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How to Help Your Child Take Responsibility for School

How to Help Your Child Take Responsibility for School

Helping your child understand that school is important and necessary can be a daunting task. As a parent, it’s easy to feel disappointment or frustration when your children’s performance is less than hoped for. Fortunately, you can find ways to encourage them to take responsibility for school.

Try these ideas:

1. Know your child’s teacher. Build a positive relationship with the teacher. When your child sees that you view his school life and performance as important, so will he.

  • Staying active with your child’s teacher and classroom lends your presence to your child’s school life.
  • Plus, consistent contact with the teacher means she can provide you with advice and helpful information about how to aid your child to have a successful school year. 

2. Your child’s report card belongs to him. Ensure that your child knows this. Avoid making the mistake of becoming emotional when your child brings home grades.

  • Recognize that managing the whole report card issue is a tough issue. If you reward for good grades, then do you ignore not-so-good ones?
  • Avoid punishing for less-than-satisfactory grades.
  • Remind your child that: “Those grades belong to you. They show you and the teacher how you’re doing.” When you take this step, you’re not letting your own emotions and feelings get too tied up with the grade report. Otherwise, the child loses ownership of his own grades.
  • Help your child stay “connected” with his grades, which encourages him to take pride in them. When you practice this, he’ll want to be responsible and put forth effort into school.

3. Consider signs of progress besides just grades. Focus on other information about how your child is doing in school.

  • Actions such as following the teacher’s instructions, relating well to other children and being respectful of others are all behaviors that matter. Let him know that you see his efforts in these areas and that they show maturity and growth on his part.

4. Look for positives. Related to the above point, it’s helpful to shift your focus from any negatives about your child’s school performance to positives that he portrays at school.

  • Although negatives have a tendency to get your attention and trigger strong emotions, if you “catch him being good,” you’ll then have issues to address using positive feedback.

5. Praise. When you use praise to help reinforce your child’s positive behaviors, be specific about your child’s attempts. Instead of saying, “Wow, you did great,” say, “I saw that you put a lot of time and effort into that book report, and you did a great job with it.”

  • Another example of praising effectively is, “Good for you that you took the time to look up the information you needed, wrote a thorough term paper, and turned it in on time.”
  • When you’re specific in your comments, you’re basically telling the child exactly what you’d like him to do again in the future. If you praise effectively, your child will see what he did “right” and he’ll want to do more of it in the future.
  • Some child behavioral experts even believe that if you ignore negative actions and focus mostly on positive behaviors in your comments, the negative actions will be extinguished from lack of reinforcement.

6. Keep your own feelings under wraps when discussing school with your child. Avoid expressing or connecting your own emotions with the child’s grades or performance at school.

  • Remind yourself that these are his grades, rather than yours. Your kid’s grades reflect only information about him.
  • In other words, avoid taking the grades personally. Getting angry or disappointed about them will be ineffective in encouraging your child to take responsibility or put forth more effort.

As a parent, one of your jobs is to help your child become more interested in and involved in his education. Using the above strategies will help you encourage your child to take responsibility at school so he’ll be more successful in the years to come.

Certified NLP Coach

Program Description: The Certified NLP Coach program allows you to incorporate very powerful NLP techniques you’re your day-to-day coaching practice.

ICF Training Hours: 65

Duration: 25-weeks

Schedule: One 2-hour class per week

Includes certificate: Yes

Certified Organizational Development Coach

Program Description:

The Certified Organizational Development Coach program is an exclusive and very unique program, designed for coaches who wish to coach entire organizations with their Organizational Development and Change Management goals. This program provides you with 65 ICF training hours - more than enough for the ACC credential. Over a series of 25 weekly lectures, it prepares you to deal with volatile group dynamics across entire organizations. Topics including OD interventions, Team Engagement, Buyer Behavior of internal customers, The Tripod of Success, Ensuring Sustainability, Performance-Retention correlation, Strategies to influence behavior - and many more - are covered in detail.

Coaches are introduced to the ARCS Model, as well as to the Organizational Culture Audit Toolkit. Employee motivation, satisfaction, and productivity are discussed, as well as their impact on the performance of the organization as a whole. Students are introduced to various Change Management models including Lewin's Planned Change model, the ADKAR Change Management model, and Kotter's 8 steps of Change Management. Resistance to change and its manifestation are discussed, as is Behavior Modification.

Upon completing this program, Certified Organizational Development Coaches will have all the tools they need to affect positive transformation within organizations, and will be able to coach teams and personnel at all levels - including initiators, decision makers, influencers, and intervention implementers.

In addition to coaches who are launching their own Corporate Coaching practices, this is an essential program for HR professionals, Training and Development Professionals, Managers, and Corporate Leaders who wish to implement internal policies and OD processes to guide their companies and people through ongoing change.

ICF Training Hours: 65

Duration: 25-weeks

Schedule: One 2-hour class per week

Includes certificate: Yes

Certified Executive Coach

Program Description

The Certified Executive Coach program has been designed for coaches who wish to coach managers, executives, and corporate leaders. The goal of this program is to cultivate a deep understanding of how the executive coaching process works as well as some of the challenges that come up in executive coaching conversations.

This program has been approved by the International Coaching Federation for 32 hours, and it comprises of 12 live, instructor-led, fully interactive virtual classes offered over zoom. These classes cover various aspects of executive coaching including, but not limited to Effective Collaboration, Performance Management, Upskilling, Conflict Management, Effective Collaboration, Developing Team Members, and many more.

This program has a very unique, hands-on, experiential structure. Classes are focused on active participation by students through real life Coaching Challenges and discussions of real life executive coaching situations.

ICF Training Hours: 32

Duration: 12-weeks

Schedule: One 2-hour class per week

Includes certificate: Yes

Certified Life Coach

Program Description:

The Certified life Coach program is an essential program for anyone considering coaching as a profession. The goal of this program is to create a deep understanding of the coaching process, along with how and why it is effective in catalyzing shifts in the mindset to create positive, sustainable transformation.

The training is based on the ICF’s core coaching competencies. It focuses on skills that lead to effective coaching conversations and that are required to build a successful coaching business. It evokes awareness about how identity, thoughts, and feelings determine mindset; and why a change in Think Feel Do impacts the achievement of goals though a change in this mindset.

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ICF Training Hours: 95

Duration: 24-weeks

Schedule: One 2-hour class per week

Includes certificate: Yes

Class Schedule
ProgramStart DateClass TimesClass Schedule
Certified Life CoachTuesday, June 13th10:30am ET
3:00pm ET
8:00pm ET
Once a week, 2-hours, for 24-weeks
Certified Organizational
Development Coach
Monday, July 17th10:30am ET
3:00pm ET
8:00pm ET
Once a week, 2-hours, for 25-weeks
Certified Executive
Coach
Thursday, July 20th10:30am ET
3:00pm EST
8:00pm ET
Once a week, 2-hours, for 12-weeks
Certified NLP Coach
Practitioner
Wednesday, July 19th10:30am ET
3:00pm EST
8:00pm ET
Once a week, 2-hours, for 25-weeks
Platinum - ACC/PCC
Mentoring
Friday, August 18th10:30am ET
3:00pm ET
8:00pm ET
Once a week, 1-hour
for 7-sessions PLUS 3 one-on-
one sessions with mentor