The Best Practice is a Diversified Practice

Variety makes everything a little more fun and a little less boring, but it also enhances memory. When it’s time for your students to focus on practicing skills or reviewing material for mastery, mix the content rather than blocking the content. Blocking content involves concentrating on one type of skill, rather than practicing multiple skills together. But when practice lessons intermingle assorted skills, the students have to engage in thinking that goes deeper* than activities […]

A School Performance Check-Up

Now that we are in the routine of the new school year, it would be helpful to evaluate some important aspects of your child’s school performance. It’s not too late to make some improvements that will make a big difference for the rest of the year. Answering these questions will help you evaluate your child’s performance and develop a plan to succeed this school year. Do you know how to communicate with your child’s teacher? […]

Plan to Encourage

Now that you are a few weeks into the school year and have had a chance to get familiar with your students, you should begin to recognize their strengths and weaknesses. You have probably already sent home a note or email about a student that you wanted to improve behaviorally or academically. But, have you notified parents about something their children have done well? Chances are, you will not, unless you have an organized system […]

The Power of Modeling

Are you thinking of something that you would like your students to do a little better? Think of a way to model it. Imitation is one of the most powerful ways for solidifying behavior. Research on this has been done for decades, and it is related to Bandura’s research and formation of social cognitive theory in the 1960s. He found that students were more likely to imitate what they observed from an adult than what […]

Teenage Anxiety Increases With the Help of Social Media

The most popular app today among adolescents is Instagram, but teens also report that it’s the app causing them the most emotional problems. In a survey of over 1,500 teens and young adults, Instagram was cited over other apps such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and Snapchat as having the greatest impact on their anxiety levels.1 There’s a pivotal factor here that determines how much anxiety adolescents experience in social media use. How much are they emotionally invested in social media?