4 MORE Important College Skills

Learn the Keys to Communication

Amy Barr with The Lukeion Project

Ever make plans for a special feast and then arrive at the store without your shopping list? You’ll remember the major items but a nagging fear you’ve forgotten something will follow you home. Navigating the final educational years with your high school student can feel like this. Even with a mapped out transcript, you’ll often be plagued by the concern you’ve forgotten some vital lessons.

A well-rounded academic-focused transcript is splendid. A good high school check-list insures students take the requisite classes and complete those necessary credit hours. You’ll soon learn getting into college is only the first little battle. Your high school student also needs to develop proficiencies to help her stay in college for the long haul. Here’s a short list of skills that must be practiced throughout high school to guarantee a smoother path through college. If you’ve failed to work these into your curricula: Now is the time to add these to your learner’s existing studies.

1. Note taking

Home educated students are rarely great at note-taking unless they have intentionally sought lecture format courses. As much as parent educators love to offer lively, interactive, hands-on, out-of-the-box teaching opportunities, most first and second year classes at college will have a traditional lecture format with large lower level course sizes. I was once a TA for a 700-student mythology course! Will your student be good at note taking?

Conventionally schooled parents may have spent many youthful hours in lecture-format high school classes and wrongly take this skill for granted. Note-taking must be learned, practiced, and perfected. Your student can start to master the skill while reading or listening to sermons at church, vlogs, or podcasts. Later have him participate in lecture-based courses in which he is responsible for mastering what he hears. Don’t let college be your child’s first high-stakes note-taking experience.

The best students know that note-taking is more than just busy work and transcription skills. Good note-takers are also active listeners. The practice of organizing and processing data during a lecture is the first huge boost to learning that data. The second sensible move is to train a student to always recopy her notes right after each class. If she does so, she’ll seldom do poorly on an exam. Fleshing out ideas right after a lecture means far more than just neat notebooks. If she is diligent, a good note-taker will process the data a second or even third time without spending much extra time on the class. By the time she must prepare for the test, she’ll already have much more information neatly stored in her long-term memory. The best way to study for even the most difficult topic is to take notes, recopy those notes, and then copy them a third time. By then, recall will be a breeze.

2. Typing

Parents might be hunt-and-peck typers with short-form abbreviated texting habits. If this describes you, this will likely describe your students. Take some important time in early middle school actively working on typing accuracy and speed. There are several really fun apps on the market to help build both. No student should still be using the hunt-and-peck approach to typing nor the “look at every keystroke” method by the time they go to college so why wait that long? Get those skills going before high school so that it comes naturally when typing is needed the most.

3. Time management

Teens are notorious for being poor time managers while others seem on-the-ball at birth! Some kids are born behind schedule, always rushing to finish projects, chores, and responsibilities. But the secret is basically this: Time management can’t be taught so much as modeled and practiced through personal experience. Parents naturally want to take up the mental load of constantly reminding kids who have a more relaxed approach to life’s schedules instead of letting their children quickly learn what happens when time is not managed adequately.

Start early and never stop stressing the importance of getting things done on time without drama but resist the temptation to DO the managing. Raise the bar for high school students. Give your child the chance to work on a variety of long and short term projects while navigating a normal schedule. State your expectations up front, set firm due dates, and be prepared to live with the consequences of occasional failure without drama. Mom and dad often sabotage real growth in time management skills by softening the blow of real consequences, especially when consequences impact grades. Don’t rationalize offering flexible deadlines to save your learner’s GPA. Poor time management skills in high school will eventually damage college, career and interpersonal success. Start early (well before transcripts are at risk) and stick to your stated schedule and your stated repercussions.

The best students know that good time management will let them pack more into each organized and prioritized day.  If they put goals, school projects, exercise, spiritual development and relationships ahead of interruptions, time-wasters, games, and short-form content. They’ll experience the fullness that high school and college have to offer during truly free time opportunities once they know how to finish obligations first, not last. Encourage students to volunteer for community service projects or major family ventures in which they take leadership in planning and implementation. They can see how time management skills pay off while working in service to others. Ever wonder why colleges like to see community service on a high school transcript? Time management is one big reason.    

4. Mature Communication Skills

Each semester I teach several hundred home educated high school students live online. I encourage them to communicate questions and concerns about the material at hand rather than asking mom or dad to do this chore. If they don’t understand something or need help, they must communicate that to me instead of having a parent become a translator. When I hear their questions, I get to know them, and they learn to express themselves and even advocate for themselves if they think I need to revisit a score or grant some type of extension. The whole process makes them better students while I become a better educator.

Not every student develops even these communication skills. I will sometimes have a student for 2, 3, or even 4 years of Latin. Out of shyness or due to limited experience in self-advocation, they never step up. Consequently, I never communicate with that student directly. How sad when such a student asks for a college recommendation! All I can do is rave about good grades. College recommendation forms don’t ask teachers much about grades because that’s what transcripts are for. Top colleges and universities want to know how well a student interacts with teachers and students, how well she reacts to adversity, his warmth of personality, her sense of humor, his leadership qualities, character, and extracurricular accomplishments. Colleges especially want to know if a student responds well to setbacks. If I’ve never had a chance to communicate with a student, a whole letter about good grades is worse than no recommendation at all.  

The best students overcome a shy or tentative nature by learning to interact with trustworthy adults, educators, youth leaders, and coaches. The best parents not only encourage their children to interact with adults but will insist that their child do all the talking and negotiating when there is a question or dispute. Once at college, professors will interact with students as adults or quickly grow to discount students who don’t act like adults. Parents should never communicate with college professors (or potential employers) on behalf of their students. If you have a shy student, make sure the communication skill has been well rehearsed before freshman orientation begins.   

