Here are some tried and tested tips and techniques for achieving success in school at any level! Check it out…
1. Your Weekly plan
Create a short-term plan for making progress on what’s important at the start of every week (try doing this Sunday). Use a plain text editor on your laptop and save it to your desktop. Use freestyle thought to naturally build your short-term plan for developing the stuff that you have to do. Some tasks will be long and detailed and others short and simple – try not to constrain your thoughts.
2. Prep better for essay exams
Ohh the essay exam! Here’s a simple technique to crush essay questions on your next exam. Read the question and figure out what you need to answer – write it down. Make sure you include important arguments covered in class. Before you start to write, draw an outline of your arguments on the back of the paper – bullet-point your main points. Take a couple of minutes to carefully ponder your outline.
3. Cool studying technique
Try this next time you go to study for a test. It’s a technique called “note compression.” Cram all of the core concepts for the test on one piece of paper (front/back). This allows you to build important connections between ideas in the course/material. For certain subjects learning by connections is easier than memorization and will be way more fun!
4. Organization is the key to less stress
Here’s a couple of hints for creating a organization system. For each class/subject use only one notebook and one folder for all the materials handed-out. Also, I recommend every student keep an online Calendar (Google Calendar is the best), use the colours to mark each class clearly.
5. Wiki Essay Writing!
Use a wiki to structure your ideas, research and writing. There are many free wiki spaces to choose from so find one that works for you (check out PBWorks). In your wiki build your structure with these main headings: administrative section, primary sources, secondary sources and an outline. This technique tackles the complexity of researching the topic before and organizes your research so you can easily pull up sources, now write!
6. Take notes you can learn from
Try not to transcribe every word your teacher is saying. Instead, take down the big ideas and write notes in the form of questions and conclusions peppered with evidence. Take a few minutes after class to clean up your notes. When you’re studying later on ask the questions to yourself aloud and try to memorize the conclusions.
7. Time Management is simple
This may not work for every student but here’s a simple philosophy for time management to achieve student success at any level. Do less in a day. What you do; do it better. Finally, know why you’re doing it.
