From Fs to As: The Brain Science Behind My Coaching

One of my favorite things to do in the entire world is to help students learn how to learn. I am quite good at this. I worked at a university learning and tutoring center as an academic coach. I have also taught life skills classes that included how to be successful in college. Students who had below a 2.0 grade point average (GPA) were required to meet with me. I have coached students from having all Fs to all As.

My meetings always started off easy. I wanted to get to know my students holistically. What are their likes and dislikes, what do they have going on outside of school, what do they think led them to failing their class(es), and so on. Once I understood the bigger picture, I could better recommend strategies that would actually help them.

These strategies—when students used them—were always successful. But it wasn’t until recently that I understood why.

When I was on a healing journey, I started practicing meditation. Not only did I meditate, but I also started reading books about meditation, enlightenment, and spirituality. Meditation and these books introduced me to the concept of neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is the capacity of the brain to develop and change throughout life. It refers to the ability of the nervous system to reorganize its structure, functions, or connections in response to intrinsic or extrinsic stimuli, such as learning, experience, or injury, according to Merriam-Webster.

Once I learned about this term, things started to make sense, but I wanted to learn more. So of course, I read more books and am continuing to read more books on neuroplasticity. This is neuroscience we’re talking about. It’s a big subject to digest.

To simplify what I understand: when I was meditating, I was rewiring the connections in my brain. And although I didn’t realize it at the time, when my students applied the techniques I provided, they were also rewiring the connections in their brains, allowing them to retain more information and perform better academically. These techniques are not hard, but they do require consistent effort.

Admittedly, it is hard to be consistent. It’s like saying you’re going to eat healthy, buying all the groceries, eating a couple of healthy meals, then going right back to your typical diet. A better way to introduce a new habit is one at a time. Choose one meal of the day, one healthy food that you enjoy, and build that one thing into your routine. When I decided to eat healthier, I chose to start with breakfast. My go-to breakfast was coffee and sometimes I would add a pastry. The food I introduced was one slice of toast with avocado, eggs, and seeds sprinkled on top. This was a much healthier alternative, and I loved the ritual of making my breakfast. When you are consistent with just one thing, you are slowly rewiring your brain. Once the brain is wired to do this one thing, then you can introduce the next.

Please don’t ask me how long it will take. Remember, I’m only just beginning to study neuroscience. In my experience in academic coaching, no one is on the same timeline, because no one has the exact same life circumstances. But, according to James Clear’s Atomic Habits, it takes about 66 days to build a habit (if you really need a number). Forming new habits of any kind cannot be “fixed then forgotten.” It requires ongoing maintenance, personal awareness, and asking for help when it’s needed—until the habit is so ingrained that it becomes who you are, like waking up every day to brush your teeth (or, let’s be real, grabbing your phone without even thinking about it—it’s automatic).

But it’s not just the formation of a habit that leads students to success. It is the learning techniques—or let’s call it the quality of the habit—that benefits students’ performance.

Overgeneralizing—or maybe not—but many of us struggle with staying focused on things that don’t give us a constant dopamine drip (unlike scrolling on social media). So staying focused on studying is hard. One of the techniques I share with my students is the Pomodoro Method. This method was developed by Francesco Cirillo to combat procrastination; he used a tomato-shaped kitchen timer (pomodoro in Italian), set it for 25 minutes to focus on a task, and when the timer went off he took a 5-minute break, then went back to the task for another 25 minutes. According to Brain Balance Centers and the American Academy of Pediatrics, a person’s attention span in minutes is roughly equivalent to 2 to 3 times their age, peaking around 48 minutes in a person’s lifetime before brain decline. With this information, Cirillo’s Pomodoro Method makes good sense. I do wonder if this statistic is still true given the impact of social media, which is designed to retain our attention for long periods of time.

If you have a student who needs more help performing academically, and you want to know more about how to rewire their brain, I am happy to help. I am giving free consultations to families who would like extra academic support.

Book recommendations and resources:

Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear

The Neuroscience of Learning by Elliott Middleton

Normal Attention Span Expectations By Age by Brain Balance

American Academy of Pediatrics