That's a tough question. You need to teach a learning strategy when it becomes clear that a student needs to learn a skill that either is assumed as mastered or is not explicitly taught in the general curriculum. A cue is when you find yourself repeating the same direction for a task and a student is not being successful (Berry et al., 2004). For instance, if you find yourself in math class repeating the steps to solve a problem over and over, strategy instruction on problem solving is appropriate.

 

The first step is to identify the specific skill that the student lacks. Once you know that, you can select a strategy to address that need. Strategy instruction can be considered an initial step in building skill acquisition for students. The goal of the problem solving strategy would be for a student to learn the steps and be able to use the strategy independently until the strategy becomes automatic and eventually internalized as a skill.

 

Strategy instruction takes time and energy. The payoff can be worth the effort though, since learning strategies provides struggling students with the ability to perform a task better. Schools often start small, with just one strategy, and then add to their collection of strategies as teachers become skilled at teaching them. 

Do you have a student in your class, that no matter what you do to try to motivate him, apathy always wins? Do you have a class full of students that don't seem to care about grades or success at school? Maintaining perspective in these challenging situations can be difficult, especially when you've spent your entire school year trying new ways to enlist these students. Just as research tells us, we need to teach behavior the same way we teach academics, it tells us that we may need to help some students make the connection between how their effort effects their achievement (Pollock, Pickering, & Marzano, 2001; Colvin, 2009).

People generally attribute success to ability, effort, other people or luck. Of those factors, effort is the only one that empowers individuals in the long run. No matter how much ability you have, you eventually run into a task for which you are not prepared. There will be situations in which you will need to succeed on your own, so relying on other people is ineffective and luck runs out. Therefore, teaching students to focus on changing their beliefs about effort could empower them to see how increasing their effort positively impacts achievement.

Telling stories about famous people who overcame adversity through hard work and persistence will influence some of your students, but challenging students may not be swayed so easily. They need relevant data from their own lives to make that connection. To help seemingly apathetic students explore the relationship between their effort and achievement, teachers can integrate effort versus achievement charts into their classrooms. In order to make the largest difference, students must collect and track their own data. Then, teachers need to conference with students to provide individual feedback about the results. By providing individual feedback, teachers allow students to process how their effort affected their achievement.