Make the Cut – Fall 2021
Paul Menton Centre, Carleton University
TRANSCRIPT: Learning Strategies Presentation

[PADDY] Back in the background, you could hear a sweet little voice. that was the voice of Amanda Blais, and Amanda is now going to outline - she's a senior disabilities coordinator at PMC - and she's going to outline Learning Strategies for you. Amanda, over to you. 

[AMANDA] Thank you so much, Paddy. I don't know if I've ever been told I have a sweet little voice. So, I appreciate that (laughing). So, today I'm going to be speaking to you all about Learning Strategies supports um and here at PMC we offer students with disabilities one-on-one Learning Strategies support. That being said, throughout all institutions, there will be learning centers that offer similar supports to students. um So, wherever you choose to go, please be sure to ask about learning strategies. So, we'll start with an overview of what I'm going to talk about today. So, What is Learning Strategies? (We'll get into that a little bit); The difference between high school and university (similar to what Sonia was doing); How to get started with learning strategies; What areas does Learning Strategies address; Three levels of time management; and Questions. But like everyone else, I'm going to start us off with a poll. So, hopefully you still have the Poll Everywhere available to you. So again, that is pollev.com/MTC2021 or text mtc2021 to 37607. So, my question to all of you out there listening is “What do you think are the biggest differences between going to high school and in post-secondary?” 
It's a big question.

Give us a minute to roll in. I know some of you are putting your answers in the Q&A. So, our staff will paste those into the poll if you're having any difficulties using Poll Everywhere. “More home—“ … it says “more hot work”, but I'm guessing that means “more homework” … uh “workload” … “workload” again … “more time on my hands”, interesting. You will have “more responsibility” … I see a lot of “responsibility” coming up a lot … uh wow, it's really moving now … “more freedom” … “different people” … “independence” … awesome. So, a lot of you are talking about um essentially your, your time, or who you're connecting with, or where your expectations are coming up. um Some of you said “living alone” as well. So, thank you so much for uh contributing. It's nice to see a lot of you participating out there. 

So, we're going to talk about what Learning Strategies is. So, let's get started there. So, how you're going to get started with connecting with a Learning Strategist  - if we can switch to the— there we go … uh is to explore the university resources. So, the link in this PowerPoint which will be available after the event will take you to our university resources page, but all post-secondary institutions will have various types of student engagement resources. So, you can get a referral at PMC to a Learning Strategist through your Disability Coordinator. Your Departmental Advisor might be able to connect you with Learning Strategist support within your department or your faculty. Professors and Teaching Assistants are great sources for learning uh assistance. Student Service Specialists … again most post-secondary institutions will have a Learning Centre available, and Residence Advisors and Rez Fellows can also be a really good source to help you get connected to various learning supports available on campus.

So, what is Learning Strategies? So, here at PMC, like I said, we do provide a one-on-one Learning uh Strategies appointments with professional staff um as needed. So, when you register with PMC or even, you know, in your fourth year when uh things might be getting a little bit trickier as you coming closer to graduation, you can always ask your Coordinator for a referral to work with a Learning Strategist and you'll meet with them as frequently as you need to. So, it could be on a weekly basis, monthly basis, bi-term basis, every year. It really depends on you and what your needs are. We design our Learning Strategies appointments to address metacognitive challenges and academic deficits … lots of big words! uh Metacognition refers to understanding the way that you think. So, as Sonia was talking about when she's talking about self-advocacy, it's really important to understand the way that you think and translate that. Understand the way that you learn or your learning processes, and more specifically, we like to use a lot of your strengths to kind of address maybe those areas that you're having a bit more challenge in. But again, we like to focus on, you know, skills-based teaching, or strength-based approach. So, moving beyond just the skills to doing more self-regulated learning. So, things that you can take into the workplace those transitional skills. And in order for these to be effective, active participation from the student is essential. So again, we can tell you all of the ways that you can, let's say, do time management techniques, or reading techniques, or all those kinds of things, but unless you're trying it and giving it a good shot, it really, it really won't work right. So, we need some buy-in from students and active participation for things to work. So, we always like to say that accessing supports is not required, but it is recommended for success. So, we often find that the students who try to do things by themselves often will run into some challenges throughout the way. The reason why there are so many student services supports is because, time and time again, it's proven that those students who work with their peers, reach out to their professors, use student support services tend to do much better in their studies. So, you know, if you have a feeling like "oh I really want to give it a shot on my own", you don't have to - that there's lots of ways to get connected; whether you're coming in person or virtually online, you can access supports.

