Tutoring: Get Personalised Online Support
Do any of these comments sound familiar?
- ‘My child gets angry when we do work together – I don’t know what to do.’
- ‘Why is it my job to teach my child? I don’t know how to help with the reading and other homework – the school approach isn’t clear to me.’
- ‘I feel the teachers, and other professionals think my expectations are too high. I find it hard to talk to them.’
- ‘I have tried so hard to do everything they tell me – but things are just getting worse.’
We provide support for you and your family, whenever and wherever you need it!
Chris Brooks and Dr Amanda Abbott, our two highly experienced tutors, provide specialist individual tuition anywhere in the world using online meeting rooms. (We are based in Adelaide, South Australia.)
We chose the name of High Performance Learning because we provide struggling students with the specific Learning and Language Skills they need, so they can break free of their difficulties, and become High Performers at school and in life.
In particular:
- We treat specific learning and emotional difficulties such as dyslexia, auditory processing disorder, concentration problems, stress management, and other special needs.
- We fix basic educational problems such as speech, listening, reading, writing, phonics, comprehension and maths.
- Once students overcome their basic learning difficulties we teach them high powered study and exam skills for all English, Maths, Science and Humanities subjects.
Why Our Programs Are So Successful
We use the latest research-based techniques.
Neuro-science has taught us a lot about how brains operate over the last 30 years. Applying this knowledge to education and learning enables us all to be much better teachers and learners.
For example, when neuro-scientists scan people’s brains while they are reading, they find that good readers integrate the visual and auditory parts of their brains much more than poor readers and people with dyslexia. By teaching young children and poor readers how to integrate the visual, auditory and speech parts of the brain better, we can make massive improvements in their language skills.
The good news is that brains can be rewired – this is what we mean by the term ‘brain plasticity’. When a person learns something new they have made changes to the way their brain is wired – they have made new connections between their brain cells (neurons). When a person forgets something, their brain has removed some of the connections between their neurons.
At High Performance Learning we help people who are struggling with their learning, by teaching them how to learn more effectively so that the different parts of their brains become more connected and integrated.
Here are some examples of the High Performance Learning approach to common learning problems:
Dyslexia and other reading problems:
Chris Brooks, Founder of High Performance Learning, has developed a multi-media and colour-coded computer font for learning to read. This amazing font gives visual and auditory cues about the 200 letter-sound and sound-letter phonic rules in English. Reading words written in this font helps the reader build stronger and more appropriate pathways between the visual and auditory parts of their brain. This makes decoding the words much easier, thus freeing up a lot of brain power, so reading comprehension improves dramatically.
Forgetting ‘sight words’:
Remembering a word as a whole, purely by sight, is an advanced reading skill that develops after reading a word thousands of times. Heavy emphasis on learning words by sight in the early stages of learning to read puts unnecessary stress on young children, and often gets them so confused that they give up on using the phonic rules of the English Language when trying to read. To understand what it feels like for a young child to learn 350 whole words by sight, try to learn to read and write one Chinese character every day for a year without forgetting any of them – that made you sweat didn’t it! Our Basic Reading Program uses our colour-coded, multi-media, computer font to help the reader understand the role of each letter in every word. Changing the focus from remembering whole words by sight (visual memory), to understanding what each letter is doing, enables the reader to use the speech, auditory and understanding parts of their brain to support the visual parts.
Difficulty learning multiplication tables:
Most children are encouraged to learn their tables by repetition – this is rote learning. Rote learned facts only stay in the memory if they are practised regularly. In these days of calculators and computers, we don’t get much practice with our tables so most people aren’t sure of all their tables. This means that they can’t rely on them in real world situations where accuracy is very important. At High Performance Learning we teach a few simple thinking strategies that enable our clients to work out their tables, accurately and at high speed – for the rest of their lives.
Poor concentration and focus:
Developing self-awareness and mindfulness, even in quite young children, helps people take more control of their thinking processes. Another factor that makes concentration and learning difficult is stress. We show people simple and effective stress management techniques so they can lower their stress levels in learning situations, and in other areas of their lives.
