MyGuru is launching a new book summary program where we summarize and analyze books that discuss recent research on what drives academic performance and leads to success inside and outside the classroom.
'How Children Succeed' Book Summary: Part 1
Posts by Mark Skoskiewicz:
Being Strategic: Set Goals, Gather Facts, Consider Alternatives, Make Plans
“Strategy is about making choices, trade-offs; it's about deliberately choosing to be different.” - Michael Porter, famous Harvard Business School professor
Embrace Mental Math Throughout Everyday Life
“I would like to make a case for raising the importance of mental math as a major component in students’ tool kits of mathematical knowledge. Mental math is often associated with the ability to do computations quickly, but in its broadest sense, mental math also involves conceptual understanding and problem solving.” - Cathy Seeley, National Council of Teachers of Mathematics President 2004-2006
The Indirect Effects of Independent Reading
“The amount of free reading done outside of school has consistently been found to relate to growth in vocabulary, reading comprehension, verbal fluency, and general information. Students who read independently become better readers, score higher on achievement tests in all subject areas, and have greater content knowledge than those who do not. - Research Journal of the American Association of School Librarians
Calm Your Mind: Understanding & Managing Stress
“A bit of stress in short doses is useful in improving our memory and enhancing performance. However, too much, too regularly, is extremely damaging to our mental and physical well-being.”
From https://www.headspace.com/science/stress, a web-site founded by globally recognized mindfulness and meditation expert Andy Puddicomb
Just because you have no major or minor diagnosed mental health disorder, doesn’t mean you have a completely healthy mind. If school, work, sports, orsocial situations tend to make you nervous and stressed, your performance suffers.
Fuel Your Mind Through Exercise, Nutrition and Sleep
It turns out that there’s lots of documented scientific evidence that the more you exercise, the better you eat, and the more you sleep (within reason), the better your brain works (i.e., you can reason more clearly, recall information faster, solve problems faster, etc.). It naturally follows that exercise, nutrition, and sleep are critically important, though perhaps indirect, elements of improving children's academic performance.
On the one hand, this may seem a little obvious. But one of the more interesting pieces of advice about critical thinking and problem solving ever given to me was that the best insights are those that seem really, really obvious once they are realized. If you really didn’t know it before for sure, but now you do with certainty, you’ve realized something important. Still, I find that sometimes an idea seems so intuitively obvious that it isn’t interesting enough to grab most people’s attention, or perhaps because it’s obvious, it just doesn’t seem like it can be that important.