#159 Study Strategies to Beat Your Teen’s Mid-Year Slump with Katie Azevedo Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker Robbins 0:44
Is your teenager’s backpack a black hole of missing assignments? Are you watching their grades slip while their stress levels soar? The mid year academic slump is a real phenomenon that catches many families off guard, but there are proven strategies to help your teen regain their momentum and confidence. Today’s conversation with study skills expert Katie Azevedo reveals practical solutions the three biggest mid year challenges students face overwhelming stress, declining grades and vanishing motivation. Katie shares specific techniques for task management, time visualization and active study methods that can transform your team’s academic performance. We’ll explore how you can support your student without doing the work for them, including exactly what questions to ask to gage if their study methods are actually working for them. If you’re concerned about your student’s academic performance, or want to prevent a mid year slump before it starts, this episode provides a roadmap you need to transform your student’s year. You’ll learn concrete strategies that go beyond basic reminders and generic advice giving you tools you can implement today to help your teen regain control of their academic journey tomorrow. I’m Lisa Marker Robbins, and I want to welcome you to College and Career Clarity a flourish coaching production. Let’s dive right in to a great conversation.

Well, Katie, finally, having you on the show, I feel like we’ve been talking. I know we’ve been talking for well over a year, and I am such a fan and admirer of the awesome work that you’re doing with students, around their study habits, around their executive functioning, because it is a game changer. Well,

Katie Azevedo 2:37
thank you, Lisa, thank you. And the fandom goes both ways. For sure, we run in the same circles here, and I am just I’m very excited for our conversation today.

Lisa Marker Robbins 2:49
Me too. And you know what? It couldn’t come at a better time, because it is midpoint. And I realize midpoint varies a little bit by where you live in the country. Here in Ohio, we get out of school by the end of May, before Memorial Day. But where you live, it’s later in June. But regardless, that January, February mark is like, okay, it’s your midpoint. And oftentimes that is when kids, maybe parents, maybe kids, knew it was not going so well, and parents all of a sudden get semester guys, and they’re like, whoa. Grades, and they’re like, holy cow, what’s going on? But you and I, because we’re both growth minded, people believe there’s always room for a very fresh start. So because you specialize in this, I could sit here and go like, Oh, I bet they’re struggling with this, or this is the cause, but you are a study habits guru. What are the top problems that you see creeping up, things that kids are struggling with, or maybe their parents call you and their the parents are freaking out like I had no idea this was going on. How would you distill it for our listeners so they can, you know, listen to this with their own kids in mind.

Katie Azevedo 4:03
Great question. And I could talk about study habits and study skills all day long. So clear your schedules, but this is the time of year. I mean, if it depends if we’re in college or high school, but for college students, oftentimes, some courses, well, high school, too. Some courses are ending in a second semester, a new round of courses will begin. So there is sort of some fresh start, like literal fresh starts that happen this time of year. But with the advent of the cooler season and it getting a little bit darker, a lot of kids this time of year enter into and I think as adults and parents, we feel this too, the stress and the overwhelm that comes around this time of year with finals, or, depending on your class, maybe midterms. So it’s the stress and overwhelm with managing the basic responsibilities of being a student that is what I would say is one of the. Three common struggles that students have this year, and we can dive more into that. Number two is going to be an actual decrease in academic performance, something that is quantitatively measurable in the, you know, with GPAs and grades. And this can be a result of having the stress and overwhelm, right? The stress and overwhelm, if it’s been an incubation for some time, can result in in the lower grades, for sure. Well,

Lisa Marker Robbins 5:29
I have a question about that. So if you, if you’re working with kids and you’re looking at their scores, you said, like, it’s common mid year to see a decrease in the grades and their academic performance, and perhaps that’s caused by stress, or maybe it’s caused by something else. Do you see, like, what’s the curve throughout the school year? Like if we were looking at a high school student? And to your point, some high school courses are only a semester. Some are for the full year. Some high schools themselves are on block schedules, so it’s only a semester. But do kids typically start strong, and then is there a natural low for most kids mid year, or like, what does that curve look like?

