With its comprehensive mentoring support, PAL offers its students many benefits during their time at Curry and beyond graduation. Unlike services that offer drop-in skills assistance, PAL is an integrated program that helps students take charge of your academic and personal success through strength-based instruction and a close mentoring relationship with your PAL instructor.
Among the many ways that PAL distinguishes itself from other college programs or services are its:
Strength-based philosophy and approach: Many of our students have superior abilities in areas that they have not learned to tap fully. Our students are often gifted athletes, musicians, thinkers, writers, leaders, or artists who have been frustrated academically due to a disproportionate focus on their weaknesses. With PAL’s unique and positive approach our students learn to use these strengths to lead them to success.
Proactive structure: Unlike the drop-in support that is available at most colleges, the support that is available in PAL is structured to work with students before they experience difficulty. Please read more about the STRUCTURE OF PALto understand how PAL is designed to help students be proactive and achieve independence.
Focus on metacognitive analysis: Metacognition, or thinking about thinking, is at the heart of the PAL philosophy. By helping students reflect regularly on their learning, students are able to identify the strategies and techniques that will work best for them, allowing them to become their own learning specialist in time.
Exceptional instruction from highly qualified and dedicated faculty and staff: PAL’s 30 distinguished faculty members are all learning specialists with Master’s or Doctoral degrees. Each PAL instructor has extensive experience in providing academic assistance to college students with learning disabilities. However, more importantly, the PAL instructors are all specialists who are able to connect with students and establish a relationship of trust.
Warm and supportive community of learners: PAL students develop a camaraderie and community that allows them to learn from each other as well as from their PAL instructors. Because so many PAL students are leaders around campus, there is not a stigma attached to participation in PAL. In fact, many students proudly describe their participation in PAL due to our highly selective admissions process.
Campus-wide sensitivity to individualized learning: For more than 30 years, PAL has been an integral part of the Curry College community, creating a campus-wide awareness of the remarkable talents and abilities of students who learn differently.
Support for using assistive technology: PAL’s Assistive Technology and AccommodationsCenter is supported in part by federal funds due to its service as a national model for assistive technology support. With a full-time dedicated staff member offering training and assistance, the AT center at PAL provides a wide range of technologies that have been beneficial to students with learning disabilities.
Unique and inviting facilities: Housed in the Gertrude M. Webb Learning Center, PAL provides over 10,000 square feet of dedicated space to its students. Included in the facility are its own computer lab, the Assistive Technology and Accommodations Center, and numerous classrooms for individual and small group sessions with PAL instructors.
Support in developing self-advocacy skills: PAL’s goal is to help students to develop their own advocacy skills so that throughout their lives they will be able to describe their needs and their strengths. Rather than contacting professors on behalf of students, PAL instructors will often work with students to prepare them to speak to professors and articulate their needs effectively.