THE PROFESSIONAL STUDENT
About me...
Welcome! I’m Patrick Martel, a certified Special Education Teacher with dual certification in Special Education and English, along with two master’s degrees in Teaching and Liberal Arts. With over 14 years of experience working with students in independent schools, I’ve developed a passion for helping students with learning challenges find success. My consulting practice focuses on empowering students—especially those with diagnosed or undiagnosed learning disabilities—to overcome academic obstacles through customized, skill-building interventions. My goal is to provide families with expert guidance, actionable plans, and ongoing support to foster lasting academic and personal growth for every student.
It's simple, really...
I began my career working in a special education program at a private independent school in southwest Baltimore, where I was assigned a caseload of students, and my job was to support them in whatever classes they took, freshman through senior year. This exposed me to a wide range of subjects since my students took classes from the lowest level to the most advanced across all grade levels. After four years (with my first group of students), I realized I was basically just playing defense, reacting to what challenges - missing assignments, lousy test grades, and the like - school threw at my students. I wanted to take a whole different approach with my second group, so I developed a systematic approach, proactively teaching my new freshman group a set of specific skills and routines that are always used by the most successful students.
Then from 2020 to 2023, I had the opportunity to work with another school to help them develop their special education program. There, I had a lot of flexibility to implement what I believe are the best practices, and oversaw the development of a comprehensive curriculum for a class that students in the program took that explicitly taught them executive functioning skills. My team and I developed a structured program to promote my PROACTIVE executive skill-building approach, rather than just relying on the typical reactionary model, and we saw HUGE results, not only dramatically reducing the number of students who failed or transferred out, but also tremendous growth in the number of students in our program who earned academic honors!
There are two types of students. One is always concerned about the PAST - scrambling to try and get just partial credit for homework that's missing from last week, a test they did poorly on and need to re-do, trying to make up work from an absence. The other is concerned with the FUTURE - writing down and working on assignments that aren't due for days, reading ahead in English class, chunking up a large project and scheduling it out over the next two weeks.
Both students end up doing about the same amount of work, overall - but one is stressed, frantic, suffering from constant anxiety, and has low confidence. The other is less anxious, gets much better grades, AND ends up having more free time. That's The Professional Student.