Education News

Good Learning Habits

Education News from Alleyn's | www.alleyns.org.uk

Dorcas Aird, Head of the Alleyn’s Learners’ Programme, offers strategies to help your secondary school child become a better learner.

Helping your child develop good learning habits will not only improve their ultimate outcomes but it will also make their (and your!) life easier along the way.

Form Good Habits Motivation is the key to learning, but there is something even more powerful: good habits. Children need to understand their brains so they can implement good learning strategies. ‘How the Brain Works’ in the links at the end of this article is an excellent introduction and is well worth exploring with your child. In the meantime, here is how your child can do homework or revise effectively: • When they focus, they should really focus. Tell them how to do the Pomodoro Technique: you give yourself 20 - 25 minutes of super concentration and don’t let anything distract you. You focus when you need to and then take a break and change activity to allow your brain to diffuse. • They should ditch the technology unless it is directly relevant to a task - our brains can get overloaded – so no music, phones, or computer flashing in the background. (If they don’t believe you, show them the Guardian article in the links below). • They should do one thing at a time. Multitasking is a myth and task switching wastes time while your brain adjusts to each activity. Decide what is most important and do that until it is finished - and do the hardest thing first! Think Deliberately In an age where we are bombarded with information from so many sources, children need to develop into independent, careful thinkers. (Have you read Factfulness yet? Have a look at the Gapminder link below). To avoid falling into the trap of believing everything they read, encourage your child to:

• Check their sources. Always do a ‘NOPA’ (question the Nature, Origin, Purpose and Audience of their source) and always cross reference. • Be mindful of their unconscious biases and admit that they can be wrong because of assumptions their brain makes. You can test your own ability to question your assumptions by taking an unconscious bias test from the Harvard link below. • Read and watch the news from a variety of sources and notice differences in perspective. Growth Mindset Young people are capable of amazing things when given high expectations and opportunities to try, fail and improve in a supportive environment. Developing strengths they admire in positive rolemodels and practising those they are proud of in themselves will help them thrive. Growth mindset works when young people are given supported opportunities to actually succeed. Useful Links: www.howthebrainworks.science www.theguardian.com/profile/bradley-busch www.gapminder.org/factfulness www.implicit.harvard.edu/implicit www.characterlab.org www.mindsetworks.com