The Study Skills Series

The Teachers Collective completed another successful series of 2 workshops for teenagers on how to study.  We taught internationally proven study techniques that will help students understand and learn better, taking memorization out of the picture.

Modern syllabi and job skills prize understanding and older methods that rely primarily on rote memorization are (thankfully) being revised.  Not as fast as we would all like but that is no reason for us to not educate our participants on how else it can be!

Parul Mathur is a special educator with over a decade of work experience with students with different learning needs.  She is one of those mover and shaker types that will diagnose the specific problem that a child is facing and provide the scaffolds needed to help her student overcome it.

She shared one of her primary skill strengths with the participants of our workshop – study skills. We used activities and role plays in the first session to bring home the need for students to use study skills.  We can teach all we want but unless our children are convinced that they need to use it and use it consistently, these methods, however fantastic, won’t have the opportunity to work.  Students went away thoughtful and one of them came back to us reporting that she DID find it a better way of studying, having used it in the intervening week.

The second session was Visual Note Making/Note Taking and math study skills – an approach to address ANY problem in school math.  This session had hands-on learning with students using their newly-learned skills in action.  It went well – how so we know?  From return attendees and feedback.  We are so thrilled that some bragging might be in order! 😀

There are plans afoot to do this as a summer program – study skills, math and writing for academics.  Together, it should help students get a good foundation on their learning as well as test taking.  At the end of the day, our goals are also that students will learn what they need to with understanding, ditch rote memorization and work efficiently, taking the excess time to play or refine their interests.  Space for that narrows considerably in high school, definitely something damaging to many students.  After all, academics, while important, isn’t the only factor to success in life!

Do give your children the time to play.  Get them to efficiently and effectively study so that they have this time to do other stuff!  Please help us get these skills to more students – please do share our posts and enroll your children, god children and anyone you care about!

Happy Republic Day!