The Best Academic Coaching Resources for ADHD Students

If your child receives a formal diagnosis of ADHD, one of the first questions on your mind is probably about their academic potential. Will ADHD stop your child from succeeding in school?

The answer is no. Although nine out of ten ADHD children get some form of school support, that doesn’t mean that this diagnosis puts your child at a disadvantage.

With a better understanding of ADHD, there are now plenty of resources and support packages available to help a child manage their ADHD symptoms and ensure it doesn’t impact their educational progress.

Here, we’ll explore some academic coaching resources available to parents to support a child with ADHD. Read on to explore how you can best help your teenager balance ADHD and schooling.

ADHD and Learning

ADHD affects around 13.6% of all teens, according to recent research, so it’s a relatively common condition. Nevertheless, having ADHD poses some unique learning challenges for teenagers, such as:

• Problems focusing during lessons
• Hyperactivity
• Challenges with reasoning
• Challenges with comprehension
• Related conditions, including dyslexia
• Organizational skills
• Long-term memory and recall
• Communication

Your child might exhibit one or more of these challenges if they have an ADHD diagnosis. But it’s essential to understand their specific issues as it will help you create custom learning support to best fit their needs.

What is Academic Coaching?

Academic coaching is a method of supporting a student, and it’s a valuable role to consider when you have a teenager with ADHD.

Coaching is not the same as teaching. Academic tutoring focuses more on the soft skills ADHD-diagnosed teenagers need to get the best out of any learning program.

For example, that might involve empowering a student with new skills to help them absorb new information, ultimately assisting that teenager in feeling more in control and confident in an academic environment.

Academic Coaching Resources

Plenty of fantastic resources exist online for academic coaching, and discovering these will be a great starting point for you and your child. Here are some of our recommendations.

Day Planners

A planner or journal is a valuable resource many of us can use to schedule our daily lives. For someone with ADHD, a planning tool is an excellent way to help teenagers focus on their biggest learning priorities.

So if you are interested in academic coaching, you might find it worthwhile to invest in a simple planner.

You can use these planners online (via an app or website) or in a more traditional paper format.

These planners are often simple, one or two pages where you can write down your daily goals and any tasks you need to complete. There is often space on the page to review and tick off work you completed.

For teenagers with ADHD, a day planner is most effective as it will allow that child to improve their organizational skills without becoming overwhelmed or distracted. Here is a list of day planners suitable for ADHD students.

Executive Functioning Skills Coach

Executive functioning skills are all the things we need to manage our day-to-day lives. These core skills are assets for any adult or teenager, whether they have an ADHD diagnosis or not.

Executive functioning skills include flexibility in thinking, memory, planning and organizational skills, self-control, and time management.

The more fine-tuned our executive skills, the more they can help us succeed in life, whether passing exams, preparing for a job interview, or advancing in a high-pressured job.

For a child with ADHD, developing these skills requires a little bit more support and guidance in the form of practical steps and frameworks. That’s why an executive functioning skills coach can be helpful in these circumstances.

Peak Academic Coaching has an online skill coaching program focused entirely on executive functioning skills.

During this program, your teenager will get valuable guidance to help them focus on priority tasks such as exam study and homework, as well as specific and practical techniques to help avoid distractions in school.

They will also learn how to handle the pressure of deadlines and how to set and stick to goals.

You can find out more about your executive functioning skills training program here.

Academic Coaching Training Resources

Academic coaching in a training environment is ideal if you want your child to excel at school.

The soft skills a child will learn as part of academic coaching support, such as study techniques, will benefit any child with an ADHD diagnosis.

Your child will be offered methods to improve skills or performance techniques related to most aspects of academic life, such as taking exams.

It’s the best way to ensure your child is working to their full potential and has the chance to reach their most ambitious academic goals, whether passing a specific exam or applying to an Ivy League university.

At Peak Academic Coaching, we offer a training program specifically for academic coaching, which is suitable for all teenagers, including those with ADHD.

As part of this training, your child will work with qualified academic coaches who can offer tailored support to fit their needs.

You can also combine this with a specific subject. That’s useful if your child is struggling with a core subject at school, such as English or Maths.

If academic coaching sounds like the right option for your child, you can find out more about our program here.

ADHD Coaching

Academic coaching is there to help a child navigate the challenges of education. However, ADHD coaching is explicitly designed to help a child navigate the challenges of having an ADHD diagnosis.

With ADHD coaching, your teenager will work with a qualified coach who can provide a tailored plan of action for managing ADHD. It will include specific guidance on things like:

• How to manage and meet deadlines
• Remembering items and tasks for class
• How to stay focused in a lesson
• Listening and talking skills
• Planning and priority management

ADHD coaching provides something that standard educational programs miss.

It provides mentoring on top of training, and for many ADHD students, it’s the personal mentoring that truly helps them to learn how to manage their condition and get the most from their educational career.

