Does your student have any of these limiting behaviors?
- Student Coaching Services
What resolution is better than making the commitment to do better in school? This is especially necessary for students who have applied to, or are going to apply to, college over the coming year. It is vital that students do as well as they can in order to secure a placement at their dream school.
However, as well-meaning as students can be, they can also suffer from behaviors that limit their potential and put their academic plans and dreams at risk. Such behaviors are especially common among high school students, since high school learning is less intense than learning at the university level. The pace of learning and the demands put on students will increase as they transition to higher education.
Here are the five most common limiting behaviors that students put on themselves. You may recognize yourself suffering from one of these behaviors. However, with expert tutelage and coaching, you too can fulfill your academic potential.
Five Student Profiles
The Lazy Student
Lazy students can be some of the smartest students in the class. This is why it is especially troubling that they have no motivation to try academically. An example of a lazy student might be an aspiring computer science student that decides to enroll in a BA in Computer Science, rather than a BSc, simply because he or she can fill his or her schedule with general courses, rather than intensive math and science courses. Being lazy limits a student’s potential, and the effects of laziness can follow a student his or her entire life.
The student who procrastinates does not suffer from motivation or ambition. Instead, he or she suffers from a lack of internal discipline. A student may want to become a dentist with all his or her heart, but he or she constantly leaves studying and essay-writing until the last possible moment. While a student can achieve the necessary A’s in high school to enroll in a good dentist school, procrastination will harm her academic potential once she starts higher education. She will not be able to leave things to the last minute anymore. In university, the best students are more often the ones that schedule their days around their studies, and accomplish all their necessary tasks as soon as possible. There is simply no time to procrastinate.
The Bad Test Taker
Bad test takers may be ridiculously smart and may put in hours of preparation to ace their tests, but find they never do as well as they would hope. With such students, they simply have not found the right test-taking strategies! These students usually try their hardest to succeed but they fall short. Luckily, this is a great student to coach because these students are willing and able to learn. In practically no time at all, a bad test taker can ace a class, as long as he or she finds the right system to prepare.
The perfectionist, like the bad test taker, tries really hard to do well, but instead of not finding the right system, the perfectionist stays too long on one task before accomplishing another. He or she sees his or her tasks as being good, but not great, and spends amazing amounts of time trying to achieve perfection. Perfectionist students need to accept that achieving perfection at the cost of the rest of their academic assignments will only harm them once they apply for college, and that the best thing to do might be to let go and move on. It is far better academically to achieve a mixture of A’s and B’s than to achieve one A+ and low B’s or C’s.
The Stubborn Student
The stubborn student believes that he or she is correct when it comes to academic assignments, even when he or she is not. It is difficult to coach a stubborn student, although not impossible, because this type of student is stuck in his or her ways. However, with dedication, an experienced student coach can reach the student and reduce this stubbornness. A stubborn student might create his or her own mathematical processes on a math test, regardless of the teacher’s instructions to use one specific method. If a teacher asks a student to find the center of a circle by drawing chords and lines, but the student uses overlapping circles in his or her methodology, that student will not achieve full marks because he or she did not follow the instructions. Ultimately, stubborn students can be convinced to follow academic rules, and when they do so, they can improve greatly.
How can you help?
Depending on the student’s limiting academic behavior, he or she may need a different level of student coaching. Student coaching sessions range from one to several sessions per week, and from 30 minutes to 2 hours per session. A student coach can assess each student’s academic performance and behaviors in order to find the best program for the student to follow.
Many academic problems that students face are problems that can be diagnosed and corrected. Most issues students have are not inherent in that student. Most problems are due to habit. Habits can be reformed and good students can become great with the proper tutelage.
If you have an academic behavior that you want to correct, or you need general guidance involving your college admissions and application processes, contact a student coach today.
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