Holidays are over, it’s as cold as it ever gets where you are and your children are back at school feeling like their holiday was too short, the’ve forgotten everything they learned last term and they are already behind in their work. Have I got it right? They probably had course work to do over the holiday break that they didn’t get finished, they’ve got mid-year or ‘mock’ exams coming up soon and they are expected to start thinking about their finals already!!
It is no wonder this is the season of maximum depression. What your children need most at this time is to ease as gently as possible back into the routines of homework and study with as much support from you as possible. If you have been to any of my presentations you will know that I am not a fan of parents pressuring children but I am a fan of good organisation. Remember that the solution to depression is action. What can they do to get on top of things, what actions can they take – with your help?
Strategies for the (slightly) de-motivated child
1) Focus on purpose – why are you at school?
This is the most critical question and although the answers may be obvious to you if you haven’t talked through this question with your son or daughter because it is just too obvious then do so – you might be surprised. And don’t accept any glib answers. You need to explore:
– how is getting an education an advantage?
– what is the nature of modern society – the information revolution, the internet?
– what kind of jobs are going to be the most sought after in the future?
– role models of success – using their brain or their body most?
– the building block nature of education – what leads to what?
In the end I think it comes down to having choices, in that a good education will give you more choices as an adult than a poor education will. And more choices are worth having. Real poverty can be easily defined as having no choices.
2) Look at goals – what do you want to achieve by the end of the school year?
In all areas – sports, social, cultural, leisure as well as academic. Having helped your child to formulate some goals get them to write them down!! I like to use the following framework for writing goals:
Positive language – what you will do rather than what you won’t do
Outcome focused – what will it be like when it is finished?
Specific – clear, precise – how much, how high, how far…?
I-based – in your control rather than depending on what anyone else must do
Timed – set a time for completion of the goal and any lead-up stages
Incentive – what is the incentive, the purpose, what will be the benefit of achievement?
Visualise – actively and regularly visualise achieving the goal
Evaluate – build in a time frame for evaluation of progress toward the goal
3) Assess present progress
Contact key teachers at school and find out how your child is actually doing. Do not rely on their reporting. As we discovered half way through Year 10 with one of our sons, he was actually doing much worse than he had led us to believe. If you get in a similar position, try and find a champion for your child at school – someone who will unobtrusively keep an eye on his or her progress. We were able to enlist the support of the Year 10 Dean at my son’s school who was able to institute a monthly written feedback check from each teacher from then on.
4) Install review procedures
Every night your child needs to be reading over what s/he has done at school that day, as well as doing homework. It sounds like a lot but it can be as simple as them talking you through each class they had that day. Create a system and stick to it! This procedure made a big difference to my son’s attitude, performance and enjoyment of school.
5) Be prepared to change
One thing that became apparent to us was that our son had one subject (French) that he was grossly under-performing in and in discussion with him it was obvious that this was effecting his performance across his whole school day. We discussed this with his dean (and with him) and we decided to pull him out of his French class (this was in the middle of his school year) and get him into a Drama class instead. The effect was remarkable, his Drama teacher reported to us that he walked straight into Drama as if he had been in the class all year, moved straight into a lead role in a production they were engaged in and in the end of year exams obtained his highest mark – even though he only attended half the year. More importantly his attitude towards his school day rose and he became more positive and more focused overall. The most important thing my wife and I learnt from that experience was the importance of being prepared to change. If the present regime isn’t working – producing the academic results you and your children want – do something differently! As is often said “If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you always got”
6) Buy resources
As they get closer to exam times, make sure your children have the subject review notes they need for the exams, copies of old exam papers, internet access to subject review sites etc.
7) Identify learning gaps and get remedial tutoring
Even with all the help that we were able to organise our son was still just scraping by we decided that he could do with help in both Maths and Science. During the last part of the first holiday break of the year we organised for the son of a friend (who had finished school the previous year) to come twice a week and spend two hours each time with our son working through the revision guides he had used the previous year. Straight away they identified clear gaps in understanding and began remedial work. The big advantages with using an aquaintance of a similar age were good role modelling, same language structures, familiarity with each other and a comfortable environment. Real progress then began to be made and we continued this system right through the year.
8) Realise that making significant changes to a child’s academic performance is a long slow process and you can’t do it for them.
One of the biggest difficulties I have had with my children over the years is probably helping them to become independent learners. My wife says it is just because I am such a ‘control freak’ and I think that has some validity but I think that many people (especially fathers) face this problem. If we don’t have that much contact with our children on a day to day basis because of our working hours maybe when we do connect we try to help them too much with motivators, rules, systems and strategies of organisation which we know would help them succeed if they implemented them in our absence. The problem being that if we end up being the one that is providing the motivation, the drive, the purpose, the strategies and also we are the one that is getting them started each night in their study and and checking that they finish everything they need to, then they don’t tend to learn how to do it for themselves. Sometimes learning how to learn, independently, is a process best learnt by first experiencing some failure. Somethimes they have to fail first in order to to learn to succeed.
INDEPENDENT LEARNING SKILLS
A while ago I came across this fascinating article in the Times Higher Education Supplement which I think highlights the need to help all children to develop process focused learning strategies and the habits skills and techniques of independent learners:
Tutors in Despair at Illiterate Freshers
Jessica Shepherd
THES: 09 February 2006
Undergraduates are entering university less numerate, literate and knowledgeable than ever before, according to the most comprehensive study undertaken of how university admissions staff view the latest intakes of students.
Admissions tutors bemoaned new students’ lack of independent thought, “fear of numbers” and expectations to be “told the answers” in a survey of staff from 16 Oxbridge, Russell Group and post-1992 institutions.
The report, leaked to The Times Higher, reveals that lecturers are forced to postpone courses to the second year of undergraduate degrees to make time for remedial teaching and to develop students’ independent learning skills.