Katie Azevedo 6:15
So I mean, you know, the answer to so many of these questions is it depends on the student. Are there mental health factors and things like that involved? But yeah, there does tend to be a curse. We’ve got the typical September, October, New year, new me motivation. I got my new school supplies and my new pen, and I’m going to do this year different, right? A lot of our students enter the school year with this like, this is going to be my best year yet. And the the problem with motivation, and that’s actually number three, the struggle. Number three that students deal with this time of year is low motivation. Motivation is temporary, and it’s really neat when it shows up, but we can’t count on it showing up, and so we need to rely on systems and and strategies and habits for when motivation doesn’t show up to the party, right? So that motivation can often take students into September, October, maybe even November, early November, sometimes there’s a sense of relief of, okay, well, it’s Thanksgiving break. If they’re here in the States, I could get to go home. I get to recoup a little bit, but it’s that mid November to the end of the first semester, where I tend to see the biggest dip in student grades, in motivation and an increase in their stress and overwhelm with all of the things that are involved in being a student who can handle a workload, that makes sense? Yeah,

Lisa Marker Robbins 7:44
it does. I mean, I always say like, kids are motivated for something, yeah, and so always like, it’s not like you. In my mind, I always think like, you don’t have a lack of motivation, but it’s what are you motivated towards? So as a college major and career coach, I find that sometimes when they get overwhelmed, their motivation is just not to feel the overwhelming feelings, right? And so they will do what they can to protect themselves from those feelings. As you were just talking, and I was thinking, Oh, you brought up Thanksgiving, you know, and then we get into the holiday season, whether it’s Christmas or Hanukkah or just winter break, depending on what you celebrate, maybe the motivation, the what appears to be lack of motivation on the academic side, could be motivation around like, oh, it’s the holidays. It’s time to have fun. Or, you know, before we hopped on you and I were talking about Black Friday shopping and and things like that. So I always say that you’re motivated around something. And it could be that you’re just motivated to not feel the negative feelings make decisions, or maybe they’re just as you were saying that about holidays and things like that. I’m like, maybe it’s just the motivation around I gotta switch into the holiday year of having fun,

Katie Azevedo 9:03
right? So the motivation becomes a distraction, because your motive, yeah, exactly.

Lisa Marker Robbins 9:07
And then the New Year hits, like, right now, and it’s like, you know, it’s almost like that seasonal affective disorder, which I don’t even have that, but you talked earlier about, like, it’s dark out, it’s cold, we’re like hibernating, and now the fun is over, but yet, we’re at we’re at a lull, we’re at a low point,

Katie Azevedo 9:28
right? You know, I find that the students who have a better understanding of how motivation works and how it really, truly is a feeling and it’s not a strategy, those are the ones who can sort of ride the lulls and motivation. They have that self awareness to say, this is what it is. I’m feeling meh. It could because of these reasons, or could because of reasons. I don’t know, but I’m still going to rely on my systems, because those are the things that I can count on. Those are the students who have the most success, you know, transitioning from. One semester to the next semester this time of year, or even just from September to May or June. It’s the students, I think, who often don’t have those strategies and systems and study habits in place, who tend to experience the greatest dip in motivation, because when their motivation, when they don’t have those systems in place, they don’t get the academic performance that they were hoping for, or that their parents were hoping for, that they thought for themselves. So they become overwhelmed, right? And then that’s when they’re motivated. It’s like a really negative feedback loop. So the common denominator of all these three common struggles that I see students face the the increased stress and overwhelm, the poor academic performance and the decrease in motivation. For many of those situations, there are very concrete and practical strategies that students can put in place. So that’s what I’m excited to share. Well,

