Meet a student & her mom.They both know that parenting a teen through middle and high school isn’t always easy. And being a teen isn’t always easy, either.
At the A+ Club, we provide academic coaching, mentoring & tutoring in order to help parents of middle & high school and college students track their work, get tutoring and homework help when needed, and engage in the positive processes of goal setting, problem solving, and academic self-advocacy. Continue reading
One of the most effective strategies to defeat procrastination that we have used with students in our A+ Club academic program is what the procrastination experts call “just getting started.”As posted in “Beating back procrastination pt 1,” the benefits of “getting started” include:
“Getting started” can be so hard. We know that we should get to work on something, but our emotions get in the way because it can seem so big, and so far away, and, well, it’s easier — and makes us feel better for now — to put it off until later. Continue reading
Fight the need to finish now!Getting started on studying, homework and large assignments means just that: start a little now — and don’t worry about finishing until later.
Cramming is a difficult habit to break. The best technique for breaking the cramming cycle is to “smooth out your workflow” by just “getting started,” whether or not you’ll finish it now.
Students who have trouble starting an assignment or project often put it aside for later because they feel they need to finish it once they start. Knowing they can’t possibly finish, they don’t bother to start. Here’s the logic: Continue reading
Sometimes it’s, “she never does well in math” or “he does his math homework but scores poorly on quizzes and tests.”
Why students struggle in math: guided v independent practice empowered by feedback from The A+ Club on Vimeo.
“Guided practice” is when the teacher shows or “teaches” a new topic or skill.
“Independent practice” is when the student engages it by him or herself.
Effective teaching develops learning through a deliberate combination of guided and independent practice, where each builds upon the other. However, if the two are disconnected b an absence of effective and direct teacher to student feedback, then learning doesn’t happen.
This is why kids often say, “I get it when my teacher explains it, but I can’t do it on my own.” When your child complains that he or she “doesn’t test well,” it’s because your child is not receiving effective feedback to empower the independent practice required for learning.
This process is the same for all courses and subjects, but it more frequently manifests in math classes because math learning is not as easily processed through “guided practice” as other subjects.
In our A+ Club academic program, we engage students in effective learning techniques and provide guidance and direct math tutoring and in all subjects for overall academic success.
– Michael
Megan Rocks! Megan and Michael discuss how the A+ Club helps students, parents and teachers.Featuring Megan Schneider, Office Manager at School4Schools.com LLC
Megan manages the A+ Club service that provides assignment, grades and missing work updates and notifications, essay review and all-round student help with homework, due dates, studying, grades to build academic awareness and relevancy.
Student Success Podcast No. 25, Jan. 22, 2016
See also Megan’s interview clip
Continue reading
At the A+ Club, we make strong claims for the power of mentoring. We believe that consistent, positive feedback from caring, experienced, and non-judgmental educators empowers students by building lifetime skills and habits of reflection, goal setting, and general self-betterment.A Gallup-Purdue study of the impact of mentoring on college students in post-graduate job success and all-round well-being already proves our theory (see Mentoring Students for a Lifetime of Success). What the Gallup-Purdue study doesn’t say but is implicit to the results is that mentoring is neither casual nor predetermined.
Note that the study did not point to “advisors” or “guidance counselors” for impact on students. In fact, the absence of those terms in the study is significant. Mentoring relationships are not appointed, they are not pre-selected or administered from above. They develop organically through sharing, trust, care, expertise, authenticity, and constancy.
Sharing: effective mentoring is empathetic.
Trust: mentoring without trust is just more random advice.
Care: the effective mentor is selfless, non-judgmental, patient, and caring.
Expert: the effective mentor delivers something of value.
Authentic: effective mentors don’t condescend or merely guide from above; their mentoring comes from the heart.
Constant: effective mentoring is regular, not occasional or random.
Imagine that a high level executive at a major company mentors up-and-coming professionals. Imagine that some of these protégés ultimately report to that executive, if not directly, then through other chains of command. If so, there is with great difficulty any mentoring, as it’s just another power-relationship, however well-intentioned.
Now, imagine that a high school student receives mentoring from an educator at the school. We call those “Guidance Counselors,” and they have no less administrative weight than does our executive. They are both firmly a part of an institutional power structure and are therefore inherently judgmental and authoritative.
This doesn’t mean an executive or a guidance counselor can ‘t be an effective mentor — it does mean that each has the burden of authority to overcome in order to deliver mentoring that is authentic and trustworthy.