If ADHD coaching is something you think is suitable for your teenager, head here to explore our training and our resources.

Summer Programs

Daily structure and routine are helpful to any child with ADHD.

But summer breaks from school often leave children with the opposite, with plenty of free time and distractions such as social media and computer games. And that can be a challenge for any teenager.

So one resource you might like to explore is a structured summer program of activities for your child.

Thousands of summer programs are available throughout the country. They offer various teenage activities, such as sports, music, drama, art, and even outdoor adventure activities like rock climbing.

These opportunities also have the added benefit of allowing your child to develop social skills by mixing with larger groups of children outside the typical school environment. That is an excellent lifelong skill for anyone to develop.

By heading to the American summer camp directory, you can find a list of summer programs available for teenagers.

Volunteer Programs

If you’ve worked with an ADHD support team before, you’ll know that one of the techniques for managing the symptoms is for your teen to focus “outward” on activities around them.

And a helpful way of encouraging this is to guide your teenager toward a volunteer program.

Supporting others can be a rewarding and valuable way for your teenager to boost their skills and develop their confidence and self-esteem.

There are lots of different volunteer programs that are suitable for teenagers and young adults. Here are a few:

• The American Red Cross
• Meals on Wheels
• Dosomething.org
• Volunteering abroad programs
• Boy Scouts of America / Girl Scouts of America
• Habitat for Humanity
• Pet Therapy via Pet Partners

The great advantage of volunteering is that there is something for everyone. So whatever your child’s interests, you’ll find volunteer programs to suit them.

It’s an excellent way for your child to become more self-assured and experience first-hand the rewards of helping others.

ADHD Online Guides

There are many online guides about ADHD that will help you understand the condition and practical steps you can take to help support a teenager with ADHD.

By understanding as much as you can about ADHD, you’ll be in a stronger position to provide the academic support your child needs to thrive in school. Here are some guides available for free:

• How to manage daily family routines, from ADDitude
• How to parent a teen with ADHD, from KidsHealth
• A guide to ADHD and schooling, from Helpguide
• Study skills for ADHD, from the University of Illinois
• Teaching and Managing Students with ADHD, from the ADHD Foundation
• A guide to helping children with ADHD from Brain Balance Centers

You’ll learn helpful tips from these guides, such as creating the optimum home environment and study space for children with ADHD.

You’ll also learn how to create a family routine to help your teenager easily manage everyday tasks.

Time Management Apps

Another great resource that can help your ADHD child academically and elsewhere in life is a time management app.

Apps are a great tool to help people stay focused when working and avoid distractions. Many use demonstrable time management techniques such as the Pomodoro.

Here are some of the best time management apps on the market for iPhones and Android:

• Trello
• Todoist
• Be Focused
• SimpleMind
• RescueTime
• Evernote
• Mindnode
• Notion

You can work with a coach to find the right time management tool for your teenager. A coach can also guide your teenager with time management techniques to help them get the most from these apps.

Journals

Though journaling might have been around for hundreds of years, it’s only in the past decade or so that experts have discovered that daily journaling is an essential tool for mental health.

Writing a journal is a relatively simple exercise as it’s about putting your thoughts and feelings onto paper. However, it’s a powerful way to manage your emotional well-being.

ADHD can make it harder for a person to understand and process their feelings. So it’s a valuable tool to have available if you have a child with this diagnosis.

Plus, managing mental health will be an added tool for your teenager when navigating the demands and stresses of academic life, such as exams and university applications.

You can use an app for journalling, but a paper-based journal is an excellent option if you restrict your child’s access to technology. Here is a list of some of the best journal tools and paper journals for children with ADHD.

Activity Guides

Do you find your child lacks focus on what activities to choose in their spare time? This is a common theme with teenagers who have ADHD.

But mastering hobbies and activities are an essential part of academic learning. A good activity will help your child develop some of their executive function skills if they find a hobby for which they are enthusiastic.

Plus, strength in an activity that requires discipline and self-control (such as learning an instrument or martial arts) is an excellent way that your teenager can manage their ADHD symptoms both now and also when they are adults.

What you can do is work with a coach to help guide your child towards more productive activities that will help support their academic progress.

Good examples of productive activities for children with ADHD include fitness, gardening, backpacking, working with animals, or reading.

Many additional online resources can help your child explore their favorite activities and pastimes, such as activity planners like this one.

The Best Way to Support ADHD Students

If you have a teenager with ADHD, your best action plan is to take a proactive stance with their learning.

Tools, frameworks, coaching, and practical support can also work holistically to give your child every chance to succeed academically.

These academic coaching resources are your first line of support – use these to put together a plan of action. And get in touch with our team to find out which of our ADHD-focused training options is the right choice for your teenager.

You can do that by heading here to complete our contact form.