Lisa Marker Robbins 10:57
you know, as you were talking about, I like how you normalized a lack of motivation, like everybody’s going to experience a lack of motivation at some point. It’s how you ride that wave when it comes that is going to make the difference. So I mean, I really want all of our listeners to hear that, because we’re not I would say what I’m hearing for you is you’re not endeavoring to say, like, we’re gonna solve motivation problems. Your kid will always be motivated like it’s not possible. You know, I I told you earlier, like I’ve had a cold all week. I haven’t been motivated to work out because I just don’t feel good, and my body needs extra rest. And so, you know, I’m motivated to just get on the other side of my cold, is what my motivation is. But those things are, you know, those things are going to come. So let’s normalize, first of all, that there will be lacks of motivation. That’s nothing to shame anybody over. But let’s learn how to ride that wave. And you’re, talking about systems. I A lot of times on my executive coaching with my business owner clients. I’ll talk about like, if you’ve installed the routines and the habits, which is really a system, just like you said, then you can go into autopilot, even when you don’t feel like doing things right, exactly,

Katie Azevedo 12:18
right, exactly. So if I’m working with a high school or college student, either, you know the in my private study skills, executive function coaching, or, you know, inside my course, school habits, University, where I always start is the foundational there’s two foundational pillars that are attached to so many other academic experiences that our students have, and that is task management. And time management, there is more than this, but as our students, if our students really, truly learn to lock, create, first and then lock in a task management system, any time management system, and truly understand what those are independently and how, then they lock in and work together as gears. Those two things together have the potential to reduce that stress and overwhelm. Because students know what is due. They knew. They know when it’s due, they know when on their calendar they plan to do those activities. There is absolute, 100% clarity around what the things are and when they’re going to get done. And a lot of our students do not know what time management and what task management really means parents all the time. I’m on phone, you know, phone calls. My kids disorganized. My kid doesn’t know what time management is. But then, you know, sometimes just all in the goal of, you know, having a robust conversation and getting to the nuggets of things. I’ll ask the parent, well, what is time management? Well, it’s getting their things done. Okay, well, how does your student make time visible, right? Because time is a very measurable thing, we can count it, right? And so students using calendars making time visible so they can see, okay, I have class on these days from these times, these are my available pockets of time. Oh, wait, nope, it takes me 20 minutes to get to that class. I go to the gym here. Oops, I need to eat. Oftentimes, when I’m building out a calendar system with students, they forget to add in the commute times. They forget to add in their realistic bedtime, their downtime, which is super important. We’re not just all work, no play. That’s not realistic. And then they see their true pockets of available time. So that’s step one, and then our task management. That is something that, you know, if I ask students or even parents, what is task management, it’s, it’s my things, okay, well, what does that mean, my assignments, okay, but what if you have a test on Friday? What does that mean? Well, that’s not an assignment, because that’s during class. Ah. So that is where we go wrong, because if there is a test on Friday, there are tasks that are related to that test on Friday, happening, happening, successfully, right? We need to study, well, when are we going to study all we need our time management system in place to know where those pockets of time are right. So that’s what I mean by just a simple example of creating a task management system and a time management system independently, and then having them work together. That can also, of course, increase, you know, the motivation, because that’s clarity. Wherever we don’t have clarity, we lose motivation when we know what we’re doing, when we’re doing it, we know what the criteria of success looks like. Alright, then we are motivated to say, Okay, I’m going to get that check mark. I’m going to be done with that thing. And then when we have the motivation and the time and we can actually sit down and plan our study sessions. Now this is the third piece that can help our students overcome these. You know, typical struggles during this time of year is actual study skills. I can’t tell you how many times I am working with students, or I hear from students or parents who said my kid doesn’t know how to study, and to them like that, that acknowledgement is often in despair. My kid doesn’t know how to study, and you know, I’ve hear it so many times, but the reality is, our kids are not taught. Our kids are taught content in school. The Spanish teacher teaches Spanish, the math teachers teaches math, the English teacher teaches ELA, right? I have a master’s degree in special education. I used to be a special education teacher in a high in high school, and I was in charge of an academic support classroom where I was supposed to be teaching students executive functions, study skills, time in and there was no curriculum in our school system whatsoever, which is why I had to, well,