Conflict, anger, tantrums, reluctance to go to school or do homework:
It is important to understand that these things are all symptoms of underlying thinking and learning problems. Attempting to fix the behaviour without fixing the causes of the problems will not work. We provide Full Diagnostic Educational Assessments to determine exactly where your child is confused, what is causing the confusions, and what needs to be done to fix the problems. (Our Diagnostic Assessments are very different from standard Educational Assessments done by most Educational Psychologists who use standardised psychometric tests which compare the scores your child gets to the scores of other children the same age.)
Poor marks at High School and University levels:
Reading textbooks and notes over and over, trying to remember the facts, does not work in the long term. Essays and exams are designed to test a lot more than just the ‘facts’. Among other things, they test communication skills, the relationships between the facts, and the ability to apply knowledge in new situations. We teach students how to learn these things right from the first day of their courses. This deeper understanding makes their courses much more interesting and satisfying, and they don’t forget most of what they learned straight after their exams.
The Age Groups We Work With
We teach people at all levels of their education how to overcome their difficulties and excel at their education:
- Pre-School and Early Learning
- Primary School
- Middle School
- Senior High School and College
- Coaching and Mentoring for Adults and University Students
Our Educational and Tutoring Services
Free 15 Minute Diagnostic Consultation:
Before you consider working with us, we invite you to discuss your concerns about your child with us (Chris or Amanda, our Specialist Educators). Give us a call now on Phone: 0419 806 706 or contact us ONLINE. We look forward to talking to you.
Full Diagnostic Educational Assessment:
Before planning a program to overcome educational and learning difficulties we provide a full Diagnostic Educational Assessment of the student’s thinking, learning, speech, listening, reading, spelling, writing, maths, study, emotional and social skills – this enables us to target the real causes of learning problems.
Personalised One-to-One Online Tutoring:
Tuition to address your child’s specific issues online. Individual tuition is more effective in the long term because we can sort out issues that are difficult to deal with in a classroom situation. Also, we involve you in the program so we can give you skills to develop the relationship you want with your child.
Why We Do What We Do
Chris Brooks: ‘I was educated in the 1950s when Australia had a great shortage of trained teachers. I struggled terribly with my learning when I was young – particularly with learning to read. I had a great Maths teacher in Grades 7 and 8 who taught me how to learn Maths but I struggled with poor reading and spelling right through High School and University.
When I eventually learned how to read at the age of 25, I couldn’t understand why no one had taught me what to do before – it wasn’t so hard!
When I got over my anger about so many years of unnecessary struggle I decided to dedicate my life to helping other people who are struggling with their learning so they can achieve high levels of performance and reach their full potential.’
Dr Amanda Abbott: ‘I had severe learning problems when I was in Primary School so when both my children had dyslexia and other learning and emotional difficulties, I was determined to make sure that they did not go through what I had. I took them everywhere: psychologists, speech therapists, occupational therapists, specialist tutors, various schools, and other learning centres. Nothing worked and my children were getting more frustrated every year.
I had nearly given up when I heard about Mr Fix-it (Chris Brooks) at High Performance Learning. At the time, the name High Performance Learning sounded too good to be true, but I was so desperate to help my children that I was prepared to try anything.
Chris taught us in an easy step-by-step way, always teaching us how to learn as we went. I was amazed at the improvements my children made.
Even though I was a highly educated professional myself, I was even more amazed at the improvements in my own learning and language skills in the process of working with my children. I was so inspired that I wanted everyone to be able to experience this life-changing program that makes learning so much easier. So, I left my career as a Senior Research Scientist working on 3D imaging of skulls and brains at the renowned Australian Cranio-Facial Unit at the Adelaide Women’s and Children’s Hospital – I went back to University and got a degree in Education and a lot of teacher-training and mentoring from Chris. I have been working here at High Performance Learning as a Specialist Educator ever since. I’m still working with brains, but now I help re-program them, to the delight of our clients!’
Get Ongoing Help With Parenting and Education
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