Academic Success Planning: How to Help Your Students Succeed

What is Academic Planning?

In order to understand student success planning, we first need to understand what academic planning is. Essentially, this is when students are planning for their future in academia by incorporating purposeful tools and techniques into their everyday study habits. 

Students can create their own academic success plan by understanding what their goals are and how they are going to consistently strive to reach those (academic) goals. Ultimately, we use academic success planning to understand where we are and how we get to where we want to be. 

Essentially, students reflect on where they are currently, what their strengths are, and needs improvement areas when it comes to studying and study skills, before making a plan to strengthen the parts that are working and improve the parts that are not. These personalized student success plans can help learners improve and stay on track in the future by helping them understand not only what to do, but also how to find the resources to complete tasks. 

Taking an Inventory of Skills

When students ask “whats study skills,” they may be trying to understand how to study for skills or learn more about study skills examples. An easy way to help students reflect on where they are now, what their strengths are, and what their needs improvement areas are when it comes to study skills is to complete a quick Inventory of Skills. These types of surveys will ask about how students are doing with a variety of study skills that help students succeed and allow them to easily pinpoint where they need to focus this school year. 

Use my Free Academic Success Planning Guide (with included skills inventory survey) to help you in this area. The guide also includes a full (also Free) Google Slide Deck that I use to teach my students about Academic Success Planning and better study skills at the beginning of the year. There are overviews and previews of different skills as well as an incorporated inventory that allows students to take the survey while working through the PowerPoint. This could be great as a first week activity as stations or as a full class discussion. 

SMART Goals Defined

SMART Goals are not a new concept. They help us take vague goals and make them more specific and realistic, so that we can better achieve those goals in a manageable time frame. SMART goals are Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Timey. This seems simple enough but students (and adults) can struggle with making sure that their goal is achievable and specific. Many just want to say “Get an A” and while that is great, we as teachers tend to want something a little more substantial. If we can have students focus on a specific topic, or skill to learn as well as how they will get there, it is far more likely that they will reach their goals. 

Student SMART Goals can be difficult if students have not been explicitly taught how to make a fully functional goal and action plan before. I have found that having some time at the beginning of each semester or quarter or year to discuss goals and give students the opportunity to create them (and review them) is especially helpful to their success throughout the year. We also want to make sure that we make deliberate time to review these goals and for students to reflect on the progress they have made toward that goal thus far.

In my classroom, we begin the year with a goal setting conference. We discuss creating goals as a class and then I meet with each student to understand them better, build a sense of safety and rapport, as well as help them with their goal setting for the year. I have a template for this type of conference here. Then, (depending on time) we will review those goals at the end/beginning of a quarter and at the end of semesters. I have even incorporated graded conferences, where students have to build a verbal argument where they support how they have achieved their goal during the semester. It is always nice to incorporate some of our standards in a way that keeps students engaged and has them working with real-world skills.

Don’t forget about the Free Academic Success Resource Guide and Slide Deck. It includes study skills examples, SMART Goals examples, and activities for each of the items listed in this article. Click here to see more.

How to Time Manage for Students

Students are not explicitly taught how to manage their time, so it is no surprise that they often procrastinate or do not spend enough time on an assignment. Many also have a lot of extra responsibilities outside of each high school course. We can help incorporate time management for students by giving them the skills or tools to do so on their own. 

For instance, we can show them how to prioritize, use their planner, set boundaries to avoid overscheduling, avoid distractions, or even bring it back to goal setting. I created an entire Time Management video course that covers each of these and more. Since it is a video course, you can set it up in stations or use it on a light class day or after an exam day or picture day, etc. It is a ready-to-use curriculum that comes with an ebook of notes and resources as well as the Slide Deck I use in the videos to teach it (just in case you would like to teach it in a way you know your students would best respond to).  You can also read more on The Importance of Time-Management - Using Planners here or Distractions: Keeping Us From Productivity here.

What’s Stress Management

Often teachers can visually see student stress as it begins to build to a breaking point. Teaching explicit stress management skills through either stress management videos (like in this teacher-ready Stress Management Course to help you and your students get a little stress relief), can help alleviate the amount of students stressing about their academics. Stress Management is an integral part of academic success planning because it is so often overlooked. Even if we can only incorporate these skills as bell ringers or on short days or on days where there is a pep rally, we have to try and help students with their social emotional learning whenever we can. 

Here are 7 Stress-Management Tips for Teens to help students with stress or read more about incorporating social emotional learning in your high school classroom here.

Methods on How to Study

When trying to build study habits, students can sometimes feel lost as to where to start or what they need. 

I advise students that they first understand the teacher's perspective. Often, they (and sometimes we as teachers) can fall into the trap of misunderstanding what others are going through. Unfortunately, students may not see the relevance in an activity or all of the hard work an instructor has gone through to help students learn something. As such, students may see it as busy work or that a teacher doesn’t like them or “purposefully” makes it difficult. I know I have been told that I was too rigorous of a teacher just because I wanted to be, not because I was actually trying to set them up for college work. 

So when building study habits, my first advice is to make sure that students know how to ask questions (and give them lots of options: email, surveys at the end of each class, LMS area just for questions, exit tickets, whatever works best for you). Let them know that you are available for questions and how/when would be best to ask, so that they can get a response. This is also a great time to set some boundaries (i.e. students will not get a response at 8pm outside of school time for an assignment due the next day, that does not excuse students from problem solving). You can find a balance between supporting your students and having a work/life balance.

Students can also incorporate better study habits by learning to review their notes consistently, learning to break up tasks, and learning to check their work. We as teachers can remind students of this or even add specific 5 minute blocks of time (as bell ringer or exit tickets) to actively practice these skills with students. Each of these skills and how to implement them are covered in more depth through the Academic Success Planning Slide Deck that you can find here.

Overview

Now if you are thinking, “Okay, yea, I want to help my students succeed; but Jewels, I have no time! I am already overworked as it is!” I get that more than you will ever know. I have been where you are and I know the struggle well. As such, let me guide you through with a little more ease than I experienced. Instead of starting from scratch, take my materials that I researched and gathered and presented. Use them in whatever way you can. 

Only you know your students best, so my materials are meant for the versatile teacher like you. They can be used in a variety of ways, in parts, as a whole, or just as a mini lesson when you have a miraculous free 10 minutes at the end of class, usually with that one class that always finishes everything early. Check out the Jewels of Teaching Life Skills Academy for several different ready-made courses and materials for your students, or check out my Teachers Pay Teachers Store for individual resources that you might like that will help you spend less time grading.