It’s all connected.
Know Your Mind & Align Team expand the potential of instruction by treating academics holistically, in the context of the student’s whole mind and whole environment.
Knower Academics educators love teamwork and communication – because it helps our kids. Communication is built into every Knower offering because we are dedicated to close partnership with families, faculty and schools. From session logbooks to weekly instructor check-ins and internal student updates, we want all the adults supporting the student to be up-to-speed on student progress and understand how to be helpful.
With Align Team, Knower builds upon this already-robust communication by establishing a dedicated team meeting to coordinate care among faculty and professionals who are working together to support a student. We work collaboratively to assess the student’s level of struggle and develop a structure of expectations and feedback that empowers students to engage in stressful aspects of school. Students improve their communication skills and ability to self-advocate, implement effective coping skills in times of stress, set priorities, and face academic challenges in a supportive environment. The student’s family and teachers become more empathetic, consistent, and decisive as they guide the student along a path to face academic struggle and manage it successfully.
Here’s how it works –
We build each Knower Align team with the Knower instructors, faculty, mentors and other professionals supporting the student and family. Our most common Align Team integrates Knower’s academic specialist with a student’s advisor, learning support, and often a family coach or personal therapist. The Align Team meeting carves out dedicated time to make sure all involved have current information on a student’s well-being and progress, and to ensure that we are sending a unified message to the student. Typically we begin with a 30-minute Align Team meeting once a week, decreasing the frequency of meetings as students progress toward their goals.
We’re able to combine the right tools for each individual student’s needs, including:
- Align Team
- Therademics™ Instruction
- KNOW Your Mind
- KNOW Your SPACE
All of which are designed to work seamlessly together and provide a higher level of care for:
- anxiety
- depression
- OCD
- perfectionism
- ADD, ADHD, learning differences and disabilities
- school avoidance
- school refusal
- severe homework avoidance, writer’s block, test anxiety and acute anxiety related to these activities or others like them
Therademics™ Instruction
Let psychology inform learning.
Learners often fall short of their potential, not because of the material they are learning, but because of their psychology. Academic success is driven by students’ perception of themselves and how they interact with the teachers, family and peers in world around them. It makes sense: we learn, think and feel with the same brain. So why are the academic realm and the psychological realm so often treated as separate spheres? What if academic support could address, not just learning, but also the psychology of the learner?
Our Therademics™ specialists complete a special training and internship process through which they learn how best to support students with anxiety and OCD. At the same time, they are teachers with expertise in specific subjects or aspects of academic support, so they can help students apply their coping and therapeutic strategies immediately in the context of real and meaningful coursework. The difference is remarkable, especially when, through our Align Team, our specialists partner with clinicians, schools, and family coaches.
Available through the Knower Therademics™ Program:
- Specialized techniques and strategies, taught in the context of relevant subject material, that are proven to support anxious learners, perfectionism, OCD, and learning differences
Available when Therademics™ is combined with Align Team:
- Exposure Response Prevention practice in session
- Data to inform school placement
- Prescriptive accommodations that teach students to target weaknesses instead avoiding them
- Advocacy with case managers and special education teams for students with IEP and 504 plans
KNOW Your Mind™
KNOW Your Mind offers one-to-one coaching to help students build their academic identity and meet academic goals with confidence and grace. KNOW Your Mind allows a stronger emphasis on unique learning profiles, therapeutic applications, and medical needs.
With every non-preferred class or unpleasant homework assignment, students face so much more than the material. They face emotions, choices, pressures, and even fears. Parents and teachers often feel confused about how to help, especially if they hear different advice from different professionals. They know that schoolwork needs to get done, but they also want to be understanding and kind to a struggling child. They want to support the student, but at what point does support cross the line and begin to enable bad habits?
Students experiencing health or wellness issues, and students with neurodiverse learning profiles, benefit from working with a true learning specialist who can design the systems they need to be successful. Students make more progress when parents and faculty build an environment that empowers students to face anxiety, reducing maladaptive patterns and over-accommodation. We’ve established Know your Mind coaching as a way to support the student’s whole team in creating and maintaining this environment.
Know Your Mind coaching uses synchronous sessions, text and email support, and curriculum or documentation to create cohesive support among:
- student
- families
- faculty
- doctors
- mentors & life coaches
- psychologists & psychiatrists