Lisa Marker Robbins 16:51
right? I’ve always said the same thing. I’m like, it’s interesting. There are certain things, like, in my world, career development, career advising, study habits in your world. I was also a classroom teacher a very long time ago, for eight years, and that nobody actually owns, like algebra, one tends to be owned by eighth grade and ninth grade math teachers, right? Study Habits is an essential skill which actually builds the soft skills that employers want, which I know from my career advising and and yet nobody owns it, because everybody has all this content that they have to get done. And it just nobody wants to own it. There’s not room on the plate to add one more thing. And so it’s just, it’s fascinating to me. I think financial literacy has been one in the past, but a lot of states are mandating now that there is a graduation requirement, but there’s no graduation requirement for Career Development and Advising or study habits. And so that’s why you and I both have right? Is why you and I both have jobs. Frankly, I have a question. So you name these three, it sounded like of the three strategies, test management, which is funny. I think I hear a lot of people talking about time management, but I rarely hear people actually talk about task management. So that might be new for some of our listeners. It’s, you’re up close and personal with that every day. But that to me, I was like, Oh, we really do need to think of those as separately. It sounded like, for sure, study skills was happening maybe third in that. Would you if a listener said, Oh, we’re going to tackle with my kiddo for a better semester either task management or time management. Like, should one come before the other? Are they concurrent? Like, what? What would your advice be to a listener who wanted to try to go at it on their own? That’s

Katie Azevedo 18:53
a great question. I’m in my head as you’re saying that I’m picturing like a three legged stool and task management, time management and study skills are all a leg of a stool, and if you remove one, you’re going to wobble, right? And I Gosh, that’s a great question. So

Lisa Marker Robbins 19:10
it sounds like it’s kind of like concurrent it is, because if

Katie Azevedo 19:13
you, if you have really solid study skills, and we can talk about some of that, but you don’t have a grasp of your time and what your actual tasks tasks are, then you’re not going to be able to use those study skills in a way that makes sense, because you won’t know when your study sessions are. You won’t know

Lisa Marker Robbins 19:33
you could have fantastic study habits. Sure be a great study, or you know that you should study four days in advance, or whatever for a particular test and and sprinkle it over the days leading up to the test, instead of cramming the day before the day of. But if you’re not managing your time, then it’s not going to make a difference

Katie Azevedo 19:53
right in the reverse is true too. So if you have weaker study skills, but you have a great. Task management system, and, you know, some color coded Google Calendar, and it’s, you know, beautiful, but and you’re like, Okay, well, I need three hours to study for this exam, and then the next day, another three hours. The next day, another three hours because you don’t actually know how to study. So you are wasting three hours a day using passive study techniques that don’t work but that feel like studying. Right then you really, genuinely think you’re being a good do be because you’re reading through your notes and you’re, you know, flipping through your textbook, and you’re scrubbing through the videos that were assigned in your portal, all of that feels like studying and gives studying vibes. And if a parent walked by their child’s bedroom, or, you know, a dorm room, and saw their kid hunched over computer with books out that all gives it has the optics of studying, but most of our kids are not using active recall study techniques, which, hands down, is the only way to get information from the outside, books, videos, notes, whatever, into our long term memory, not our short term memory. We are not memorizing. Memorizing is so temporary and it’s one dimensional. Real learning is 4k it is 5d if that’s even a thing, I don’t know. Maybe it

Speaker 1 21:17
is, it is today. It is today, today,

Katie Azevedo 21:20
and it’s real. Learning involves the ability to use and remember information, recall it when you need it, and to be able to apply it to any type of question that appears on the test. But that fake passive studying, which is like the reading, let me let’s just, can we just, I’m going to, you know, I’ll get off my soapbox in a moment, but yeah, reading or rereading or even just reading is not studying. Reading is an absolutely, completely different verb. Reading involves, you know, decoding and moving your eyeballs over a page. Studying is so much thicker and grittier than that, then that is what our kids don’t know. Active recall study techniques must involve testing yourself on the material with no answers in front of you. It is uncomfortable. It can make us itchy. It can make us feel like we don’t know something. But the reality is, when we’re studying early on in the study process, we don’t know things, and we do not want to hide from that fact. So

