Utilizing her experiences and nerdy obsession with neuroscience, learning and the brain, Samantha Woods has become a recognized and well-respected authority on ADHD & Executive Functioning Skills, the management system of the brain. Sam is a self-proclaimed Brain Nerd and has devoted the last 20 years of her career to exploring how the latest brain research can be applied to a student's learning and life success. She has dedicated her life to building Kaizen Education Services, a social enterprise dedicated to equipping educators and students with the essential knowledge and strategies to support with their executive function teaching & development.
Samantha Woods, Founder
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
I am the founder of Kaizen Education Services and a self-proclaimed brain nerd.
I was a teacher for over 17 years and started Kaizen when I worked as the academic support lead in the counseling department at a junior/senior high school in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. It was there that I discovered my passion for helping students (and educators!) to understand their unique brains.
I am a dog lover and have had a dog most of my life. Ozzie is my current furry friend (a black labrador retriever) and he is being trained as an emotional support dog for children with anxiety and ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder).
When I am not sitting at my desk writing and creating new programs, you will find me in the Rocky Mountains hiking, biking or sipping a glass of wine by the fire.
I now spend most of my time innovating programs for students with ADHD, presenting and sharing practical tools & strategies with educators, parents and anyone invested in making good change (Kai-zen) happen with a young person in their life.
I have two boys, ages 20 years and 23 years old who are largely responsible for fueling my passion for brain health and wellbeing.
Could you provide an overview of Kaizen Educ and its mission? Kaizen is an educational social enterprise dedicated to working with people who face the challenges of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). Kaizen works 1:1 with students and adults to coach executive functioning brain skills, the skills often underdeveloped and lagging in an ADHD brain. We work with students and adults (we like to say, from the classroom to the boardroom!) because children with ADHD grow into adults with ADHD. Along with a specialty focus on matching neuroscience with teaching executive skills, Kaizen has developed a comprehensive coaching training program to bring on a team of committed, like-minded educators to support my original vision of empowering brains for learning and life. No matter child or adult, everyone deserves to learn the skills needed to reach their full potential.
What inspired you to start Kaizen Educ? I became an entrepreneur by mistake. I had no intention of leaving my stable, well-paying, educator position in “‘the system.”However, it was WORDS and LABELS that changed my plan. Powerful, life-impacting wordsriddled with SHAME that were not only being used to describe my students, but eventually, those same words, were being used to describe my youngest son. These distressing labels launched me on an unexpected and unpredictable journey that has landed me in this honored space of working with children and adults who are navigating the challenges they face with ADHD. The kids who were described as such, landed in my school office because they “didn’t fit the mould” and it was up to me to “fix them.” Student apathy, avoidance and low confidence began to make total sense because I learned that by the age of 12, children diagnosed with ADHD or other learning difficulties, hear 20,000 more negative, critical or corrective messages from authority figures than their neurotypical peers (Michael Jellinek, MD). Using neuroscience research and cognitive data collection to drive objective decisions surrounding a child’s learning became my focus. I discovered that specifically, my students’ executive functioning skill development was lagging. Executive function can be described as ”‘the management system of the brain.”
These skills allow you to set goals, plan, and get things done. It has been proven that well-developed EFS has been shown to be a better indicator of school and career success than one’s intelligence score. However, these skills are STILL not explicitly coached at school. Instead of teaching students WHAT to learn, I began coaching them on HOW to learn. I began to experiment with creating individualized student programs to explicitly coach these skills with successful results. Those who “couldn’t learn” began to SHINE. I finally recognized that her students’ success in life goes well beyond intelligence and academic skills. After taking this neuroscience research hiatus, thanks to Dr. Peg Dawson and Dr. Judy Willis, I discovered that lagging executive functioning skills were at the root of many of my students’ challenges. Since then, I chose to leave the education system and developed a successful executive skills coaching program for students and adults who recognize that building these invaluable skills can lead to a lifetime of success and peace. Kaizen is currently developing an online platform to empower educators to address the diverse executive functioning needs in their classrooms so that more children and adults can develop their brain toolkits before moving into higher levels of learning or the workplace.
Can you describe the range of educational services and courses offered on your platform? Kaizen provides executive functioning training from the classroom to the boardroom, typically working with students ages 10 – adults. 1:1 ADHD Coaching for students and adults both in person at our office and online across the world. We are also launching Kaizen’s Brain Hub Academy in a few months, a digital launchpad designed to empower educators to address the diverse executive functioning needs in their classrooms. Typically, this is students diagnosed with ADHD. Yet, the program is designed to positively impact ALL learners, not just those with an identified learning challenge.
Kaizen’s educational outreach programs provide ADHD & executive functioning learning workshops to parents, educators, and caregivers, anyone who has a vested interest in supporting a young person with developing these essential skills.
Could you share some success stories or feedback from learners who have benefited from Kaizen Educ's courses? Here are a few testimonials from students/families/adult learners:
“Before going to Kaizen I struggled with issues such as Time Management, Meeting Deadlines, Work Ethic, Concentration and Overall Life. Kaizen has taught me how to improve and better these skills. Through the lessons, I learned strategies to manage my time, plan my days and get important things done. My issue with meeting deadlines is now a thing of the past as I was given skills to stay on task, plan what needs to be done when and how to make sure things are finished. Not only did they help with these issues they provided me with the tools to complete everyday tasks more efficiently and better altogether. Along with a very open schedule for meetings, incredible staff and amazing help. They helped me get my life back on track,” (grade 12 student who worked with Coach Ron). “Samantha started early in the program with some introductory workshops for the entire group using assessments to help them get a picture of their cognitive and executive skills. From there, they split into sessions with smaller groups based around specific skill development such as time management, planning& prioritization, stress management and strategies for active learning. Once those sessions were complete, there were opportunities for some who needed further one-on-one support to work directly with coaches from Kaizen. The results were superb. Learners had breakthroughs early in the program that allowed them to see long-standing learning challenges in a new light and build new strategies using the strengths they have to overcome those challenges. This set them up to be successful through a heavy workload and working in project teams with many finishing the program saying that it changed their lives. We will definitely continue to engage Kaizen in our programs."
Margo Purcell, CEO InceptionU Tell us about your greatest career achievement so far. I am proud that our Kaizen team persevered and pivoted through the challenges of COVID to provide not only educational support for students but also mental and brain health support. By pivoting our entire practice online, we were able to reach more students and their families during this very challenging time in their lives. It was rewarding to pull together as a Kaizen community and do all we could to reach our students who were feeling overwhelmed, isolated and scared. We knew our students were suffering and we worked as a team to do anything we could to creatively reach them.
If you could change one thing about your industry, what would it be and why?
Gosh, SO many things…education systems are complex beasts and difficult to change as they are still so often rooted in institutional mindsets. I am hopeful that this is slowly changing but if I could change one thing about education systems is that it would become an essential requirement to build ALL children’s brain health toolkits from the moment they enter school rather than waiting until we notice that they are not reaching their full potential and label them with ADHD. Executive skills are a crucial but often overlooked factor for lifelong wellbeing so let’s start there…early intervention is key so that every child reaches their potential for learning and life.
Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
I clearly remember the fall day I drove home after working with a student who said he didn’t want to go to ‘the special school for kids who are dumb’ because he had ADHD. His mother was sitting next to him in my office and her eyes welled up and she looked down into her lap, feeling helpless. My heart broke and I knew I had to do something bigger to demystify and debunk the myths surrounding this condition. I was tired of fighting a system that placed students into categories of ‘learning disabled’ or ‘not.’ It was that day I knew my own lifelong learning journey would need to radically pivot so I could feel congruent with my own beliefs and values.