So, yes, we can imagine that executives or guidance counselors can make effective mentors. Absolutely. But it is harder to imagine that they can be effective mentors to more than a few protégés or students with whom they can create authentic relationships.
They not only have to overcome the burden of authority (which severely challenges authenticity), they have to overcome the burden of a strained caseload. Thus the largest reason that guidance counselors don’t make good mentors is that, according to Time,
A public school counselor in the U.S. now has an average caseload of 471 students….
(from The High School Guidance Counselor Shortage, Dec. 03, 2013)
Try being caring, empathic, authentic — and constant — with 471 students! Not possible. A guidance counselor can mentor some of the students some of the time but none or a very few of them all of the time.
Our view is that effective mentoring starts with the student, not the mentor.
When we take on a student, it is by student choice. We cannot mentor a student who is not interested in self-improvement, and we don’t. We don’t get past a first conversation with such a student (and I’ve only run into 2 or 3 over my three years in this business).
The only way we can start with a student is if that student sincerely wants academic improvement. And we never define it for our students: it’s up to them what that means. Once we have established goals, then we can work on deliberate, realistic steps towards them with confidence, trust, and care.
Our authenticity comes of the concern we show and the expertise we bring. Our teachers — whom we call “Student Supporters” — are experienced, active educators, and they only do this work because they care, because they enjoy establishing a relationship with a student whom they do not grade, whom they do not judge. Freed authority, they are free to care without judgment.
Once our teachers have established that trust, once they have established their care and expertise, then they have an authentic relationship. Then the only missing ingredient for effective, powerful mentoring is constancy, which they bring through scheduled, weekly or more reflection, goal setting and problem-solving conversations .
Our teachers love this work. And they also know how emotionally taxing it is, for they care so much for each child. They only take on a few, some choosing to work with only one student, and the rest taking on no more than a few to work with, guide, counsel, and help along towards a brighter future each and every week.
We know it works, and not just because our kids do better in school. We know it works because our students are ready and eager to take that mentoring call every week.
– Michael
The kids loved these, and it always drove engagement in whatever the topic. A couple sound clip examples I used are:
A quick link to the source file made for a one-click launch of the file, and they can also be linked to or embedded in a PowerPoint file for use at a particular spot in your lesson.
Microsoft used to include libraries full of these little sound clips as part of the Office Suite, but they’ve removed them and the old clip art files. So we have to find them somewhere else. There’s plenty of open-source sound clips out there, just be careful with copyright.
Watch here how it works:
I love being able to drop any text into the file, or even allowing students to type in their own answers to questions, etc. to be read aloud to the whole class.
Lots of possibilities here to enliven and enlighten your students. Have fun with it!
– Michael
Here’s the code for these Narrator files.
1. open Notepad
2. copy the code from below
3. use “save as” extension:.vbs (instead of .txt)
4. click on the .vbs file to launch
Parents and teachers usually conceive of student procrastination as putting off homework or projects until the last minute.It is.
We also tend to think of disruptive classroom behavior as “disobedience” or “acting out” over some issue, from disconnection or boredom to serious underlying troubles. Which it is.
But those same processes of delay and avoidance over aversive tasks that are procrastination are also at work during class.
We have discussed on the Student Success Podcast and Blog how procrastination is an emotional response to task aversion.
When faced with an unpleasant task, the procrastinator chooses to defer that task for later in order to feel better now (relieve the stress of the aversive task).
Parents! If schools were meant for learning, why do we have grades?In other words, if learning were the goal, wouldn’t every student have to get an A+ before moving on to the next level?
If, when a student gets a D, and it indicates the student met 64% of expectations, is there learning going on at that school? Wouldn’t a 100% grade represent true learning?
As long as there are grades less than an A, the point of schools, then, is not learning.
Worse, not all grades are equal. Does an A in PE represent learning as much as an A in math? They both count the same towards your GPA and both are required. Clearly, learning is not the only thing being measured here. Continue reading
Today’s Tip for Teachers is how to use OneNote, a free program from Microsoft that is a potential game-changer for teachers.
1. Input Box code:
message=InputBox(“Type in the box to say it!”)
set sapi = CreateObject(“sapi.spvoice”)
sapi.Speak message
2. Simple text narrator:
Dim message, sapi
Set sapi=CreateObject(“sapi.spvoice”)
sapi.Speak “woof”