So, Areas for Development … So, these are the areas that we will address during Learning Strategies, based on, you know, what you need or the impact of your executive functioning. So, we will— we can help you with reading strategies, writing strategies, time management and task management, problem solving, organization, studying, note-taking, test-taking, and many other academic skills. As you'll hear from Jordyn shortly, we like to incorporate a lot of these strategies with assistive technology or software because, again, why make our brain work in overtime when there's lots of uh devices and software out there that can do a lot of the work for us. So, we can just focus on understanding the content, which is really the goal of being at university.

So, the puzzle piece that holds everything together. Some of you said this in your responses and I'm sure you're gonna know what this is, but time management is the piece that holds everything together. Why? … We like to use a lot of memes (laughing) … uh Because if you can't manage your time and understand how long things take and allot enough time for them, then you're really not going to have that much time to, to get them done. um So, we always talk about time management in three levels. So, we always talk about Term Calendars (so, the four months um of the term), Weekly Scheduling, and To-Do Lists. So, full term, what's happening this week, what's happening today. So, this is an example of a Term Calendar. So, once you receive your course outlines or your syllabus … so, we like to call those the roadmaps to your courses … literally, your professors will give you all of the learning objectives, topics you're going to cover, additional resources you can use to practice. Those outlines should be the thing that you refer to the most and they should be super ratty if they're all printed off … which not a lot of people use printing anymore, but if they were, they would be really ratty pieces of paper because you're looking at them so much. So, what you're going to do is you're going to write down all of your due dates, your test dates, and your exams into your Term Calendar. We often recommend having this printed off and visible on a wall, because with digital calendars, you usually only see one month at a time and it's super easy to just ignore those reminders. We're not saying, “don't use digital calendars”, but definitely use a term— a printed term calendar um in addition to digital calendars as well. Include a percentage that each assignment or test date is worth. Having those percentages on your calendar will help you understand how to prioritize your time. So, something that's worth 50% is gonna probably require a little bit more time than something that's worth 5%. Both are equally important to complete, but you also want to make sure that you're not, you know, allotting 10 hours to your 5% assignment and half an hour to your 50%. So, you got to really make sure that you're, you're allocating things appropriately. We often find that color-coding can be really helpful. So, we often say that you should color code one course in one color, the next course and another color when you're doing your, your dates and deadlines on your calendar, just so that your, your mind can help focus on which course is tending to have more frequent evaluations; maybe um when things are starting to cluster on the calendar, you can start to plan ahead and start to problem solve with uh your Professors, your TAs or your Coordinators or Learning Strategists. Create goal dates to complete large assignments. So, things that are really big … because Sonia mentioned, um extensions on assignments are not something that we offer here at Carleton um as a blanket accommodation. So, you really want to make sure that if you are concerned about beating deadlines that you're trying to get them completed ahead of time. One of the approaches we like to use with a lot of students is, you know, arrange to meet with your professors on a weekly basis to kind of talk about how that assignment is coming along. That way, if you need to ask for an extension, you're already in communication with them and they're probably going to be much more likely to give you an extension. It's always helpful to see all four months all at once, and again, like I said, you want to make sure that it is visible.

We talked about a Weekly Schedule. So, you will be able to see a weekly schedule on your learning management system. So, here at Carleton we use Brightspace and you also have access to Carleton Central which will have your course calendar there. Someone said that they had a lot of free time. So, here's the caveat that no one tells you … although you probably only have, let's say, three hours of class a week, you need to allocate as much time outside of class as you do for in-class. So, you might say, let's have— say, have 15 hours of class work in a week, but you also want to allocate 15 hours outside of class. You need to do your readings, practice problems, attend study sessions, you know, do review, create summary sheets. There's a lot of work that goes into understanding because university and college are so independent and you're learning, Yes, your professors are putting together wonderful lecture presentations, but you have to do all of the legwork ahead of time in order to understand the material so that when you're watching your lecture, you can understand what they're talking about. um So, it's important to create a weekly schedule. And again, just like we talked about with the four-month calendar, color coding can be really helpful in being able to understand which courses you have when, and this is an example of what this looks like. And you'll also see that we also have allocated time for all the different tasks that you need to do; so, your courses or your lecture dates, your tutorials, maybe your labs, if you have uh work or employment, when you're going to do your readings, when you're going to study, when your professor office hours are - all of these things need to be accounted for in your weekly schedule. So, although it seems like you might have more free time, once you start to do this, you'll realize that you know you really need to be using your time wisely to get things done on time. 

