Many people expect teacher’s responsibilities is to inspire students via exciting classroom lessons, creative assignments, and an enthusiastic personality that challenges students to be superachievers, but the best way for students to improve their skills is to get specific feedback and advice from their teachers. This feedback and advice helps you to focus on what you need to do to maximize students’ potential.
Below are 14 tips for teachers or parents on how you can improve each student’s academic performance via one-on-one private conversations.
14 tips on how to improve each student’s academic performance
- Be Specific In Your Praise
- Set High Expectations
- Simplify The Skill Categories
- Utilize real world interesting examples
- Establish culture of evidence and justification
- Encourage Independent Reading
- Introduce new “power word” every day
- Have students think with numbers every day
- Maximize students’ engagement time
- Ensure students’ understanding on new concept
- Include formative assessment
- Use the feedback loop concept
- Discuss Students’ Future
- Self-assess regularly
1. Be Specific In Your Praise
The praise should be as specific as possible because students can detect flettery. If you are analyzing a math problem, you could praise the student’s effort and work ethic. THEN, you can get into the flaws. Many people have told me they hate math because a teacher emphasized on only the final answer. Stressing the negative can discourage students from improving an important skill.
2. Set High Expectations
Emphasize in your first meeting that you have high expectations for EVERY student. Students with mediocre or worse grades might have low expectations because they’ve struggled in school for years. It’s YOUR job to boost their confidence and tell them that every student has skills that will help them succeed in life even if the student is unaware of those skills or their skills haven’t helped their grades. Tell students that you will work with them to find and/or improve those skills. Be clear that you will insist on high expectations throughout the school year.
3. Simplify The Skill Categories
Giving students detailed advice is crucial, but you should simplify your overall analysis of their work. You should summarize their performance once each session. Don’t list more than five or six skills. Which skills you list depends on what subject you are teaching, but examples of skills are working with classmates, problem solving, creative thinking, analytical thinking, research, writing, speaking, reading comprehension, and completing assignments effectively. Using the same categories throughout the school year makes it easier for students to follow their progress.
4. Utilize real world interesting examples
If you’re a Math teacher, you might be frustrated that so many students hate Math. Perhaps, though, a few students love basketball. Instead of giving them a Math problem out of a textbook you can ask them to figure out LeBron James’ scoring average by having them add how many points he scored in each game and then dividing that total by the number of games. Yes, that approach worked for me with one student. Check out creative ways to get students excited about math in real world.
5. Establish culture of evidence and justification
It’s true that “everyone is entitled to an opinion,” but everyone must be prepared to justify an opinion, using evidence. From now on, make this a rule, for yourself and for your students. Always ask, ‘How do you know that’s true?” “What is your evidence?” Never allow someone to say, “It’s just my opinion” or “I don’t know why I think that.”
6. Encourage Independent Reading
Reading is the key to everything, and yet most students don’t read enough. Consider setting a goal of doubling the amount of text that students are reading every day—but make sure the reading is manageable, enjoyable, and personally relevant. Also, have students talk about what they read, and write about it. The ultimate goal is to get kids “hooked on reading”.
7. Introduce new “power word” every day
“Power words” are abstract vocabulary words that are useful for thinking and talking about content. Power words are words like perimeter, inference, hypothesis, and category. They are the kinds of words that appear in the prompts to test items. Power words help young people think, and express their thoughts, at a higher level.
8. Have students think with numbers every day
Spend at least part of every class period counting, measuring, estimating, calculating, etc. Where appropriate, insist on quantitative evidence. Ask questions like “How many?” “What percentage?” Display data in tables, graphs, and other visual forms—but always emphasis meaning and analysis, not just the collection of data. If they don’t know, break it down and make math easy to understand.
9. Maximize students’ engagement time
In many classrooms, students spend a great deal of time chatting, sharpening pencils, arguing about grades or homework assignments—and engaging in other activities that are not directly related to the content. In many classrooms, a few students get most of the attention. Take steps to ensure that all students are engaged in the academic content as much as possible at all times.
10. Ensure students’ understanding on new concept
Use performance assessments to ensure mastery and understanding. Use cooperative learning and other strategies to ensure that students take responsibility not just for their own learning, but for the learning of others. Have all students show they understand. Establish a classroom culture of asking for clarification and help—and make sure all students get the help they need. Don’t let anyone fall through the cracks.
11. Include formative assessment
Royce Sadler, Professor Emeritus at Griffith University, suggests that students must be able to understand quality work and be able to asses the quality of their own work. Give your students examples of quality work so they have something they can compare their work to and can identify their learning gaps themselves. This helps to show where students need improvement. Students become more motivated about learning and confident in their abilities.
12. Use the feedback loop concept
This involves teachers and students simultaneously collecting and analyzing student learning information to determine where students are and where they need improvement. Students’ movement from one learning target to another works best when students receive feedback to help them improve. Students rely on feedback and, without it, their chance for remaining engaged learners spirals downward.
13. Discuss Students’ Future
Many students won’t understand this zealous effort to improve their skills. They think their skills are fine, particularly if they get good grades. It’s YOUR job to emphasize that they might need to improve many of their skills if they want to excel in college, graduate school, and the workplace. Telling them about your experiences or the experiences of others as you or they struggled to make the transition from high school to the next level is beneficial. Besides, you want to tell students that they should WANT to maximize their potential. Praise them as they improve.
14. Self-assess regularly
Teachers should self-assess how well they perform these three actions:
- My students clearly see how one day of learning builds on the next day of learning.
- I create opportunities where my students receive continuous and specific feedback that helps them improve.
- I consistently recognize my students’ strengths.
Now that I have given you 14 tips for how you can improve each student’s performance via one-on-one private conversations, I have a tip for how you can improve your own performance — don’t overwork. Work smarter and harder, but you don’t necessarily have to spend more time working.
Working smarter might mean fewer classroom lectures and replacing them with interesting assignments for students as you talk to one of their classmates. Working harder might mean improving your time management skills.
Or you can tell your principal that you want to be paid more because of your remarkable dedication to the academic success of your students. That’s a joke. Good luck!!
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