Each month, a Thinking Organized tip is emailed to our growing list of educators, parents and students who want to improve their executive functioning skills.
Now that your child has about a month of the new school year under his belt, it’s time to talk about how to keep him motivated throughout the school year. While some children don’t know how to meet their academic goals, many just lose the motivation to put in the time and effort that good grades require.
Here’s where you can help. Instituting a system of behavior modification – the awarding and withholding of privileges and rewards – can encourage students to do their best.
Psychological research has proven that behavior that is rewarded or reinforced tends to be repeated. Unacknowledged behavior tends to diminish or disappear. The principles of behavior modification are simply a formal method that observes behavior and seeks to shape it in positive ways.
Communication is an important part of the process. Students need to know exactly what is expected of them. Each goal should be specific, realistic and achievable. When children encounter failure, show them how to correct mistakes and move on, being quick to praise positive results.
The reward does not have to be expensive or edible in order to be effective.
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smortoMotivating Students Towards Academic Achievement
Nothing beats the newness of back to school: fresh, blank pages in pristine, colorful notebooks, sharpened pencils, and ambitious minds full of resolutions. However, with a little pre-planning now, you can establish systems to help your child maintain that feeling of organization throughout the school year. Effective structures for managing two key aspects of life – materials and time – are essential for working smarter, reducing stress and thinking organized.
Everyone has experienced the panic of not being able to find something crucial (like the car keys) minutes before you have to run out the door. Or the sinking feeling you get when you’ve forgotten something important. Help your child avoid these issues by setting in place systems of effective material organization.
Time management is one of the biggest problems I see in my practice, both with children and adults. Many individuals have not learned how to estimate time appropriately, struggle with beginning difficult or boring tasks, find themselves wasting large amounts of time or are constantly running late. Instituting strategies to organize obligations will help your child learn the importance of dividing, allocating and using time effectively, a skill that will prove invaluable throughout his life.
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Time management is one of the most pervasive problems seen in the Thinking Organized practice. Adults who struggle to organize their time effectively often feel that they are running on a hamster wheel every day, dashing from one “emergency” to another, leaving them feeling ineffective, panicky and stressed. Students experience similar anxieties when they make mistakes in estimating how long an assignment will take or putting off a task or project. Most of us remember the feeling of having to “pull an all-nighter” to cram for an exam or finish a paper. Not fun!
However, many parents don’t realize how valuable the summer break can be for reinforcing time management strategies. After all, organizing time is not just an exercise for school, but a lifelong skill that can affect every hour of every day. During the more relaxed days of summer, practicing time management techniques can be accomplished without major consequences for mistakes; therefore, it is a safer time to let your child be in charge.
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Summer vacation is upon us. While that realization has students jumping for joy, it leaves many parents anxiety-ridden, wondering how they will ward off brain drain and help their children accomplish their summer reading requirements. Nagging and setting strict daily requirements can leave everyone feeling stressed and resentful. Fun, on the other hand, helps you sneak in that daily dose of reading while boosting spirits, morale and brain power.
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If you’re like most parents, a number of “standards” start to be compromised at the end of the school year. Wise moms and dads know to choose which battles are worth the effort. With the pressures of exams and end-of-the-year projects, parents might find themselves taking on some of their children’s responsibilities or helping them with schoolwork a little more than usual.
However, your overall goal as parents is to raise an independent individual who can effectively negotiate the rigors of life as well as academics. To do this, children need to develop executive functioning skills, the cognitive processes that control and organize goal directed behavior. Everyone utilizes executive functions, with varying success, to negotiate not only long term or multi-step projects but also activities of daily living. Once an objective is set, executive functions regulate the ability to initiate, plan, prioritize and monitor the steps toward goal completion.
Summer, when the stress of school is out of the way, is a wonderful time to work on improving your child’s executive functioning skills. When a test or exam is looming, it is hard to not step in and help your child prepare for that test. However, outside of school, the stakes are not so high. During the summer, it’s fine to let your child make mistakes and learn how to persevere until a strategy is mastered.
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smortoLet Your Child Make Some Mistakes This Summer!
Nearly everyone who has gone to school has felt nervous before or during a test. Students, especially those who are organizationally challenged, often feel they have too much to study and that they cannot possibly understand the material in time for an upcoming test. Some children are calm in the days leading up to an exam, but fall apart while testing. How do you know if your child is experiencing test anxiety? Be on the lookout for these common symptoms:
Physical signs of test anxiety include headaches, stomachaches, nausea, sleeplessness, faintness, dizziness, tense muscles, sweaty palms and trembling hands.
Emotional symptoms may involve crying, getting frustrated quickly, growing angry or snapping at others.
Although some stress is normal (and even beneficial), experiencing severe anxiety can cause a student to blank out or have racing thoughts that interfere with test performance.
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Springtime seems to also be the season for term papers, projects and large-scale essays. Although this may be a good method to assess what a student has learned in the course of the school year, culminating assignments can present many challenges as well.
Research papers pose particular problems, especially for students who struggle with executive functioning skills. First of all, a deadline that is several weeks away is an invitation to procrastinate.
Teenagers especially are prone to feel that they have plenty of time and do not need to start too soon. However, research papers are lengthy and time-consuming assignments. Often, at least one part of the process will take longer than planned, or require a different approach than originally envisioned.
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It seems like the whole country has a spring break in March. College students are gearing up for trips home, ski vacations or warm beaches. Easter and Passover coincide this year, so many schools are off the last week of March. Everyone is looking forward to a rest from the routines and pressures of school.
However, here’s the problem. When students come back from break, many of them act like summer vacation has already started. Senioritis becomes infectious, and children of all ages begin dreaming of sleeping late and having free time. Often, it’s up to the teachers and parents to say, “Wait! We’re not done yet.” When the going gets tough, organized thinkers need to model the steps of planning forward and preparing for the challenges ahead.
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It is important for students to set both long-term and short-term goals for the current school year and years to come.
For example, “I want to go to college after I graduate from high school. And this year I will begin to study several days before a test instead of just the night before.”
In order to achieve these goals, students need to learn effective planning, which includes deliberately setting objectives and taking specific steps to help them be efficient with their time.
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As 2012 comes to a close, the ups and downs of the past year become footprints in the sands of time. Though the successes and challenges of 2012 are past, their memories have become a part of you and your child. How you set the stage for the future may in part be determined by your understanding of what has already occurred. Learning from past achievements and failures can prepare you for the future. Reviewing what worked and what didn’t is a crucial part of your journey toward “Thinking Organized.”
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