Dr. Wright L. Lassiter Early College High School at El Centro College

 Key skills that students need to be successful  Academic Behaviors are actionable; students can learn them and become better at them with practice

 Goal Setting  Persistence  Self-awareness  Motivation  Help Seeking  Progress Monitoring No single factor may be more important to student success than the degree to which students take ownership of their learning!

 Having a goal or a reason to learn is most important!  Goal setting leads to develop skills of disciplined practice and stronger self-control and self-direction.  Students need to learn how to set short-term, medium-term, and long-term goals  All students should have one or more goals throughout their schooling  Students should know that their actions matter and that students can influence or control their lives through their actions

 Most goals worth pursuing require persistence – the ability to continue in the face of frustration and failure.  Persistence is sustained effort over time.  Synonymous with tenacity or grit! When have you demonstrated persistence?

 Knowing how well one is actually doing in a course  Competent students are cognizant of how good their work is; without a teacher telling them

 Also known as “Drive”  Highly motivated students are natural goal-setters  The best form of motivation is intrinsic, coming from within  Motivation can come from various sources or reasons

 Skillful students know when they need help  Many students don’t know when they are in over their heads  Student most in need of help are the least likely to pursue it on their own  Seeking and accepting help is not an indication of failure  Students need to know:  How to join a study group and participate effectively  How to use campus-level and departmental academic advisors  How to best use teacher office hours, the library, tutors

 Students need to monitor their progress at regular intervals  Waiting until the end of the course to find out how you are doing does not work in higher education learning

 Being able to manage your time will you with the more challenging assignments  Time management includes:  Scheduling your time  Prioritizing your time  Knowing what is a realistic amount of time to complete a task  Pacing and distributing work over the course of a project  Balancing demands on your time  Understanding how to break complex tasks or assignments into pieces that can be tackled sequentially  Time management begins with the simple task of writing down assignments!

 Knowing how to identify what is important from among everything that is heard or seen in a lecture  Good note-taking skills enable students to understand better the material that has been presented to them in a variety of ways  Annotating texts  Highlighting texts  Abbreviating words  Cornell note-taking method

 Strategic reading is critical in college  The amount of reading increases in college courses  Extracting key meaning from texts  Previewing the assignment to get a general idea  Scanning the material to determine the structure and challenge level  Identifying key unknown terms and terminology

 Otherwise known as CHEATING  Examples:  Turning in work that was completed by someone else  Taking a test for someone else  Using an electronic device to look up answers  Using an electronic device to take pictures of answers  Plaigarism  Academic dishonesty can get you expelled from ECC!