Six Ways to Build Student Confidence

Six Ways to Build Student Confidence A confident student has a much better chance of being successful in school and beyond. You might not be able to teach confidence, but you certainly can nurture it in each of your students. Here are six ways to do so: Loosen the reins. Maintain control over your classroom environment, not your students. Let them take the lead on classwork and assignments, and take on a supporting role. Pump them up. Tell your students that you believe in them and their abilities often. The more you do so, the more theyll believe it, too. Foster the development of a growth mindset. Let your students know that you believe that theres always something to discover and that learning never stops. Theyll start to recognize that learning is continuous and that their potential is unlimited. Set goals as a class. Theres something very empowering about setting goals. Encourage your students to take control of their destiny by putting on paper the endeavors that matter to them (and the steps theyll take to achieve them). Embrace the mantra Lets explore that. When students ask questions, dont just give them the answers. Have them delve into new topics. Ignite their curiosities. Point out their strengths. You dont need to do so publicly, but find opportunities to let your students know when they do things particularly well or when you see them exerting extra effort. They might not recognize those attributes in themselves. Confidence is an important trait that you can help build in your students through your everyday interactions. In doing so, youll have a lasting positive impact that will serve them well in life.

ACT Math Strategy Series [Part 3 of 3]

ACT Math Strategy Series [Part 3 of 3] ACT SAT Prep and College Admissions Blog Math is a subject that most students either love or hate. In either case, preparing thoroughly for the Math section of the ACT is important in order to do your best. If math is not your strongest subject, building a solid foundation of understanding will be important for maintaining a decent overall score. If math comes easily for you, reviewing will still be important in order to fill in the gaps in your knowledge, especially if you want your score to truly reflect your ability. Either way, this series of posts gives you valuable strategies that will help you maximize your score. This post is the third of a three part series that looks at strategies for acing the ACT Math section. Strategy #7: Recognize Obvious Shortcuts Often problems that appear to involve laborious calculations will actually be quicker to answer if you recognize shortcuts. For example, 256/64 is obviously 4 if you know your powers of 2. Other problems might be quicker to solve if you merely approximate the answer, which may get you close enough to recognize the correct answer from among the given choices. The more you practice with the specific types of problems that show up on the ACT, the more easily you will be able to recognize shortcuts when they are available (and the less likely you will be to waste time looking for them when they don’t exist). Strategy #8: Check Obvious Answers It doesn’t hurt to glance at the answer choices before attempting to solve a problem and check for any that appear to be obviously correct or obviously incorrect. Of course, if an answer choice appears to be obviously correct you should still verify it for yourself, as well as confirm that the other choices are not correct. Conversely, if an answer is obviously incorrect, you can eliminate it, which can make it easier to identify the correct one. Strategy #9: Use Strategic Guessing On the ACT there is no penalty for guessing, so there is no reason to not answer every problem. Guessing works best if you can stack the odds in your favor by eliminating as many incorrect answer choices as possible. On some problems you may be able to guess and check. If the answer is a number, it makes sense to guess the middle one first, because if it doesn’t work you may be able to tell if you need to go higher or lower. This will often be faster than starting at the highest number and going down or starting at the lowest number and going up. Dane Dormio is an online tutor and blogger with an unconventional approach to education. Visit his tutoring blog at www.synergy-tutoring.com. hbspt.cta._relativeUrls=true;hbspt.cta.load(215486, 'a519c073-790d-4c67-b0fd-7095f1869478', {});