How YOU can help me at Stepping Stones International

My work at Stepping Stones International is getting more serious and challenging – which is a very nice surprise! There are some key problems that need to be seriously addressed to improve the quality of the SSI program. I have been assigned to tackle one of the problems regarding education – since I have some teachers following this blog, as well as friends who are teachers in training, I thought I would take some time to describe the problem and if anyone has any ideas or suggestions, please Please PLEASE email me them! Any and all advice is welcome – we will take all the help we can get!

Without getting into too much detail, many of the students who attend SSI are seriously struggling academically. With all the stress that they deal with at home, many of these students are both unmotivated to study, but also lack the necessary study skills to be an effective learner. Moreover, students are not improving in school and some teachers see SSI as a distraction to students, rather than something helping their studies. In fact, however, studying is an important part of the Stepping Stones curriculum. Right now, the students study for 1.5 hrs each day and ALL day on Tuesday. It’s simple studying, where I and some other volunteers, are there to help out when the students have questions. Since this current strategy is not lending many results, I have been tasked to develop an actual Study Skills Program where: students will learn helpful study skills and apply them in their own studying, as well as tutors for the centre will go through a mini-lesson on how to be a more effective resource in the centre during study periods. (Remember the main goal here is HOW TO IMPROVE STUDENT GRADES).

There are some obvious changes that need to be made in the centre with respect to the attitude of staff members during study period; i.e. we need to be stricter in ensuring the students are actually studying. We also need to take a more proactive approach in encouraging students to seek our help and ask questions. But what I’m more interested in hearing is if any of you have activities or strategies on how to motivate students to WANT to learn and do well? Does anyone have specific activities that teach study skills? To give you some examples of what I am talking of, one thing that I am working to find is a company to donate planners for the students to use; this would allow us to teach the students time management and organization, as well as provide us a means to track what assignments, tests etc the student has. (So if anyone has connections with a company that might be willing to donate 70 planners for 2009 and 2010 to SSI, let me know!) I’m also implementing a journal writing activity to take place every week to reflect on the SSI weekly themes which will help students work on their writing and reflection skills. Now, once a week we will have a ‘study skills lesson’ where some sort of skill (note taking, memorization tricks, using flash cards, etc) will be passed along to the students and they will be expected to demonstrate this new skill by using their own school work. We’ve also tossed of the idea of provide rewards/punishments to the students who do well/very poorly in the study skills program. Anyways, I know that’s a lot of info, but I would love to hear if you have any suggestions, lessons, skills, activities or anything else that we could use in our study skills lessons... you know my email address!

Thanks, as always, for taking some time to read about my trip! Hope everyone is safe and happy back home.

Cheers,

Matt