Special Feature By MindChamps

INSPIRING YOUR STUDENTS TO LEARN

MINDCHAMPS shares valuable tips to help your students develop the love for learning and achieving more in school.

Mr Brian Caswell from leading international mind development institute MINDCHAMPS, shares invaluable tips to help your students develop the love for learning and achieving more in school. Mr Brian Caswell, the Dean of Research & Programme Development, believes in these teaching philosophies.

‘DOs’:

 •Create a non-threatening environment where learning is fun and seen as important for its own sake – not because    you are in competition with the rest of the world.
• Do praise progress and be interested in what your student is doing. Ask them to explain
(a) what they are learning and
(b) how they are learning it. Explaining new information helps to cement it strongly into the long-term memory.
• Do celebrate every victory. Every little thing learnt is a brick in the foundation of future success. Children respond brilliantly to deserved praise.
• Do make time to talk – about something other than school work. A child will accept advice and suggestions far more readily, if it is not the only communication they receive.

‘DON’Ts’:

• Don’t take the fun out of learning by emphasising the negative results of ‘failure’. Children know these without being constantly reminded, and dwelling on the negative tends to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
• Don’t dwell on mistakes or past failures. Rather, establish the mindset that each ‘set-back’ is really a ‘set-up’ – something we can learn from to improve our future performance.
• Don’t focus all your effort on the limited goal of an examination. They are important, but look at it this way – a good learner will always do well at examinations, but someone who excels at ‘cramming’ for exams is usually not prepared to do very much else in life.

- Contributed by Brian Caswell

Dean of Research & Program Development MindChamps


FOR MORE INFO:
visit www.mindchamps.org