How can your teen best level-up to meet the demands of their current year?
I’ve had a few emails come in since my video where I pulled back the curtain on Term 1 results and shared the fact that it’s not uncommon for students to drop back a little in terms of results and grades from where they were at the end of last year – Parents asking for advice about how students can best level-up to meet the demands of their current year.
So I want to share with you 2 key focus points for your teen to level-up their study and meet the greater demands of their current year level.
Here are 2 key focus points for your teen to level-up their study and meet the greater demands of their current year level
Because – ‘What got them here, won’t get them there’.
Meaning, what got your teen a C grade in Year 9 for example, WON’T get them a C grade in Year 10.
Likewise, working the same hours and putting in the same effort as they did in Year 10, won’t get your teen the same results in Year 11. And so on.
Here goes!…
Focus Point One: Producing work of a higher QUALITY.
One way to do this is to improve their QWC – quality of written communication. This is a large focus of my Write Like an A-Grader training, with elements such as creating more sophisticated sentence structures, using more technical and a wider range of vocabulary, and strategic proofreading and editing.
Focus Point Two: Producing work at a higher COGNITIVE SKILL level.
And if you want more info on what I mean by that, then be sure to come to one of my future webinars, where I explain command words, Blooms Taxonomy and how it all relates to assignments, exams and marking criteria, in detail – because this is such a crucial element to students’ achievement – but one that very few students or parents are fully aware of.
But for now, I can tell you that to produce work that engages and displays higher cognitive skills, your teen needs to not only respond accordingly to any high level commands, but they also need to create opportunities to work at that level.
That might be when they choose a topic for an investigation, when writing their own thesis statement, or when selecting a genre for a piece of extended writing. They should be looking for ways to operate at the analysis, synthesis and evaluation levels rather than keep themselves stuck in description and basic explanation mode.
If your teen can put into practice just a few of the many techniques and strategies that go into these 2 focus areas then they’ll be making progress towards meeting the demands of their target grades of their current year level 🙂
