It’s all connected.
Knower Align Team
Align Team expands the potential of Knower Academics instruction by treating academic struggle 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, faulty 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.
Here are some specialized types of Knower Academics instruction that often work best with Align Team.
Align Team, Therademics™, KNOW Your Mind, and KNOW your SPACE are designed to 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
Instead of sheltering our students from struggle, let’s support them to grow through the struggle.
With every non-preferred class or unpleasant homework assignment, anxious students face so much more than the material. There are emotions, choices, pressures, even fears. Then, there are behaviors and habits – often unhelpful – that go along with those emotions, pressures, choices and fears. 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™
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?
Taught by licensed therapists, KNOW Your Mind offers one-to-one coaching to help students build their academic identify and meet academic goals with confidence and grace. Paired with Align Team communication, KNOW you MIND allows a stronger emphasis on therapeutic applications in Knower instructional sessions.
KNOW Your SPACE
Expert advice for parents and faculty.
When school gets hard, students are not the only ones who struggle. Parents and teachers often feel confused about how to help. They know that schoolwork needs to get done, but they also want to be understanding and kind to a struggling child. There is a boundary (somewhere) between supporting the student (helpful) and allowing the student to avoid facing challenges (unhelpful). Where is that line? How firmly do we, the adults who are supposed to know what to do, hold to this boundary? When does being flexible and reasonable cross that line and become an over-accommodation that actually hurts our kids? What if academic support could coach, not just the student, but also the adults who support the student?
Led by therapists and psychologists who are trained in parent-centered approaches for treating student anxiety, Know your SPACE coaches the student’s support team. Students make more progress when parents and faculty build an environment that empowers students to face anxiety, reducing maladaptive patterns and over-accommodation.
Our favorite parent-centered approach is Dr. Eli Lebowitz’s breakthrough program: SPACE (Supportive Parenting for Anxious Childhood Emotions). Knower Academics does not currently offer SPACE counseling or certification. For more information on how to find a certified SPACE therapist, we encourage you to visit https://www.spacetreatment.net/.