What's the secret to a productive study session?

What's the secret to a productive study session?

Shelbi Wilson (Teacher, Lincoln High School, Riverside, CA) gives expert video advice on: What's the secret to a productive study session?

A productive study session: simple as that, you learn something, you move from point A to point B. So, I don't want a study session to just be a free for all where I'm just looking at things. But sometimes we tend to think that even if you're just reviewing things or you're in the right environment, that it wasn't productive. If you just looked over things, a productive study session may just be I just rewrote my notes. I think if I was going to categorize it, though, a productive study session should be planned, it should be short, it should have a focus or a goal. So my goal for this study session is to have learned A, B or C. You want to check for understanding, you want to have some accountability: did I learn it? And then you want to have a plan for what are you going to do if you didn't learn it? What are we going to do differently? So a productive study session has a start time, an end time, a goal, a method of checking for understanding, and a method of reteaching if it hasn't been learned.