Author: Jared Wells

Creating a distraction free workspace.

Where does your son/daughter do his or her schoolwork?

One of the important things that a education center provides is a location and energy devoted entirely to academics. Once students walk in, their minds shift into study mode, and they are more receptive to doing homework, learning, planning and organization, etc. The environment in which we do something influences how well we do that thing.

Most homework is done in a setting that is not designed to be a workspace. For parents, home is NOT a workspace…it is a place designed to be a place to relax and feel comfortable. And while students also need that after a long day at school, they will still need to get work done. So what can we do to help make home a place where students can get their work done successfully?

1) Eliminate distractions. Distractions could be people (younger brother wants attention, mom wants to remind the student of something) they could be environmental (messy room, unfinished tasks/projects in sight), or they could be devices (phones, computers, TV, etc). When your child sits down to study, try to make sure that there is nothing in eyesight or hearing that is not involved in studying. Phones are put away, messes are cleared away, computer turned off if unneeded for this particular assignment. Earplugs can be a great investment (I buy these ones www.amazon.com/gp/product/B008MCUOH2 . They are also great for blocking snoring at night 🙂 ) . Just having an uncluttered desk can make it easier to focus. Turn the desk in a direction that move distractions out of sight.

2) Don’t use the space for recreation. The more single use the space is, the easier it will be for the student to shift into an academic mindset and stay there. Even something as simple as a comfy chair that is only sat in for reading/studying can make a big difference. This is also why we shouldn’t use electronics in bed…making bed a place where we browse facebook makes it harder for our bodies and minds to remember that bed = sleep!

3) Ask for help from the rest of the family. When it is study time, the rest of the family should understand that no one should disturb the studyer! For a student who struggles with staying focussed, even a check-in from Dad could break them out of the zone. A visual check-in that the student doesn’t notice can allow parents to know when to intervene without unnecessarily breaking the student’s focus.

By the way, it could be that home is just a bad place to study! Is there a better place to study? We offer space in our center for study, (based on availability) to our clients. What about the library? Or a parent’s office?

The more we can control our children’s environment to make it more accommodating for focus and attention, the easier they will find it to get and stay focused.

 
Finals are coming up soon for La Jolla High and Muirlands Middle…is your son or daughter ready? Call or email to schedule some time for class support or organizational/planning support today!

When I ask our students when they read the chapter to prepare for a test, the most common answers are “the night before” and “I don’t read it”. It’s no surprise then that they struggle understanding lectures, struggle with homework, and struggle with quizzes is it? Reading the chapter is an easy thing to procrastinate on…you don’t HAVE to do it until the test, so other, more urgent assignments take precedence.

But the 1-2 weeks of classtime and homework can be immeasurably improved by pre-reading. This is how it works: find out what will be covered in the lecture each day, and the night before, do the reading in the textbook covering those topics/sections. Here are three ways this can have a HUGE impact for your son or daughter.

1) Actually understanding and being engaged in the lecture! It can be challenging for students to keep up, both in their note-taking and in their understanding the material. Having already done the reading, the student will at the very least have a broad idea of the overall shape of the chapter, which means instead of hearing brand new facts for the first time, they’ll be able to fit the facts into the mental structure of the chapter they’ve already (even if roughly) constructed. Makes understanding the teacher much easier, which means better engagement and less frustration.

2) Natural pacing of the reading. Students know that, in an ideal world, they would be spacing their reading out and not reading it all in one go. Planning reading along with the lectures gives the student a natural reading pace and is a kind of built in daily reading assignment which helps make sure they don’t fall behind. Sometimes all you need is a bit of structure, and tying reading to lectures is a simple way to do it. Scheduling is doing as I always say!

3) Cornell note taking. I know students generally hate this, but it’s because they see it as this annoying thing teachers make them do, so they do it in a perfunctory, get-it-done-to-get-it-done way. What Cornell notetaking can do is make pre-reading be a great time for students to write down questions that occur to them as they read (which keeps them engaged and documents their questions without getting bogged down) and then during lecture they can listen for (or ask when appropriate) the answers, again keeping them more engaged in lecture.

