Children often get restless very easily and, in this day and age whereby technology has become part of our lives, our attention spans have shortened tremendously. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, students may easily lack the motivation to do anything productive at home.
Hence, it is up to home tutors and parents to motivate children to engage themselves in education is ways other than just burying their heads in their books.
Firstly, many students do not enjoy studying as they are presented with a lot of information at once. It may seem like a very overwhelming task for students to just study out of a thousand-page textbook. Instead, tutors should help students make a study plan for themselves.
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This study plan should include the time of the day when they should study, how long, when breaks should be taken and what they should study. Planning all of this out will help students understand how much they actually have to study which will seem much less daunting then just staring at a textbook.
At the same time, tutors should not pamper students too much by constantly advising them how to make their study plan. Students should be able to plan their own time after a while.
Secondly, some students may seem very motivated at first but this motivation may die out after a while. There are many factors which can easily demotivate students and one of them is poor performance in quizzes, tests or other assessments.
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They might have put in a lot of effort to study for those assessments and a single bad grade can easily destroy their morale. It is then up to the tutors to help the students change their attitude.
Their focus should be more on learning than grades, even though grades may seem very important. Students will eventually be able to achieve good grades if they focus on gaining more knowledge and information.
Thirdly, generally, people will only be able to motivate themselves to do better if they have a specific goal in mind. Without understanding the purpose of what they are doing, people will not be able to convince themselves to work harder and will just give up.
This applies for studying as well. If students have very undeveloped goals or no goals at all, they may easily come to the conclusion that there is no point in them putting in so much effort to study.
Thus, before even starting to teach students, tutors have to understand their final goal. If they do not have one, it is up to the tutors to help students understand the importance of setting a goal.
Fourthly, some students may enjoy studying and would not mind studying all day while other students may get frustrated after just a few minutes of studying.
Regardless of which type of student someone is, everyone deserves a break from time to time. Every student will have a non-academic hobby that can help them to distract and calm them down in stressful situations.
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Timing these breaks in between study sessions can greatly improve the effectiveness of learning and can also help prevent students from overworking. Tutors can either directly emphasize the importance of breaks or indirectly emphasize it by showing interest in the students’ hobbies.
Fifthly, tutors generally will not be able to directly influence their students on their study habits at home as they are only able to see them at most a few times a week. However, this does not mean that tutors should only try to enforce these habits when they are able to see their students face to face.
Tutors can continue their influence over their students’ study habits through developing healthy communication with their parents. Tutors can inform parents about how, when and where their child should study so that they are able to study efficiently and without much stress.
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Even if tutors are unable to do this, they should at least communicate with their students through other platforms such as messaging or social media. However, this should be done with caution. Students would not want their tutors to be constantly reminding them of their study schedule.
Some amount of breathing space is necessary!