August 5, 2020
Empowering self-reliance in students during COVID
Students might not be in class full time, but learning, connection, and self-reliance must continue.
Students, teachers and parents are trying to make sense of a changed world – one where the classroom has suddenly been replaced by the living room. Students are expected to navigate their education with greater autonomy, without the influence of classmates or the physical presence of teachers. And somewhere along the way, homework, assignments, tests and learning is expected to continue.
There are a lot of conversations happening right now about the uncertainty of COVID-19 and its implications on education—for example, will students lose, or fail to gain, certain skills that they would normally build in the physical classroom? As Education Week poses in an article titled "Will Months of Remote Learning Worsen Students' Attention Problems?”, students' ability to focus has been deeply challenged by the global pandemic. At Studyo, we think there’s room to push the conversation from uncertainty to solution.
The current technology gap
At Studyo, we’re big believers in the possibilities of technology, especially when it comes to education. However, the focus to date has largely been on technology that disseminates, retrieves and shares information with students, like assigning lessons and collecting homework. The result is that students no longer feel the need, desire or responsibility to capture information and plan their workloads like they used to do with their physical agendas. And with that comes a gap that desperately needs to be filled; students have stopped learning how to become self-reliant.
How to build self-reliance
There is tremendous value baked into the process of planning for a given assignment or test. Executive functioning skills, which are centred around organization, task management and planning play a huge part in the development of a student’s sense of self-reliance. And when self-reliance is empowered, the benefits reach far beyond the classroom—to their social life, family life, and perhaps most importantly, their inner world.
“Cognitive impairment of executive functions like inhibition, working memory, attention switching, along with planning are the underlying causes of anxiety in children."
—ResearchGate1
And yet, the question remains: how do teachers and students stay connected in a way that empowers self-reliance?
A thoughtful approach to digital learning
Studyo offers an intuitive platform that empowers self-reliance by enabling students to plan what they need to do through visualization and chunking. From task lists that can be broken down into manageable pieces to a calendar to plan their days and weeks, Studyo offers the perfect complement to the learning management systems that many schools are already using.
By enabling students with greater accountability, they can learn to take more initiative and problem-solve more successfully. For teachers and parents, Studyo opens a window into their student’s process by enabling them to track and draw on insights into how students are using the platform. This offers them a greater sense of connection—a piece that is critically important to the healthy and successful development of our students, now more than ever.
If you’re interested in learning how Studyo can help your students build greater self-reliance, we’d love to give you a quick demo.
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