3 Things for Best College (& Life) Success

Basic Yet Necessary

By Amy Barr at The Lukeion Project

College-bound teens and the parents that represent them know what it means to be increasingly preoccupied with topics about college choices, scores on standardized tests, transcripts, and hefty college tuition costs (with the obligatory high hopes for scholarships). There’s nothing quite like the satisfaction you’ll feel when your child gets college acceptance letters and a plan for the next four years. Well done! You hung in there and now your teen is ready to go—but is he ready to succeed once he gets there?
The next level will bring a fresh set of challenges. Peculiar cafeteria food and roommate troubles are as predictable as too little campus parking. Some college troubles are easy to anticipate. Others will be unpleasant surprises unless you help your teen prepare now during high school years. Getting to college is the easy part. Staying there is the challenge. Here are three common-sense skills you must develop during your teen’s high school years to boost smoother sailing later. 

Develop Excellent Research Writing Skills in High school.

Homeschoolers excel in a lot of subjects, but research writing is not typically one of them. Out of any 10 of our best students at The Lukeion Project, at least 8 need a lot more practice and exposure to research writing rules. Creative writing takes center stage because it is typically easier to stoke student enthusiasm over a creative writing assignment, so why rock the boat? Alas, unless your student plans to earn a degree in creative writing, she will have few opportunities to use those creative writing skills at college. Research writing is a must-have skill that will be required from the start. 
Creative writing and research / academic writing are two vastly different creatures. One’s ability to analyze and synthesize copious amounts of data will be hallmarks of degree programs worth attending while creative writing will have limited applications. In college I was assigned precisely one creative project by a professor who hated creative projects. He was happy when that obligation had ended so we could all get on with the more productive tasks. Research writing is not just creative writing with citation. Whether your child will seek a degree in law, biology, engineering or Classics, he must know how to research well and then write precisely, analytically and persuasively. If your student starts college before trying his hand at research writing several times, there will be struggles and tears ahead. 
The human mind is well suited to the development of research writing skills roughly around 8th grade, give or take. Students are ready to research facts and complex ideas then express answers to important questions as they persuade others with clear analytical writing. In practical terms, start your students authoring research papers early in high school so that this skill has time to become college ready. We have specifically designed Skillful Scribbler to facilitate the transition to more mature thinking and writing at The Lukeion Project so they are ready for most writing tasks up until around the mid-point of high school. Most of our classes have been designed to complement the process with shorter than longer academic writing tasks. By 11th or 12th grade consider taking College & Business Composition and then College Research Writing. 

Train to manage and balance time while still in high school.

The skills needed to boost college success should be sharpened well before dorm move-in day. Common sense abilities like money management, self-control, and determination will help throughout college, career, marriage and life. Most of us know the things kids need to thrive and mature but we may not insist on them as much as we should, especially when the demands of life weaken our resolve. So, soldier on. You may not win each battle but fight hard to win the war.
Of all of these, the most essential college skill is time-management. Many students who failed at college did so because they weren’t able to balance social activities and part time jobs with their need to study, sleep and go to class all while managing roommates and the need to occasionally exercise. To avoid time management disasters, get your high school student juggling his own schedule now while you can still catch him when he falls or maybe just offer encouraging words as he recovers from inevitable time disasters.
If you are still doing all the scheduling, chore management, and teaching during your teen’s high school years, your first step is to hand the job off to your teen. Have him take over his own schedule. Let him work out his own academic planning each semester. Walk him through the process of evaluating his course load and allot the time needed for each subject. Have him plan ahead for trips, work, music lessons, sports and free time. Making mid-course adjustments to a hectic schedule is part of the learning package, no extra charge. 
Planning ahead for busy periods is a skill that needs to be practiced repeatedly before it becomes an extremely expensive necessity in real life. I once heard of a student who didn’t bother to find where her classes would meet prior to her first day of classes. I’m sorry to activate new nightmare material for you, but on her very first day of college, she missed all of her classes because she couldn’t find them in time to attend. She came remarkably close to losing her sports scholarship before she even had her first syllabi in hand. 
Unfortunately, the absolute best way to teach time management to students who struggle with it is to have them fail at it from time to time sooner, not later. 

Practice healthy failure recovery.

As master of his own schedule, your teen must suffer the consequences for poor planning, even if he earns a low score on a quiz or paper, even if she takes a zero or a poor essay review. The resolve of many well-meaning parents melts when the student’s transcript pays the price of priorities gone awry. If procrastination is your teen’s struggle, it is better to earn a poor grade now than fail in college. Understanding his own limitations means he’s on his way to better time management. He is also on his way to developing the third most practical college skill: failure recovery. 
Learning how to recover from a failed task is vital. Mastering this piece of the puzzle will make all the difference, especially for gifted students who need extra practice, and perfectionists who must fight their compulsion to perfection over the necessity of timeliness. College will be an untidy mix of positive and negative experiences that ultimately teach us a lot about ourselves. If your teens are crushed by even minor setbacks now, you’ll need to practice healthy recovery every chance you get before freshman orientation. Failure is a certainty. Managing it well is a huge benefit.
High school is a time of countless mental changes. The process will feel like three steps forward, two steps back. Use these four years of high school wisely to help your student to mature in these three areas primarily by tasking them with these things early. May too few parking spaces, odd roommates, and questionable cafeteria food be the worst disasters he’ll suffer in his college years.