Three Tips to Build Confidence in School and Develop Problem Solving Skills
One of the big things we work to do at LearningRx is build confidence! We do that by keeping our language positive, focusing on the objective not the mistake, and celebrating success every chance we get. We love mistakes, mistakes are a chance to improve and can be used to measure progress.
If a student is afraid to dive into a particular exercise, we encourage them to do it, and then point out when they got even a portion of it right. This allows the student to see their success and then they are more willing to push harder and usually this success leads to more success.
We do this because we want our students to feel successful, build confidence, and learn the benefit of perseverance. A side benefit that can be underestimated is that they also develop problem solving skills. Instead of standing not even attempting a task they become much more willing to try which leads to exploration, which leads to more ways to solve a problem, which leads to successful outcomes.
The common language that you would hear in a LearningRx center are phrases like:
- Great job! try again!
- I like how you did that!
- You’ll never know unless you try!
- Nice work, now let’s…
- Look what you did, that was awesome!
- Excellent, you’ve never done that before…
It doesn’t matter if we are working with a student to address reading issues, problems with attention and focus, or working with kids on the Autism spectrum. Everyone can use more confidence, and the more confident the better you are going to be at problem solving and thinking critically!
This is a testimonial from a recent graduate.
“I saw a definite improvement in my son. He has been getting his homework done in school meaning he no longer feels so overwhelmed by it and his concentration to get it done has improved. His ability to memorize items needed for tests has skyrocketed. The ability to do this no longer brings tears and frustration, but instead confidence and pride.”
This is a great example of getting at the root cause and building confidence.
