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Planning is an important
part of any sphere of activity be it administration, economics, war or
games. So why is planning necessary—the answer is obvious. Without a
plan everything will go haywire and the end result is not what you want.
Hence in order to achieve your goals, you have to plan your strategy.
This is applicable even more while acquiring study skills. In order to
benefit completely, lesson plans are absolutely necessary.
The first and foremost part of the plan should be to work towards a
definite goal. When a goal is set, the level of performance is enhanced
and the ability to motivate yourself acts as an energetic vitaliser. You
are able to identify what you want to do, and what skills you have to
acquire in order to achieve that. In the process of learning more about
the skills that are required, you can evaluate yourself, identify your
strengths and weakness and learn to improve upon previous performances.
The Study skills lesson plans should be drawn up to cater to the
difficulty level of all students, remembering that the range of
difference in abilities is sometimes astounding. There are students with
handicaps and disorders, slow learners and quick ones; any lesson plan
should try to take this fact into account.
The study skills lesson plans should be so structured that it is dynamic
and capable of being altered to suit the student’s growing and changing
needs. This helps to make the students more focused in their approach,
as they are continually involved in the process of change. After all the
students are the ultimate beneficiaries. This however does not mean that
the content can be ignored. There should be adequate coverage of any
topic so that a certain degree of mastery is indicated.
So, you have taken care of the dynamic levels and the content, but there
can be no let up. All this becomes redundant if the study skills lesson
plans do not allow you to keep track of the student’s progress. This is
often referred to as formative evaluation. Monitoring does not merely
imply collecting information from the students about their progress. It
goes way beyond that. It helps you to identify the lacuna in the lesson
plans and allows you to make changes. If the plans have not met their
objectives, obviously they would need restructuring. A more difficult
situation to combat is the one that is normally encountered in a set of
students with different abilities. Can a lesson plan be modified to
cater to the fast learner and the slow learners at the same time? This
is an eternal problem that teachers face. There is no straight answer
–you have to tackle it as you encounter it.
Something that all study skills lesson plans should incorporate is time
and room for practice, for it is practice, which hones the skills. Not
only is the quantity of practice important, but also the quality. Last
but not least, conceptual learning should be an inherent part of any
lesson plan. Since there is no straight way for practicing this sort of
learning, tackling problems in more than one way does help to some
extent.
Whatever study skills lesson plans are drawn up, remember there is no
end to it. All plans have only beginnings, for human beings are unique,
and it is this uniqueness, which is conceptually infinite. Whatever plan
we draw up will be inadequate, but we do require a basic framework from
which to operate.
~ Author M. Hemdev
data(c)Indian child. all rights
reserved.
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