Lowering the cost
How learning strategies can maximize your return on investment
I will admit, with all the blizzardiness of late, I've embraced the meditative opportunities of shovelling—I can't ruminate, think of my "should-dos," or berate myself for what I've been slow on when I'm hyper-focused, chipping away ice three inches thick.
This near shoulder-season can be a strange time for learners, and quite varied across the learning years:
Most post-secondary students have wrapped up their winter break – if you missed it, check out my free Reading Week Roadmap, offering a gentle guide to recovery, content repair, and future assessment prep.
March break is coming up for younger learners; one week for public schoolers, and sometimes two weeks for those at independent schools—a choreography of travel plans, work coverage, child care scrambles, and even March Break "camp."
The temperature – at least here in southern Ontario, it swings between -15C and +5C, often one day to the next, making spring feel near, then spring hopes get dashed, only to bounce right back. The ice melts, then freezes at night, then melts again with the ever-so-slightly-stronger sunshine.
Students might also be running low on stamina. On the one hand, wasn't the December holiday break just a minute ago? On the other, learners have been studying, taking tests, doing group projects, presenting, and writing labs and essays since September. They're tuckered!
Aaaand, we're not that close to being done.
Learning strategies can help
I had a learner share this beautiful metaphor with me this week, utterly unsolicited and flooringly apt
"learning strategies are like getting the same paycheque but having worked fewer hours."
What was he talking about? This student was quite a strong one—solid 75s-85s in college. As he'd have said, he'd been "doing okay" but, he'd also be the first to admit there was a lot of procrastination, an erratic sleep schedule, studying that was really just rereading and re-rereading, and a languishing sense of confidence, motivation, and bounce/uplift/zing/joy in what he was learning.
I share this because Awakened Learning supports all learners. Many have learning profiles of some kind (learning disabilities), most have executive function challenges and/or identify as neurodiverse (ADHD, Autism), and several have additional significant experiences they're living with (eating disorders, depression, anxiety, school trauma, illness, injury).
It's equally important to share that a good number of our learner-clients don't have a diagnosis–they wrestle with procrastination, perfectionism, pandemic learning gaps. It could well be that the cost of learning is simply becoming too high—rampant stress, "okay" marks despite hours of review, and a kind of ho-hum quality to it all.
Maximizing your return on investment
After a semester of learning strategies, this learner is landing those 85s more often, and frequently it's more like 95s, and truly best of all:
procrastination WAY down
stress WAY down
confidence, motivation, restfulness, and self-efficacy are WAYYYY up!
That's what learning strategies do, they're the how of doing assessments, they're the clear action of what to really do when studying, they're the bounce/uplift/zing/joy. Plus, they lower that cost.
Two strategies you can start implementing starting today
There are some seriously user-friendly, free, engaging apps that can help turn to-do lists and prioritization know-how into clear scheduling:
Structured: this is straight from my strategist team, and I've been LOVING trying it myself. I get zero kick-back from this; we don't do affiliate anything at Awakened Learning. I just really like it.
Focus Traveller: this is straight from a parent attending The Essentials – there's still time to join (we'll send you all the recordings, and slide decks FULL of resources)! Go ahead and take 50% off! A parent shared she and her kiddos are enjoying this app.
Knowt: another community find, this one for studying support! It's like Quizlet amplified!
I've recently started suggesting that we go ahead and scrap the word "studying" altogether. Why? Because it's such an amorphous word, meaningless on its own. What do students think it is? Rewriting notes, rereading notes, "reviewing" notes but, crushingly, NONE of these are studying; none help a learner remember or apply their knowledge on a test or exam.
Instead, I suggest we say what studying should be most directly: "retrieval practice." Not a riveting phrase, I know, but it gets closer to revealing what to do: practise retrieving the info that'll be on a test. How should a student go about retrieval practice? Practice questions. Where can a student get practice questions? At the back of textbooks, former quizzes, creating them while reading or from class notes, posing questions while reading.
Finally, WHAT an ethical use of AI! NotebookLM is just about as sweet as it gets in terms of AI for studying...I mean, retrieval practice 🙂. Stay tuned for our spring studying pop-ups!
Wishing you kind learning,
Deena
