Teaching Study Skills

Teaching study skills is a duty that every instructor must perform, not just life skills and guidance counselors. Good study skills are much like transferable job skills: they're usable regardless of the specific tasks at hand. Time management, note taking, freewriting, and outlining are techniques applicable to history, science, English, math, or any other discipline.

Unfortunately, many teachers never mastered study skills themselves and are therefore in no position to teach them to their students. Or, if they did learn study skills, it was so long ago that they scarcely recall the specifics. For a lot of teachers, the processes behind essay writing, test taking, and research are unconscious; they simply expect their students to know them already.

Your Role as Teacher

One of the assumptions you must make as an instructor is that your students' other teachers have not made study skills a priority in their classes; hence the onus falls to you. Start by explaining that study skills are more than just recommendations; they're practical necessities. You might draw a parallel to driving a car or truck. While operating a motor vehicle seems like an innate skill, there are, in reality, laws that must be obeyed. There's no way to feel comfortable on the road if one has never learned to change lanes, merge into traffic, or parallel park.

Similarly, students must be taught how to organize their materials, footnote their text, write a bibliography, and manage their time on tests and quizzes. Encourage students to adapt these principles to suit their own needs and preferences. Not every student will take to multi-colored outlining, but some will. Others may find that idea "branching" doesn't seem to spark the same ideas as does straight "listing" or brainstorming. In the end, each learner must customize his or her own learning skills so that they're maximally effective. Having an arsenal of different study skills strategies is necessary for teachers to be able to reach all of their students.