Tackling a Learning Challenge

As we think about the learning challenges that stand before us as teachers and students, I wonder about the real time efforts that can help us tackle those challenges with strength and success.

I have started talking to students about this and in that discussion, I outlined four main areas:

Time
How much time do you give to the challenge?

Focus
When you are working towards this learning challenge, are you focused?

Strategy
What are the best strategies for meeting this challenge? How do you identify and discover those strategies? How do you practice and effectively use those strategies?

Choice
Is the learning important to you? Are you making a choice to meet this challenge?

This week, we'll go a bit deeper with this as we focus more on strategy and choice. What strategies help you to learn as well as you can?  How can you make sure that you're employing the best strategies in a timely fashion--a way that helps you to move towards your goal with strength?  What can you explicitly do to develop your ability to identify, choose, and use best strategies for learning?

I'll apply this learning to challenging, meaningful learning that I'm in the midst of as well with the following actions:

1. Outline the learning goals.
2. List the strategies.
3. Create a practice schedule.

Next week, I'll have students do the same. 

How do you coach students towards meeting their learning challenges?  What strategies do you find most beneficial?  How do you meet your own learning challenges as an educator?  These are important questions as we navigate teaching and learning today in this amazing age of countless tools and avenues for meeting challenge and leading to success.