About Us
The Coaching Queen
I’ve always considered myself an African indigenous pedagogical practitioner. African Indigenous Pedagogy names the teacher as a selfless healer intent on inspiring, transforming, and propelling students to a high spiritual level. I've always been a coach in the classroom, I just did not know it.
I used my English classes as a tool to practice this form of teaching. A student once told me that the “teacher” title didn’t fit what I do, but they couldn’t think of a title that did. “Community Expert” is a title that the district uses for non-licensed staff who are teaching but not on a teacher contract. This is most befitting for me and my coaching framework. Life and leadership coaching requires a curriculum and a framework.
I obtained a Bachelor of Arts degree in Psychology early in my educational career. I studied human resiliency despite human suffering. I learned how psychological safety, joy, and care impact our ability to grow intellectually. I went on to receive a Master's in Education so that I could become a master teacher.
Why life and leadership coaching? Coaching is a form of teaching that is often relegated to the athletic sector but may present a more human-based approach to cultivating cognitive and emotional growth for youth of color inside and outside the classroom. Showing up as a Black community expert provides learning and coaching opportunities for teachers who want to stay and are in desperate need of another. I want to lead the transformation of urban teaching approaches through young adult life and leadership coaching.
What the young people often say about me
Who We Are
Our Approach
- The Approaches we take are rooted in the following:
- Applied Positive Psychology: A discipline that examines the connections between brain, body, culture, and science to develop tools and practices that support human flourishing and well-being.
- Person-Centered Theory: The coach supports the clients in taking more of a lead in sessions so that, in the process, they discover their solutions. They must be actively and engaged and responsive, and create an environment in which a client can progress toward solutions, by establishing trust, helping the individual find clarity in their statements through repetition, listening closely for new layers of understanding, and expressing nonjudgmental empathy.
- The PERMA Model:
- Positive Emotion: This route to well-being is hedonic – increasing positive emotion. Within limits, we can improve our positive emotions about the past (e.g., by cultivating gratitude and forgiveness), our positive emotions about the present (e.g., by savoring physical pleasures and mindfulness), and our positive emotions about the future (e.g., by building hope and optimism).
- Engagement: Engagement is an experience in which someone fully deploys their skills, strengths, and attention for a challenging task. In such an activity, concentration is fully absorbed in the moment, self-awareness disappears, and the perception of time is distorted in retrospect, e.g., time stops. Flow can be experienced in a wide variety of activities, e.g., a good conversation, a work task, playing a musical instrument, reading a book, writing, building furniture, fixing a bike, gardening, sports training or performance, to name just a few.
- Relationships: Relationships are fundamental to well-being. The experiences that contribute to well-being are often amplified through our relationships, for example, great joy, meaning, laughter, a feeling of belonging, and pride in accomplishment. Connections to others can give life purpose and meaning. Research shows that doing acts of kindness for others produces an increase in well-being.
- Meaning: A sense of meaning and purpose can be derived from belonging to and serving something bigger than the self. Various societal institutions enable a sense of meaning, such as family, religion, science, politics, work organizations, justice, the community, and social causes, among others.
- Accomplishment: People pursue achievement, competence, success, and mastery for their own sake, in a variety of domains, including the workplace, sports, games, and hobbies, among others. People pursue accomplishment even when it does not necessarily lead to positive emotion, meaning, or relationships.