6 Powerful Strategies for Supporting Your Students Academic Success by Frank Kros, MSW, JD As school gets into full swing, consider these six powerful strategies for helping your child get the most out of this year. 1. Develop the Right Mindset in Your Child How you praise your child can have a significant impact on his or her attitude and motivation toward learning. In her seminal work: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Random House Publishers, 2006), researcher Carol Dweck argues that parents and teachers should stop telling children they are smart. Instead of praising them for intelligence or talent, Dwecks research suggests that praising for strategy selection, hard work and perseverance builds academic resilience in students and improves motivation to learn. Try using phrases such as: I like the way you tried a lot of different strategies on that math problem until you finally got it and That was a hard English assignment, but you stuck with it until you got it done. You stayed at your desk and kept your concentration. Thats great! When reviewing homework with your student, ask them to share the strategy they used to solve the problem or task. Focusing your childs mindset on proper strategy selection, working hard and not giving up when material is challenging will develop a can do attitude toward learning that will serve them well for years to come. 2. Ensure Your Child Gets Enough Sleep Sleep plays an important role in learning by providing the brain time to organize, consolidate and rehearse information before encoding it to memory. Simply put, children who are shy of sleep are shy of learning. Experts recommend that school-age children need 10 hours of sleep per night and adolescents 9.25 hours per night. Monitor your childs sleep time to see how many hours they are getting each night. Strive to schedule your bedtime routine so your child is getting the recommended number of hours of sleep. If you need some help with the bedtime routine, check-out sleepforkids for helpful tips and suggestions. In addition to interfering with optimal learning, youth who sleep less weigh more. If a young person sleeps 9 hours or less per night, research suggests they are up to three times more likely to be obese. Also, less sleep correlates with higher emotional volatility. Helping our children get the right amount of sleep each night has a remarkably positive impact on many important areas of life at school and at home. 3. Build Organizational Skills In a recent survey of private pay tutors, more than half cited the lack of organizational skills as the primary reason students are referred to their companies. Tutors report that teaching organizational skills is often the main focus of tutoring because todays students seem to have more difficulty getting organized and multi-tasking. Many students never learn a consistent, comprehensive organizational system for academics. Both parents and teachers can improve student performance, lower student stress and improve students attitude toward school by teaching students how to organize. There are many excellent and inexpensive resources for building organizational skills. Two of my favorites include the SOAR curriculum (soarstudyskills) and Martin Kutschers and Susan Morans highly practical book, Organizing the Disorganized Child (HarperCollins Publishers, 2009). Both are inexpensive and available at Amazon. 4. Exercise is Critical to Healthy Brain Development Exercise is critical to healthy brain development. Children under 12 should play vigorously (preferably outdoors) at least 60 minutes a day and adolescents should get at least 30 minutes of intense aerobic exercise per day. Research on exercise and brain development suggests that regular exercise is more important to the brain than it is to the body. Exercise increases blood flow to the brain and improves thinking ability and oxygen metabolism. Exercise has also been shown to reduce the harmful effects of stress on the brain. Exercise also sparks the growth of new brain cells through a process known as neurogenesis and stimulates older neurons to form dense interconnected webs that make the brain run faster and more efficiently.
Posted on: Sun, 05 Oct 2014 02:11:20 +0000
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