Our Story
Growth Bound Collaborative was born out of real struggles that Erin and Bekki saw their students facing every day in their classrooms. Students struggling with ADHD, executive functioning skills, and just real world organizing skills have been around for as long as teaching, but over the past few years as technology, social media, and online classrooms have taken over our world, these issues have been exacerbated for so many students. We would come into our classroom every day and see these deficits bubbling to the surface - through missing assignments, incomplete agenda books, backpacks filled with papers and sometimes random bananas and sneakers, and eventually failing grades. The coping skills that carried these students through the early elementary and middle grades were no longer working, and we knew we needed to do something different.
We started with the design for our first planner, The Weekly Reset. The idea is that helping kids get organized and setting them up for a successful week doesn’t take long, but it needs to be consistent and they need to be taught how to do it. With just 15-minutes a week (maybe a little longer at the beginning of the year to get things started), parents and students can work together and use the planner to build habits of reflection, goal setting, planning, and executing. With just this short check in, we set students up with a plan for a week that they have designed and planned for themselves.
These habits are good for high schoolers, but we believe by instilling these patterns of behavior early, we will help our students find success in college and beyond.
So, while we began by designing this planner and implementing these strategies in our own classrooms, we slowly began to see that this problem extended beyond our walls. In meetings with administrators and conversations with educators and child psychologists, we continued to hear adults speak of this growing gap.
So, here we are, trying to make a difference the best way we know how - sharing the tools and practices that we have designed to guide us in helping kids find their way in a chaotic world and plan for the weeks, months, and years of their own design so that when they walk out of our classroom and into the larger world they feel prepared and ready to be the leaders and change-makers that this world so badly needs.
Erin Niles, Co-Founder
Erin Niles is a high school English, World Studies, and AVID teacher. She earned a bachelor's in English from Boston College, her master's in Education from Harvard University, and attended the Columbia Publishing Course in the summer of 2006. After 15 years of teaching and raising three young boys of her own, Erin is deeply invested in helping students access their true potential through the power of organization and planning. While she loves teaching literature and writing, she has come to understand the power of direct instruction of executive functioning skills.
She’s grown tired of people apologizing for their child’s energy in the classroom. She embraces a chaotic start in order to find the beauty we never thought could exist.
Rebekah Gerard, Co-Founder
Bekki Gerard is a high school English and AVID teacher. She has taught English across four countries and seven grade levels. She holds her undergraduate degree in English and a Master's Degree in Multidisciplinary Studies. She has experience working with students with a wide range of needs, skills, and backgrounds. Over her 14 years of teaching, she has found that all students need explicit instruction and practice in developing their executive functioning skills in conjunction with their content learning and extracurricular lives in order to thrive. She firmly believes that only when we learn how to organize our time and our tasks can we be empowered to become our best selves.
As an adult with ADHD she has a deep personal understanding of the necessity of strong executive functioning skills to function and flourish in the demanding realities of our world.