And the last one is To-Do Lists. um So, make sure that when you're making a to-do list, we have a bit of a priority matrix up here for you. um So, you'll see here that things that are of high importance and are urgent are the things that you're going to do now. The things that are of high importance but non-urgent are things you'll do next. Things that are high urgency but low importance, you'll do last, and things that are not urgent and not important, do you really need to do them? So, that one's the “do never”. So, make a to-do list of what you need to do during the day or during the week, prioritize what needs to get done first, check off the tasks as they're completed, and enjoy the satisfaction of completing the task as you go along.

So, we do have some tips for time management trackers. So, the first one is the Pomodoro tutorial, and this link will be available to you afterwards. So, the Pomodoro Technique is a well-studied strategy where they discovered that most of us can only sustain their attention for about 25 minutes at a time. So, we've had you sitting here for a little bit of time now, and we will be taking a break soon, I promise, but what they say through the Pomodoro Technique is that you want to allot um 25 minutes for a task. So, let's say for example, you're going to do math problems. So, when you sit down to do your first Pomodoro or 25-minute session, you're going to say, “Okay, I'm going to answer, you know, the first five math problems and see how that goes”. After the 25 minutes, a little timer will go off and give you a quick five-minute break. You can re-evaluate and say, “Did I get distracted during that 25  minutes? Do I need to reach out to support um, or did I accomplish the task?” If you accomplish the task, once the five-minute break is over, you're going to want to come back and do another 25 minutes, and they say to do about four Pomodoros, so, equaling about two hours before you take a really big break. And of course, there are apps for this, so, you don't have to use like a traditional kitchen timer unless you really want to do that … um there are apps for that as well. So, check out that video when it gets posted um on at the post-event. The other one we really enjoy is 'don't break the chain' … love this YouTube video by the the gentleman that runs this one, but 'don't break the chain' was created by Jerry Seinfeld, and essentially what you want to do is you want to pick a task, and probably a task that's really difficult for you to do on a, on a daily basis, but needs to get done. um And you want to pick a minimum amount of time that you want to do that task and how frequently you want to do that task. So, going back to the idea of doing math practice problems, I have a lot of students that have difficulty practicing their math problems. Students will say, “okay, I want to do 20 minutes of math practice four times a week.” So, that means that, um let's say, they do math practice on Monday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Saturday. That means they can check off this the the box for the whole week because they've completed um what they intended to do. So, it can be really helpful to, you know, do a Pomodoro for— or sorry, a 'don't break the chain' for a task that's really challenging for you. And again, pick one to start with and then kind of see how that goes, and then make sure not to overwhelm yourself with too many 'don't break the chains'. So, another video I highly recommend watching.

So why start with time management? So, I kind of already hinted at this already. um Time management … if you're having a problem, uh if you have a problem, before it happens … if you can see a problem happening before it happens, you have time to find a solution. So again, when we talked about the Term Calendar, if you can start to see that there's a lot of due dates starting to happen all at one time, or you've got a lot of midterms and finals, you know that you can start planning for that earlier on. That gives you enough time to reach out to Professors or TAs for support, that gives you enough time to connect with your Coordinators or a Learning Strategist. It just gives you enough time to prepare for it. There's nothing worse than flipping a calendar over and all of a sudden, you realize you've got three things due on the first week of the next month and you had no idea it was coming. So, the earlier you can start to see what's coming, and then work on different things that you um can explore for time management. Like I said, the Pomodoro and 'don't break the chain' are just two strategies that we use often with students, but you're really gonna have to test out yourself what works best for you, because what works for one person might not work for everyone. So, explore some of those things now. Think about the tasks that you're doing, so, you might need different energy, or different times a day, or different tools for doing your readings versus watching your lectures versus writing an assignment. So, you really got to think about the task itself and all of the things that go into completing that task.

So, we did create um some modules for incoming students, online modules. Sonia mentioned that the university also created some transition modules as well. So, we created our MORE modules on Brightspace, and these modules are used to provide an introduction to common learning strategies and assistive technology approaches. They're able to be registered for at any point in time after you register with PMC, or again get your acceptance. And again, it's supposed to help supplement those one-on-one appointments. So, when you're not meeting with the Learning Strategist, you'll have access to those tools and those resources online. So far, we have the Time Management module available, the Note-Taking module, and the Study module available for students, and we're always working on creating more. So, when you do come to Carleton next year, you might see a few more modules available for you to access and start working on.

So again, if you have any questions about Learning Strategies, or once you register, you're like “I really want to get connected with a Learning Strategist,” feel free to drop in. We are located in 501 University Centre. You can give us a call at 613-520-6608. You're welcome to email us at our Learning Strategies email which is PMC_LS@carelton.ca. And of course, there's so much information on our website. So, feel free to check out “Registering With PMC” on the PMC website because that is where you will find a bunch of tips that we're covering today and so many more for your transition. Thanks so much for listening!