Five Tips for Academic Success in 2024
The beginning of the year is the perfect time to help your student build new skills! These 5 tips for academic success can benefit students of every age by helping them develop new ways of thinking, set goals, and understand themselves better.
Ready to Reach Your 2024 Goals?
As we celebrate the beginning of a new year, we look forward to the new achievements, goals, and experiences that are yet to come! Although we will each define success differently, together we can find ways to reach our goals, both big and small. Below are five tips for academic success that can help students who are looking to start the year off on the right page and with a refreshed outlook!
1. Know Your Strengths
A new year means 365 more chances to get to know yourself better. When it comes to academic success, playing to your strengths is a good way to begin. For example, if you excel in a group setting, you may want to incorporate opportunities for teamwork. Study groups, sports, and online platforms can help you feel more connected and let students shine collaboratively. Alternatively, if you struggle to focus and prefer quiet settings, you should create a space that supports those qualities. Consider taking a character strengths test, like the one from VIA Institute on Character, to see how well your habits align with your strengths.
2. Identify Goals and Time Commitments
What do you want to accomplish in 2024? This is a great question to ask yourself to identify your goals and create a plan to achieve them. Homework, school, family, social life, rest, and exercise are just a few of the tasks that fill the lives of a modern student. With all of those responsibilities, we need a way to keep track of them so we don’t get lost. Sometimes visual aids can be beneficial in understanding what you are responsible for and where your time is going. Graphs, pie charts, or whiteboards with pictures are a few options to organize your daily, weekly, or monthly tasks and goals to ensure you are on track.
3. Develop a Growth Mindset
No matter how hard we try, there will always be obstacles on our path to success. These setbacks are natural and happen to everyone. While we cannot control fate, we do have agency over the way we react in times of struggle! How we respond when things don’t go our way can have a big impact on whether or not we achieve our goals. Encourage your kids to develop a growth mindset. A growth mindset is a way of viewing mistakes as opportunities for learning, rather than roadblocks or failures. This teaches them resilience and helps them to see that mistakes are a natural part of growth.
4. Ask For Help
As we begin our journey, we cannot avoid coming across something unfamiliar. When this happens, we can first try to figure it out on our own. This is a great step that we always encourage students to try to help build self-reliance and curiosity. If that doesn’t solve the problem, we have two options: giving up or finding someone to help. Although in that moment we might feel defeated, it doesn’t mean we should give up. Instead, we should ask for help! Asking for help isn’t a sign of failure. In fact, it is a well-known display of strength! Every person who has found success, from an NBA player to the president, or even your favorite author, has come across something they didn’t know. They had to ask for help and take time to learn new skills that led to their success. Next time you are in doubt, ask for help!
5. Challenge Yourself
Life is full of challenges. Learning which ones are best for you to take and which ones should be left alone are all a part of growing up. Whether it is in school or somewhere beyond academic achievements, taking on challenges will lead you to grow in more ways than you think. We may not always have the time or the energy to push ourselves out of our comfort zone, however, these are the times when we learn the most. During the rest of the school year, try to say “yes” to opportunities that are new or challenging for you. Often, these are the places where you can find tools for success, and even discover new passions and goals!
Clackamas Middle College provides an inclusive, innovative, and challenging personalized education that cultivates and prepares independent learners for college and careers. Visit our website to learn more about how we help our students gain the skills to succeed in college and beyond!