The 12 Steps to Learning Strategy Improvement
Reading time: 8 minutes
An easy to follow path for greatly improving your child’s learning capabilities.
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All the tools you need are available at the Center for Homeschooling.
The Many Benefits of a Learning Strategy Process
How can you benefit from a process for improving learning? This process was designed for you to help you with homeschooling in these ways:
- It is easy to use because it lays out the steps in a logical order
- You can know which coaching stage you need to use to help your child
- It describes the results you will receive at each step
- It defines the conversations you will want to have at each step
- It solves the problem of having to think about what you need to do next
How to Follow These Steps
We have developed an easy to follow process for homeschooling parents that will show you how you can improve your child’s ability to learn. You can reach the goal of greatly improved learning in as short as 60 days. But you can work through this at your own pace and feel free take as long as you want to get to the “Activated” level of student learning maturity. When your child reaches this level, you should notice greatly improved study effectiveness, and an improved ability to remember and recall information.
Discovery
The process begins by you the parent collecting some information. You will use this information to learn where your child is in the use of learning strategies, and it will allow you to form a vision of where you would like to be. Armed with this information, you will be prepared to have deep conversations on learning with your child. The Learning Strategies Assessment is a free online assessment you use to evaluate the use of learning strategies.
This process of improvement will become collaborative with your child in the second stage, but at this stage you are informing yourself so that you can serve as an effective parent coach of learning improvement throughout the process. Don’t skip this step, it is important to making the next one effective.
Dream
In the Dream stage, you will begin regular discussions with your child on how to become a more effective learner. You will be able to offer a vision for your child of learning faster and better, and the prospect of becoming an expert learner. This is the stage where you are enlisting your child to an exciting vision of the future. It is also where you will share your assessments of how effective the study strategies are and where you see your child’s learning maturity.
Discussions at this stage are intended to produce insights and motivation to get better. You will listen to your child’s own assessment of where he or she is, and you will have collaborative discussions on what and how to start improving.
Design
In this stage, you will agree to a plan to start improving how your child learns in independent study. You will jointly identify and agree to the specific learning strategies you will work on. Each of you will have specific roles as student and coach. We recommend keeping plans to the relatively short intervals of 45 or 60 days, and then renewing the plan for the next period you want to work on.
You will implement weekly study planning and review meetings which you will use as the driver for trying new practices and determining results. Accompanying this, your child will start maintaining a daily study journal where the efforts and results are recorded for discussion in these meetings. We recommend that you both become “learning scientists” as you try things to make this a fun discovery process. Embrace a learn-as-you-go mindset that helps the process flow smoothly.
As your child progresses, you will discuss what additional strategies you want to try to get better. You can measure your progress through your weekly meetings as well as repeating your learning strategies assessment to see how much better you have become.
The results of this step are the knowledge that you have achieved much greater improvement in learning capability and that you are practicing continuous improvement.
Destiny
You reach this stage as new learning strategies start to become familiar habits by your child. You will know you are here when you see your child start to take considerable ownership over the process of learning and you feel you are able to become less directive as a coach.
One of the attributes you should most notice is that your weekly study planning and review meetings have become comfortable and constructive forums where your child is initiating ideas on how to get better. At this stage you don’t end your coaching, but it starts to transform.
Make sure you celebrate the success that you are having at this stage.
Where do you go next? It’s up to you. You can establish another 60-day plan, and start the process over again, but with a new vision and plan. The process can keep repeating until you reach the learning goals you aspire to.
