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Provide Clear Instructions to Ensure Follow-Through

Tags

Study Skills & Tools MS/HS/College Strategy

Skills

Self-regulation Organization Attention Processing Speed

Provide Clear Instructions to Ensure Follow-Through

If your student has difficulty following through to completion or often misses key steps

Teach It!

  1. Objective: When provided with clear expectations and structure to help them, students will produce more consistent, thorough and higher quality work from start to finish.
  2. Teacher Takeaways: Communicate clear expectations about the quality of the final product of an assignment. Students are likely to rise to expectations if you are clear, consistent and encourage questions.
  3. Provide Written Rubrics: Be clear if the rubric represents the minimum expectations or what a student needs for a top grade. Grade consistent with the rubric or students might not follow it the next time. Also provide detailed editing or other subject-specific checklists to follow.
  4. Help with Planning: Discuss the student's plans for completing work. Have the student explain the what, how and when. When students vocalize what they will do and how, they are thinking through the steps they will need to accomplish, how long they might take, and what is achievable. If your student is unable to do that independently yet, help them break it down.
  5. Break it into Steps: Help students see that every assignment can be broken into small steps. Often students see things as all or nothing and can become overwhelmed. Use a checklist or project plan to help with prioritization. Crossing off items on the check list will allow them to feel their progress.

Why It Works (the Science Of Learning)!

It is not uncommon to start a task with vigor and then lose enthusiasm or motivation part-way through. This problem is exacerbated for students with weaker organization and attention challenges. Explicitly showing students the process of how to follow through can go a long way in helping them complete their work more thoroughly and consistently.

Best-suited for students with weaker: Attention, Cognitive Flexibility, Inhibition & Self-Regulation, Long-Term Memory, Metacognition, Short-Term Memory, Working Memory (Source: Digital Promise Learner Variability Project)