Three audiences, one program.

For parents

This started as a parent’s problem before it was anyone’s program.

The Field Guide exists because a parent was watching what almost every parent of an 11-to-14-year-old eventually watches. The smart kid who understood the material in class. The empty planner. The project that didn’t get started until the night before. The same conversation, on a loop, getting nowhere. The mistakes the parent made trying to fix it were the ordinary mistakes most parents make: reminding, rescuing, and taking over the part the kid was supposed to learn to run.

The books came out of admitting that the reminders weren’t teaching anything, and that the kid needed a system they built themselves, not a parent who managed it for them. The student book teaches that system. The Companion gives the parent a smaller, clearer job than the one they have been doing, and explains why the smaller job is the one that actually works.

If any of that sounds familiar, you are in the right section.

For students

Written for you, not about you.

Before a word of the Field Guide was written, the author sat down with seven specific kids in mind. Not made-up kids. Real ones, with real situations. The kid who is bright and disorganized. The kid under heavy pressure who has tried harder and it didn’t work. The kid whose parents can’t help with this kind of thing. The kid for whom willpower-based advice has already failed. Every page in the book had to work for all of them or it got rewritten.

That doesn’t mean the book is a personality test or that you have to fit a category to use it. It means the book wasn’t written for an imaginary average student who doesn’t exist. It was written for actual kids dealing with actual situations. That’s closer to you than a generic study-skills book.

It is eight weeks, twenty to thirty minutes a day. No worksheets pretending to be activities. No adult voice telling you things you already know. By the end you have a system you built, not one somebody handed you.

If that sounds like you, the book is built for you.

For educators and clinicians

You already know the student who externalized every step and still can’t find a way through.

Tuesday afternoon. The English teacher calls assignments out as the class files into the hall. The coach catches her with a four-part practice sequence by the lockers. Someone at home adds another layer the moment she walks in. She did what the strategy said to do. She wrote it all down. Then she looks at the page, fifteen items deep, and freezes. You see some version of that student in your caseload every week. Late work, lost handouts, bright kids sinking anyway, not because they refuse to try but because no one has handed them a way to sequence and prioritize what they captured.

This isn’t a new model and it isn’t a framework that asks you to learn a new vocabulary. It’s a structured, eight-week, day-by-day program in a form a student can pick up and use, with a Companion that walks the supporting adult through the same arc. The work behind it is the cognitive science you already reference, working memory, spaced retrieval, and cognitive load management, applied to the specific transition from middle school to high school. It’s built for small-group counseling, advisory periods, summer bridge, and one-on-one sessions. The Companion includes guidance for group settings.

The intent is narrow. Give the people carrying this load a tool they can hand a student, not another thing to read.