and tested practices in place of guesswork and improvisation.   You can learn more about general coaching by going to www.coachfederation.org, and about ADHD coaching in particular by going to www.adhdcoachinstitute.org.

In the last 15 years, professional coaching has had a tremendously positive impact on individuals and groups alike.  From the corporate executive to the fledgling artist, clients have found coaching to be a powerful vehicle for moving both individuals and teams toward enhanced productivity and greater fulfillment.  Many professionals in other fields have learned coaching skills in order to enhance their performance in their respective professions.

In particular, coaching has developed into an effective support tool for people diagnosed with ADHD, and its use is growing in colleges and universities.  The intelligence that has brought students this far can actually work against them, in that their ADHD is often undetected, and, with the structure provided by high school and home life, they have been successful in high school.  When this scaffolding disappears, just as the expectations of them increase in virtually every area of their life, tendencies common to ADHD such as inconsistency, distractability, and difficulty with planning, prioritizing, sustaining, and completing tasks, can become academically lethal. 

The mission of the Coach Approach for College Counselors is to foster effective ADHD intervention at every collegiate support center through the integration of essential ADHD coaching skills with the existing skills of student support specialists.

The Course Offerings page describes in more detail the training offered by the Coach Approach for College Counselors.  This training is designed expressly for post-secondary service providers. It is not meant to train you to be a coach, but to teach you to communicate more effectively with ADHD students, so that these students will become more engaged and committed to your work sessions, to the structure you provide, and to the systems you create together.

If you have any questions or comment feel free to email us here at the site.

Sincerely,

Russell Colver SCAC, CPCC