Coaching Fluency Through Self-Confidence and Independence

Here’s something you might be surprised to learn: being able to read is more than just the capacity to recite words on a page.

This concept, despite being fairly obvious once given some thought, is also one that is all too often forgotten or ignored – just ask Learning Specialist Carolyn Polchinski.

Polchinski, who runs her own private practice in Scarsdale and currently works with a number of students from Eastchester and Bronxville, is one of a new breed of highly-qualified and versatile educators that identify themselves as learning specialists – a field that is increasingly expanding in New York City – delivering a wide variety of enrichment and supplemental curricula and programs right in the comfort of your own home. With a Master’s Degree in Education from Fordham University to her name, and having since then taught 12 Master’s level courses in reading, language and literacy at Pace University and Manhattanville College, Polchinski offers customers and their children entirely personalized teaching programs and lessons, down to every single book she will use with a student.

Best of all, Polchinski does all of what she calls the “leg work” herself: after an introductory session where she meets and learns about a particular student, Polchinski will go to a library and select the books she will need according to her student’s interests and tastes, all with the goal of creating a stimulating and engaging learning environment.

“What I try to access is their interests,” Polchinski said. “We’re integrating the vocabulary, reading comprehension, critical thinking skills, but yet with a subject matter that’s going to activate their minds and really motivate them to want to read and want to learn. That means pulling targeted books on the topic, creating a lesson plan, sourcing content-area vocabulary, developing writing topics and ideas for the subject matter and developing projects for the child, all while using the creativity and freedom neither the child nor the teacher has in a traditional, test-centered classroom setting.”

On any given day – and according to her students’ interests – Polchinski will deliver lesson plans based around a variety of different topics and themes, from sharks and robots to outer space and the Wild West. A student’s interests will not only dictate the books he or she will read or be read from, however, but will influence other parts of the lesson plan, from vocabulary building to writing exercises. A student learning about the American West may find the word ‘sanctuary’ in his vocabulary list for a specific week, for example, for a lesson on Mustang horses, and the word ‘camouflage’ for a child learning about chameleons.

Although she is often asked to work with students as advanced as 10th and 11th grade – helping them with school projects, essays or time-management – Polchinski’s area of expertize is as reading coach for children between kindergarten and the 3rd grade. She also specializes in ADHD and other areas she says her experience teaching post-graduate courses has shown her to be essential to each child’s success as a reader, including one she believes is at the heart of today’s reading trends: fluency.

Fluency, Polchinski explains, is the difference between a child reading words off of a page and another interacting with the text they are presented with and engaging with a story. How a child’s voice sounds when he or she reads can be a good indicator of their level of fluency, as it involves everything from expression and phrasing, to their response to punctuation and intonation – how one varies the tone of his or her voice while reading.

Fluency also involves what Polchinski identifies as three key elements of comprehension: predicting, sequencing and retelling. Here Polchinski emphasizes that both students and parents need to be educated, as she stresses the importance of adults posing questions to young readers, asking them to remind them what happened at the beginning of a story, to predict or infer what will happen next based on text, or to tell them what they would have done faced with a character’s situation.

What Polchinski also teaches is that confidence and independence are two of the biggest keys to improving reading and overall learning skills. Simply by instilling in them some confidence and assurance – and by teaching them that not knowing something should not be a source of shame but an invitation to learn about it – Polchinski has seen some of her students go from under-average reading levels to above average in a matter of a year or less.

“I model a sense of inquiry, and I embrace that inquiry, but I also model for them that it’s okay not to know something as long as they know that there is always a way of accessing that knowledge and finding out about it,” Polchinski said. “I tailor my instruction to keep my students at an even pace. It’s like going up a slight incline on a bicycle. It’s never going to be straight uphill where it’s too steep and they are not going to be able to do it. As the confidence increases, fluency comes.”

Polchinski says confidence is especially important in cases with students with ADHD, another area that she specializes in and one she says is becoming increasingly more prevalent within the community. ADHD has been shown to affect a child’s working memory, recall, comprehension, planning and organization, all challenges Polchinski focuses on helping her students navigate through and minimize through various strategies. 

Whatever a child’s need is – and with the new school year and all too familiar homework loads rapidly approaching – Polchinski is confident that her services and those of other learning specialists as herself have a place in Westchester and with local families. In an age where parents work long hours and video games are an all too easy solution to obtaining an hour or two of quiet time, Polchinski stresses there is often the need and desire for the type of personalized and intensive attention and instruction she provides – whether that is bringing an under-average reader up to speed or elevating an already proficient student to higher levels. 

“What we do is more tailored,” Polchinski said, about the learning specialist field. “Parents want to know that their children are being continually challenged. We offer new material, newer instruction, and really private classes on any topic under the sun in which the child demonstrates an interest. We engage a student’s mind by using learning strategies that they use in school, but the winning piece is that we are delivering it in a way that increases motivation and engages the learner.”

To learn more about the programs offered by Carolyn Polchinski, M.S.Ed., call 914.325.0297 or email CPolchin7@aol.com.