This is my guarantee; your son or daughter will notice an immense change in how they learn during lecture once they start pre-reading. They’ll find lectures easier to follow, and (dare I say?) more interesting. These things create a feedback loop for greater success!

Finals are coming up soon for La Jolla High and Muirlands Middle…is your son or daughter ready? Call or email to schedule some time for class support or organizational/planning support today!

I’ve already begun asking my students what their plans for finals are, and generally I’m getting blank stares. They know, in an abstract sense, they will at some point need to study, but haven’t yet figured out what, when, or how. Now is the time to start planning this out so that if (when?) stumbling blocks come up, they have time to adapt.

So what should your son or daughter be doing now?

–Collecting review assignments/packets from previous chapters. These might just be problems assigned from the textbook, they might be packets on the teacher’s website, or they might be documents your child will need to get from the teacher. Many teachers will provide a finals review packet, but waiting until the week (or days?) before the final to begin studying is a big mistake!

-Once all the material has been collecting, your child should SCHEDULE when each part will be completed, starting today! Even if the plan is to do more/most of the studying the weekend before the final, schedule out from today to lighten the burden. That will give your child a buffer should the unexpected happen, and make sure they don’t get overwhelmed by one class.

–Schedule tutoring sessions now. Education centers are going to be slammed with calls from parents trying to get their students in for last minute sessions. Be proactive. Schedule a session for this week to help the student plan out their studying/review topics the student knows she is weak on. Tutoring sessions work best when the student has adequate time in between sessions to review the material covered in session.

What does your child have planned right now to prepare for finals? How does your child cope?

Finals are coming up soon for La Jolla High and Muirlands Middle…is your son or daughter ready? Call or email to schedule some time for class support or organizational/planning support today!

“How do you know you’re ready for the test?”

A student’s having “done the homework” and “read the chapter” are not, by themselves, sufficient evidence of readiness for a test. If that is the case, what more should they be doing to prepare for exams?

Answer: It isn’t necessarily about doing more. It’s often about the way students are doing what they are doing.

The most important problem to solve is that often students don’t know what they don’t know. So the first step must be about bringing the student’s awareness to the gap in their knowledge.

Oftentimes students will get through homework assignments by memorizing processes or facts. When a homework assignment consists of 20 very similar questions, this can work pretty well, and in fact incentives memorization in place of comprehension! In the short run outlook of “today’s homework assignment” memorizing can be very efficient. But when the test comes along, if the student never understood the concept at a fundamental level, having a temporary memory lapse, or seeing a question a little different than the ones she practiced can lead to a worse than expected performance. Nevermind needing to use the concept again on future tests, finals, or SAT’s!

So what can our students do differently?

Understand, don’t memorize

The key tell for the student is “If a friend asked me to teach how to do this problem, and WHY we do it this way, what would I say?” This, rather than simply the ability to work through a problem, is a much strong indicator of understanding at a deep level. You can encourage this by asking your son or daughter to explain their homework to you, or by encouraging them to form study groups where the students teach each other the material. It’s easy for a student to mentally shrug off a “careless error” with “Well, I understood the problem I just made this dumb mistake.” But when asked to explain a concept, their struggling for words can be a much clearer indication to them that there are gaps in their understanding that need to be filled before test day.

So when your son or daughter tells you they are ready for their test, challenge them to teach YOU the chapter. Whether or not you learn it is besides the point. Your child’s fluency with the material in the teaching will be a giveaway to both of you as to your child’s level of preparation.

 

Finals are coming up soon for La Jolla High and Muirlands Middle…is your son or daughter ready? Call or email to schedule some time for class support or organizational/planning support today!

…or just not preparing for tests effectively?

Certainly, test-taking is a skill, and like any skill, some people are more naturally suited for it than others. But, also like any other skill, hard work at improving your skill can more than make up for lack of natural ability. There are of course exceptions (learning differences, tests given without enough time, etc).

One of the most common complaints we hear from students is “I’m not a good test-taker.” In the vast majority of cases what this means is that the student is getting all homework completed, and is studying for a reasonably (or in some cases unreasonably!) long time, and yet is still performing poorly on tests. And a natural response to that is to think that you are the type of person who is going to struggle with tests.

But hidden in this complaint is a key assumption: that the student understands the material, and the understanding is not translating to test-taking.

