Executive function coaching for students who are capable and still struggling.

What is executive function coaching?

Executive function is the set of mental skills that let a student turn intention into action: planning a project, breaking it into steps, starting the first step, keeping track of time, holding instructions in mind, noticing when a strategy isn’t working, and asking for help. Nobody is born with these skills. They develop through adolescence, unevenly, and for many students they lag behind their intelligence in ways that look, from the outside, like laziness or carelessness.

Coaching teaches those skills directly. It is different from subject tutoring, though it makes tutoring work better, and different from therapy, though the two often run side by side. A coach sits with the student and the student’s own workload and builds systems for it: somewhere every assignment gets captured, a view of the whole week, a routine for starting the thing they have been avoiding, and a check at the end to see whether the plan held. Then they practice until the systems run without the coach.

Who benefits from executive function coaching?

• Students with ADHD, dyslexia, and other learning differences. Executive function is often the piece that accommodations don’t address. Extended time helps on the test. It doesn’t help a student remember the test is Thursday.
• Bright students who hit their first wall. The move to middle school, a new high school, or a heavier course load is often the first time a student has to manage work that doesn’t come easily. Students who were praised for being smart can read that wall as a verdict on their ability. It isn’t. We wrote about this in our essay on growth mindset and thirteen-year-olds.
• Students starting at a new school, including the ones who just finished the ISEE or SSAT process and are about to face a heavier workload with less scaffolding.
• Juniors and seniors juggling testing, applications, and coursework at once, where the problem isn’t ability but bandwidth.
• College students who managed fine with a parent and a school structure around them and are now, for the first time, entirely responsible for their own time.
• Students whose grades don’t match their understanding because work is late, lost, or never started.

How our executive function coaching works

1. A conversation with the family. We want to know what the week looks like, where things break down, what has been tried, and what the school and any outside professionals have already observed. If there is a neuropsychological evaluation, we read it.
2. Two or three target skills, not twelve. A student who can’t start tasks and a student who starts everything and finishes nothing need different work. We pick the skills that will move the most, and we say which ones we are deferring.
3. Systems built for this student. A planner works for some students and is a graveyard for others. We test tools against the student’s habits and preferences, including paper, digital, and hybrid, until one sticks.
4. Practice on real work. Sessions use the assignments that are due that week. Students learn to break a paper into steps on a paper they have to write, and to plan a week that includes practice, a game, and a lab report.
5. The calendar in the portal. The KFT portal puts every assignment on the day it’s due, and late work turns red and stays red. For a student building these skills, that visibility does a lot of the work.
6. Coordination with the school. When it helps, we talk to learning specialists, advisors, and classroom teachers so the student hears one message. We also coordinate with therapists and psychiatrists when a family asks us to.
7. Parents in the loop, and gradually out of it. Families get a written recap after every session. Over time, the coach fades, the student runs the systems, and the parent stops being the reminder. That independence is the goal, and we measure progress by it.

Who teaches executive function at KFT

Our founder, Kate Fisher, holds a Professional Certificate in Learning Differences and Neurodiversity with a Specialization in Executive Function from the Landmark College Institute for Research and Training, the research arm of the college built for students who learn differently. Before founding KFT, she trained other tutors to work with neurodiverse students and wrote her previous firm’s guide to executive function. She has volunteered with children and adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder since childhood.

The coaching team includes learning specialists with more than a decade each in educational therapy and private practice, and a New York City school counselor who works with students on executive functioning, organization, and the habits that make school manageable. Nearly a third of our tutors teach executive function, so the same coach can often support a student through test prep or a hard course when that is what the semester needs. Meet the team on our tutors page.

How this connects to test prep

Executive function shows up on every standardized test whether or not the test is measuring it. Pacing, reading the whole question, checking what was asked, deciding when to skip: these are self-monitoring skills, and students who lack them lose points on questions they can solve. When a student comes to us for SAT, ACT, or ISEE prep and the diagnostic shows an executive function problem underneath the score, we say so, and we build coaching into the plan rather than pretending more content will fix it.