Many of the 250 university staff questioned lamented an “overemphasis” on exam success and league tables in the education system for 14 to 19-year-olds, which they say leads to students starting university suffering from “assessment burnout” and expecting to be spoon-fed.
New students, they say, increasingly struggle to cope with the independent and self-directed style of learning expected by higher education tutors.
They say that students are increasingly weak at reading critically, constructing arguments and communicating ideas in writing and have poor grammar skills compared with undergraduates of ten years ago.
Lecturers say that A levels often either cover too much of a subject in too little detail or focus on certain topics and fail to provide adequate knowledge of core ideas.
Geoff Hayward, lecturer in Oxford University’s educational studies department, which carried out the survey with the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service, said: “Negative comments are not indicative of higher education tutors and admissions staff whingeing or harking back to some golden age, but represent genuine concerns about young people and their capacity to benefit from higher education.”
He said the reduced “teachability” of new undergraduates placed the efficiency of the UK higher education sector at risk.
David Law, chair of the Admissions Practitioners’ Group of the Academic Registrars’ Council and academic registrar at Warwick University, said the report confirmed the concerns often aired by admissions staff.
He said: “We are concerned about the interface between pre-university education and undergraduate study. We are all seeing the need to be very careful with our admissions. Universities also need to review their curricula to adapt their courses to new students, though.”
So what are the skills of independent learning???
Along with all the ‘learning to learn’ skills that I am always talking about the most important skill it seems to me is only learned by experiencing failure. It could be called learning to fail but is usually referred to as Resilience.
Studies in Europe, Asia and the USA have shown that resilient students consistently share the following traits:
1) a focus on learning goals rather than performance goals – resilient students are learning at school to improve their knowledge base rather than to get “A” passes or “Excellence” grades
2) challenge seeking rather than challenge avoiding
3) a belief that effort is more important than ability
4) adaptive behaviours in the face of failure – seek out the problems with their process in order to learn from their mistakes, rather than giving up
5) motivation more towards mastering subjects for their own sake rather than towards gaining approval or avoiding disapproval
6) an internal ‘locus of control’ – believe that by their own actions they can significantly influence their own life
7) an optimistic view of their own future
8) a belief in the flexibility or malleability of their intelligence which contrasts with the least resilient students who believe their intelligence is more fixed, unalterable.
But the most significant finding, I think, is that we all gain these traits only through our experience of failure. Which does not mean that everyone who fails automatically goes on to become successful but research does seem to show that a lack of failure does not prepare anyone well for handling adversity. Only by experiencing failure, reflecting on it, focusing on the process, deciding on changes to implement and then actually implementing those changes do we learn from our mistakes and move on and grow as individuals.
Think of the worst thing that has ever happened to you?
Painful even to recall isn’t it?
But what happened as a result of that occurrence? How are you different because of it? Do you think you are stronger as a result? Of course you may wish with all your heart that the bad thing never happened but it did and you have learned from it and moved on. In a similar situation in the future you may operate differently or you may now know how to help someone else who is going through similar difficulties.
So what can we, as parents, do for our children?
1) help them to see the relevance in the world and the possible usefulness in their future of all the subjects they are studying
2) give them challenging experiences – take them out of their comfort zone occasionally
3) reward them for effort rather than outcome
4) if they have difficulty understanding or learning something new, help them to focus on the process – the strategies they are using – as the best source of improvement
5) give them biographies to read of people who have succeeded by overcoming great adversity – make sure that they expect to have many failures before they succeed
6) help them to see failures as mistakes they can learn from
7) encourage them to 100% effort in some aspect (not every aspect) of their lives, to achieve mastery as a goal in itself
8) find out the areas of their life where they feel they have no control and in stages allow them to gain more control of their life by demonstrating their ability to make considered decisions and fully accept the consequences
9) help them to develop an optimistic view of their own future
10) provide them with examples and evidence supporting the ideas that intelligence is flexible, malleable, able to be developed, (Howard Gardner’ s Multiple Intelligence’s model is very robust and proves this point very well)
and lastly, and most importantly for an increasing number of children
11) focus less on how your child feels and more on what your child does.
In other words avoid empty attempts to bolster your child’s self esteem and focus instead on helping your child to take action to change how they feel. We are all probably victims of the ‘self-esteem’ movement of the 70’s and we have learned to emphasize how a child feels – happy or sad, frustrated, challenged – at the expense of what the child does – mastery, persistence, overcoming frustration and boredom and handling challenge. Unfortunately by focusing on directly changing negative feelings into positive ones we are not teaching our children how to handle adversity and ultimately we are producing more helpless, anxious and depressed children.
As Martin P Seligman talks about in his book “The Optimistic Child” (recommended reading) with reference to the American education system –
“The self esteem movement has helped lead to the abolition of tracking,
lest those on lower tracks suffer damaged self-esteem; to the abandonment
of IQ testing, lest those who score low feel low self-esteem; to massive grade
inflation, lest those who earn D’s feel bad; to teaching aimed at the very
bottom of the class, to spare the feelings of the kids slower to learn (now that
they are untracked); to competition becoming a dirty word; to the demise of
rote memorization of epic material; and to less plain old hard work.”
And
“Feelings of self-esteem in particular and happiness in general, develop as
side effects – of mastering challenges, working successfully, overcoming
frustration and boredom, and winning. The feeling of self-esteem is a by-product
of doing well. Once a child’s self-esteem is in place, it kindles further success.
Tasks flow more seamlessly, troubles bounce off, and other children seem more
receptive. There is no question that feeling high self-esteem is a delightful state
to be in, but trying to achieve the feeling side of self-esteem directly, before
achieving good commerce with the world, confuses profoundly the means and
the end.”
I welcome your comments.
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