Study Habits: Be More Productive and Accomplish More in Less Time (FLEX)

Many students struggle to keep up with all their school work. They feel overwhelmed and stressed which can have a huge effect in their mental health. Some cannot motivate themselves to study as much as needed. Others seem to spend lots of time studying, but they have a hard time setting goals or reaching them. 

This class explains how to develop good study habits, organization and time management skills that every student should know and that will help your child be successful in school. We will talk about different scientifically proven goal setting methods that will help your child study more effectively so they can accomplish more in less time. Because every student is a little different, we will talk about how to find out what works best for your child's particular style and personality. This will help them develop good working habits and time management skills that will accompany them for the rest of their life, even after they start working. 

We will focus on:

- Week 1: How to set SMART goals. Students will learn the importance of setting goals to see a perfect picture of what we are trying to work hard for, and they will learn how to create effective goals to help them work more efficiently, focus their efforts and feel rewarded for their accomplishments. Students will interact with each other and the teacher to create sample goals, express their opinion on different goals and apply what they learn to set goals for their own learning.

- Week 2: How to schedule our goals. Students will learn the importance of writing down their goals and scheduling them. They will learn how to manage their time better and achieve their full potential by scheduling tasks in a way that allows them to work more efficiently. Students will interact with each other and the teacher to express how they believe a big project can be broken into smaller steps and how to schedule those steps more efficiently. They will share examples from their own learning process or using a sample task.

- Week 3: How to stay focused and work more efficiently during study sessions. Students will learn how to minimize distractions and improve their own focus. They will learn several research backed techniques for organizing their time. Students will be given a task to try these techniques when studying this week, and share what worked for them and what didn't.

- Week 4: What to do when you are feeling overwhelmed. Students will learn the importance of creating habits to make their school work more manageable and enjoyable. They will also learn how to apply what they have learned so far when a task is very big or overwhelming, or when they have a lot of work accumulated. We will do some case studies and give suggestions to imaginary students that have large amounts of work to do. We will also set personal goals on how to apply all we have learned to improve our study habits and work more efficiently.

This class is most appropriate for middle and high school students, although students of all ages can benefit from these working habits.

Please note that this is a FLEX class. Every week, students will get a link to a Nearpod classroom. They do not need to create an account or to log in. The link provided will have all the information needed. In this classroom, students will be able to watch short videos with the content. There will also be many interactives activities that will involve writing about their struggles and challenges, sharing what worked and didn't work with the teacher and other students, answering polls and quizzes, etc. I will also be available for consultations if needed. Each week, the workload should be between 15 and 30 minutes and will include a short homework assignment where the students will be asked to try a specific technique for the rest of the week and share the results.