The vast majority of the time we work with students who have proclaimed themselves “bad test-takers” what we find is that the students don’t understand the material nearly as well as they believe they do. So what is going wrong?

My experience is that students are not using their homework as a means to prepare for tests, rather as a hurdle to be overcome as quickly as possible, and that they are not studying effectively. I’ll discuss these in more detail in future emails, but a key question to ask your son or daughter before a test is “How do you know you are prepared for this test?” Answers that show effective preparation and high level of understanding might sound like:

“I did the practice test with no notes and got every question correct.”
“I went to see the teacher to review the problems I didn’t understand from my homework, and re-worked them by myself”
“I explained each of the slides from the chapter on my teacher’s website to a classmate”

Answers that might show either ineffective preparation or lack of self-awareness as to level of understanding might include:

“I studied for two hours”
“I completed all the homework assignments”
“I read the chapter again”

Remember, success is not just about spending a certain amount of time doing something. It’s about doing the right things with the right mindset.

What strategies does your son or daughter find effective in preparing for tests? What doesn’t work?

Looking to sharpen your student’s test taking skills? Check our our “Study Skills” workshop this summer.

Everyone has a plan until…

…a friend sends a text message
…or they remember they have something else they need to do
…or they have to look up the name of the singer singing the song they’re listening to

One of the most important skills we help our students with is learning how to plan. That it, how to bravely face a seemingly insurmountable mountain of unexamined tasks and turn it into an accomplishable schedule. Let me tell you, it is a load off of the mind of any student to actually understand the scope of what they need to do, and to see a clear path to getting it done…

…and then, right when the appointed time come to begin the first assignment, little brother comes in wanting to play. Well, what’s the harm in that right? Then afterwards, the student notices the kitchen could be tidied up a bit. Then, forgetting about the homework, he sits down to play x-box for an hour.

How can we help students prepare to deal with the inevitable distractions and interruptions that can derail even the best laid plan?

1) Identify the most common distractions/interuptions, and talk to your son or daughter about how they will deal with them as they come up. For example:
-I know my phone is a distraction. I’ll put it on DND and set it across the room
-I know that video games are a distraction. I’ll put the controllers in the living room.
-I know that browsing the internet is a distraction. I’ll install stayfocused on chrome to block distracting websites.

This is simply another form of planning…planning for how the plan might go awry!

The key is to involve the student in the discussion, having them identify the distractions, and helping them to problem solve how to deal with them as they inevitably arise. This problem solving process works both preventatively, and as a way to improve for next time after a distraction derails them.

2) Have reminders to bring attention back to the task at hand

This can be as simple as offering to check in on the student every 10 minutes or so (but make sure that you have buy in from your son or daughter…otherwise it might feel like nagging!) An alarm that goes off every 10 minutes or so can help bring attention back. As can having a kitchen timer that (quietly!) ticks in the background, timing spurts of work for the student. I use the Focus Time IOS app…it’s gently ticking in the background is a constant reminder of the task I’ve committed to accomplish.

3) Rehearse dealing with the distraction.

The key here is to physically interrupt the distraction. For example, maybe mindlessly opening up Facebook in a web browser is a source of distraction. If so, come up with an interrupting behavior (close the browser and do 10 squats, for example). Once you and your son/daughter have come up with ideas for the behavior, rehearse them! It sounds silly, but the way to break a habit is to REINFORCE the habit that you want to instill…no better way to do that then act it out! If I have trouble getting up out of bed in the morning when my alarm goes off, before I go to sleep the following night, I rehearse getting up instantly by setting my alarm. It sounds ridiculous, but it works!

Finals are coming up soon for La Jolla High and Muirlands Middle…is your son or daughter ready? Call or email to schedule some time for class support or organizational/planning support today!

Wells Academic Solutions
619.884.4233

I “exercise my idea muscle” (credit to James Altucher) by coming up with a list of ten ideas every day. Sometimes, they aren’t good ideas, but even bad ideas can be the germ that sprouts a good one later.

Here are 5 of my 10 ideas for today (in interest of brevity, I’ll send you the other half tomorrow!)

