Internal Coach Program (ICP)

Your students are diverse in their strengths and challenges, background knowledge, and learning preferences. The Hidden Sparks Internal Coach Program trains peer coaches to help you meet your student’s diverse needs. They become resident experts and resources to your faculty in understanding and supporting all learners.

The designated faculty member(s) will receive training and on-site mentoring in understanding and teaching to diverse learning styles, strategies for struggling students, and skill development to become peer coaches.

Your school can designate one or more faculty members, including secular or Judaic studies teachers, guidance staff, resource room personnel and administrators to participate in our subsidized six day training.  We encourage training faculty teams to take advantage of this resource and build school capacity in this area.

Following the training, the “internal coaches in-training” receive in-school mentoring by a senior  Hidden Sparks coach over the course of the subsequent academic year in order to hone their coaching skills. Select coaches will be eligible to continue on for a second year of mentoring as part of our Polinger coaches program.

• Understanding the Hidden Sparks Learning Lenses®: 1. The neurodevelopmental constructs such as: Language, Attention, Memory, Temporal Sequential Organization, Social Cognition, Higher Order Cognition, and Ordering Systems, 2.  Ecology and Classroom Ecology and their impact on success in school, and 3. Temperamental Traits and their affect on children’s learning experiences.
• Coaching skills that will allow them to coach fellow faculty members as they conduct guided observations of children that are struggling, debrief on their strengths and challenges and develop strategies together.
• Facilitation skills that will allow them to both facilitate monthly teachers meetings to review  students’ learning profiles and develop presentations on aspects of learning and behavior.
• Training begins with a 6 day course held in the winter and spring.
• During the school year following the course, new coaches will be mentored by senior Hidden Sparks coaches and attend small-group regional meetings as they hone their skills.
• Please note, we are currently accepting applications from schools in the NY/NJ Metro area. Schools in other areas are advised to contact the office regarding our other programs and bringing this program to their city.

If you are an administrator or school faculty member and are interested in hearing more about the ICP program,  please  contact Sara Diament, Director of School Services at Sara@HiddenSparks.org or (212) 767-7707.