DAWN ROAN

Q: Why Do People Hire You?

The short answer is that they want expert help, support, tutoring, guidance, and mentorship for themselves or their children in achieving goals, hopes, and dreams.

Many students have aspirations of attaining admission to selective, highly selective, or elite colleges and universities for undergraduate, graduate, or professional programs. Others want to earn scholarships, receive fellowships, land competitive internships or jobs, or improve career opportunities. Still others want to improve their test-taking, reading, writing, math, science, and other academic skills.

When parents contact me, they most often want to help their children achieve goals that are challenging and may seem out of reach. Their students may have encountered setbacks. Self-study may not be generating results. Other programs a student has tried may not be effective. A student may have weaknesses in academic preparation to overcome.

Most often, the families I work with have been referred by relatives or close friends who’ve had positive experiences and seen results. Parents and students want to work with someone who is not only an academically successful high performer but who also excels at teaching. And, they’re eager for learning and growth.

Q: Why Do They Stay?

Families that invest in my long-term programs often recognize, over time, that tutoring, coaching, and mentoring the processes I teach for standardized tests are investment in learning skills that will positively impact the rest of students’ lives and provide the foundation for future achievement.

Students come to see that standardized test performance is a microcosm for life, and if they have derailers—anxiety, self-doubt, ADD/ADHD, perfectionism, overwhelm, and other mental and emotional challenges—that impact their lives, those derailers will show up as they prepare for test performance. As we work on learning and reviewing content, applying test-taking strategies, and developing a student’s toolkit for navigating obstacles and setbacks, students gain self-awareness and skills, which empower them to use time more effectively and consciously make more positive choices in other areas of life.

For example, one area I work with students on is building reading speed with comprehension. Through daily exercises—reading novels, writing down vocabulary words, completing word search puzzles, and doing focused meditation—students build fundamental skills for standardized testing. If a student can save 10 seconds per question over a 40-question exam, that buys the student 6 minutes 40 seconds over the test, which can help make a significant difference to score improvement, especially on a time-limited exam. Standardized test performance aside, improved reading speed also cuts down on the amount of time a student needs for homework or school exams or reading in general, which frees a significant proportion of the student’s time for the rest of that student’s life, increasing the student’s capacity to do more of what the student wants to do in the years to come.

In addition to wanting professional expertise, families want to work with a teacher, coach, and mentor who cares deeply about each student, the student’s experiences and values, and customizing the approach for where the student is and what the student’s goals are. They want to work with someone who celebrates students’ successes, supports students empathetically and constructively through failures and setbacks, and helps students transform obstacles into stepping stones.

Some families have let me know that, although they initially signed up to learn test performance, what they gained in addition to test performance was so much more valuable and impactful: breaking down complex goals into manageable chunks, working consistently and diligently, learning how to learn, leveraging experimentation and data, incorporating feedback, attending to processes and habits, developing self-awareness free from self-flagellation, constructively learning from failure without judgment, building grit, resilience, relentlessness.

Several ACT and SAT students, for instance, have independently mentioned that they learned more in a year of tutoring than they did in all of high school. Parents have said they felt like investing in a year of test preparation for their children was like giving them the experience of a customized private school education—at a fraction of the time and cost—or imbuing them with the skills to reach for and achieve their dreams, which fundamentally shifts their life trajectories . . . and that is invaluable.

Click here for more information about Standardized Test Preparation (ACT, SAT, GRE, GMAT, LSAT, MCAT, DAT, Other).

Click here for more information about Academic Tutoring.

Click here for more information about College Admissions Coaching.