Ten ways students can use their smartphones to stay organized

1) Using reminders

Has your son or daughter ever forgotten to talk to a teacher about something before or after class? Have them set a time based reminder to go off right before class to remind them when they need to talk to a teacher

Most smartphones have location based reminders too, so a reminder right when a student gets home to break out his planner and plan his homework can be key. I do my note-taking on paper rather than my phone, but a Reminders app is one place a smartphone really shines!

2) Calendar notifications

I plan my days out meticulously to make sure I get done what I plan to and don’t lose track of time. If your student enters the plan for the day into Google Calendar or iCal, he or she can set up phone alerts to get reminders a few minutes before the next task needs to be started. So if yesterday your daughter decided she would start studying for her chemistry exam at 4pm, getting a reminder at 3:55 will make it more likely that that actually happens! There are also great phone only calendar apps that will do the trick.

3) Email

Speaking of talking to teachers, what better time to contact a teacher than right at the moment a student realizes he needs to? If your son has a question about something, instead of waiting until tomorrow, why not send your teacher an email NOW and not have to worry about remembering or planning to do it later? As adults, we know the importance of having a record of critical communications. It’s a lesson that students need to learn too!

4) Alarm Clock

Snoozing is too easy. Use the “Wake and Shake” alarm for IOS or “Shake It” alarm for Android. This alarm won’t turn off until your shaken the phone enough, with settings that will give you a workout, if that is what your kids need to get out of bed!

5) Camera

What an underutilized app (or maybe just differently utilized…no shortage of selfies or sunsets on instagram!) Camera app is amazing for taking notes much faster than you could by hand. Just make sure that the pictures are processed later. A picture of a homework assignment doesn’t do any good 4 months later.

Take a picture of…
…a sports schedule for easy reference
…a particularly important slide in a teacher’s powerpoint (with permission of the teacher of course!)
…notes you’ve written on random scraps of paper you don’t have time to process right away

Could your son or daughter use some help developing their planning and organization skills? Check our our “Getting things done: for students” workshop this summer.

We had a great workshop at La Jolla High School yesterday (to see the slides from the workshop, click here.) When I asked the students what they do to eliminate distractions when it is time to work, one of them said, “I turn my phone off”. That answer blew me away, because, frankly, the idea of turning my own phone off is unthinkable! And yet, here I am writing this email with my phone asleep and on DND, and the world isn’t ending…

…and I’m writing an email about students can use their phones to be MORE productive. Ironic huh?

Ten ways students can use their smartphones to stay organized (part two).

 

6) Password organizer

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve met with students who couldn’t remember their college board login, their power school login…even their email login! Getting a password organizer like mSecure for IOS means they’ll have that info with them at all times, and they can also stop using the same password for everything. To learn about strong passwords check out www.diceware.com and https://xkcd.com/936/

 

7) Pomodoro technique

Many student (people) have trouble focusing on a single task for a given amount of time. The Pomodoro technique is a way of timing work in 25 minute bursts and taking short breaks in between (and the work period can be adjusted to fit the person). An IOS app like 30/30 or Be Focussed Pro is a great tool for this. To learn more about the Pomodoro technique check out https://cirillocompany.de/ .

 

8) Quizlet (and other flashcard apps)

Plenty of students we work with use www.quizlet.com to study for exams…but why don’t they download the app on their phones? No idea, but what a great way to squeeze a little studying in when waiting in line, riding in the car, or other in-between times.

 

9) RSS Feeds

Surfing the web can be a huge productivity killer, especially when your repetitively checking the same website over and over. Subscribing to an RSS feed with an app like Feedly can help students make sure they aren’t going to miss any updates on their favorite websites and can more mindfully read the blogs and articles they enjoy rather than habitually checking and rechecking for updates. To learn more about RSS feeds, check out https://www.lifewire.com/rss-101-3482781 .

 

10) Text yourself

This is a great way to send a quick note to yourself to remember something. The notification of the text will sit there in your phone until you do something with the note (like write it down in it’s proper place!) I’m big on the mindfulness of pen and paper, but sometimes a phone is just handier!

Is your son or daughter having academic challenges? If so, please give us a call to schedule a free phone or in-person consultation. We’ll help them discover the truth about their intelligence!