Strategies and Tips for Students Who are Not Studious…

Many of our students come to school completely ready to learn.  They come from households where parents care about them and their education.  They are expected to go to college and to become successful members of society.  They bring their school supplies, their good attitudes, and their best behavior.  Then there are the other students who need to be taught to know all of those things about themselves.  We not only have to teach them the content, but we have to teach them school etiquette.  We have to teach and model for them how to learn and how to be successful.  Here are some suggestions.  Please add some strategies you would use.

Create routines.  Students (especially male students like me) need structure and routines that help them feel safe and successful.  Students have to be taught to care about grades and failing.  They need routine assessments.  Create a predictable testing schedule (the same day every week) with study sessions and test review sessions.  Also, include optional and mandatory make up sessions for those assessments. 

Create a daily routine.  Students should know what to do when they enter the classroom.  There should be no guessing for the start of the class.  They should know when, where, and how to unpack, sharpen pencils, if they should talk or be quiet, and what to do with their homework.  Eliminate the guessing from them.  Students complain about structure and rules, but they want it.  They need it.  It makes them feel safe.  Vary your delivery of instruction and their activities, but start and end class in the same exact way until your students become the hard working, responsible, self-motivated learners that they need to be.

Create a class theme.  A classroom should be a window to the real world.  Find a subject based theme that builds around a career, job, or social issue that could be interesting for the students.  Your ELA classroom may become a newspaper, magazine, or television studio.  All of your activities may center around the publication or production of a periodical or broadcast.  Every month the students can record their news segments or sell their periodicals to the staff and students.  It can be full of current events, content material, entertainment, or school news.  Your social studies class can run a website that creates history lessons for kids.  Your science class can be a special research organization full of different types of scientists working together to solve societies problems.  Math classes can be analysts and pundits for news and sports shows who solve math problems to teach younger students.  These are merely ideas, but the idea is to MAKE THE LEARNING RELEVANT.

Take responsibility.  Be consistent.  Hold the students accountable for their actions.  Teachers must carry themselves as if they have the power to make things happen.  Things being… learning – discipline – success…  Before I felt like a good teacher.  I acted like a good teachers I had seen.  Eventually, I became a better teacher.  

This new semester is a chance for a fresh start.  Good luck and I look forward to hearing from you.