Lisa Marker Robbins 22:25
question for you, I love that example that you just gave of you can walk past your kiddos study area that whether that’s in their bedroom, I don’t know if that’s a no no in your world or not, but if you walk past they look like they’re studying. I’ve heard, you know, in my past life as a teacher like my kid is spending hours on studying, they manage their time really well. If a parent’s listening right now and they’re like, Oh yeah, it does look like the optics, as you said on that, that my kiddo is doing this. Is there a question they could ask them to figure out, like, if they really know how to study if that’s the issue? Because I have heard parents say, like, I’m not coming to get I’m not going to an executive functioning coach like Katie to necessarily spend more time on studying. Quite frankly, my kid spends way too much time they need. As you and I both strongly believe there is a place for downtime. This is not a 24/7 we do need to build that time in. What could a parent? How could they maybe assess if their kid really doesn’t know how to studies or a question they could ask, because visibly, there could be misleading cues,

Katie Azevedo 23:47
right, right? It’s a good question, because as a parent myself, too, I know that it’s not always practical for us to be in that involved in our kids academics and our kids day to day study process. That’s their job, right? It’s our it’s our job as parents to make sure that our kids have the resources and every opportunity to succeed. That’s what I believe. But it is really tough, especially if you’re, you know, a working parent to be, you know, running study sessions with your with your kid. But if you’re at the point where there is desperation and frustration on both ends. Your kids are working really hard, your kids spending hours on their stuff, and the grades don’t reflect that, or maybe the grades are there, but at the expense of what their their mental health, their stress, their sleep, their social life, right? We don’t want that for our kids. Then you could start by just asking your kids to explain to you what their study methods are. What are you doing with this material? Okay? And if you’re hearing an answer that’s like, well, I’m going through my notes. If I’m reading the looking at the teacher slide. So reading, going through, reviewing, looking at those are all red flags, but there’s not actual studying going on. What you do want to look out for? These are good stuff. Lines. I’m making flashcards. I’m doing problem sets. I’ve made myself a quiz. I am finding questions online, because you can find anything you want there. You know, just Catcher in the Y, Catcher in the Rye, chapter seven, reading, check quiz PDF. You can type that into Google, and I’m sure you’ll get some form of a quiz right? I’m answering questions. I’m you could also ask your child, if you if you’ve got the time and capacity for this to tell you and explain to you what it is they’re learning. Because if we can’t, if your child us too, but if anybody can’t explain something clearly in a way that the recipient can thoroughly understand it. The person themselves does not understand it enough, because we cannot summarize, we cannot paraphrase, and we cannot explain that which we do not understand. And so just very sort of casually. So you’re learning about XYZ. Tell me about that. And if your child is like, Oh, well, I know it, like it’s just really hard to explain. Ah, if you knew it, it wouldn’t be hard to explain, right? And we don’t want to, we’re not creating, I bet you moments with our kids. I know it you got stuck. That means you didn’t know it, right, right? But these are just ways that we can start leaving hints and clues to our kids that, hey, you know, maybe there’s a better way to do this. There is legitimate study techniques. This is what I what I teach all day long, seven days a week, right? This is there’s ways that school doesn’t have to be so hard. And that is something I want to shout from the rooftops.

Lisa Marker Robbins 26:39
Amen. That’s good news. So what I hear is hope for the teen that’s listening to this, or the college student or the parent who got surprised by their kids grades. I remember when my kids were in college, I would say, I’m not gonna monitor your grades. You’re an adult, and I don’t think we should be monitoring our college students grades. It’s my opinion, but you do have to show me your report card before I pay the next tuition bill. And that was always the deal that we made. So they knew that there was going to be some like, I have to see proof, because I’ve worked with teenagers long enough, over 30 years, that I’m like, okay, these kids sometimes are telling their parents a story, or we hear horror stories of like kids who like parents just go like, my kid wasn’t even going to school. I just can’t even believe it. So I would always say, I’m not going to monitor I’m not going to be logging in. You’re a college student. Now, I think when they’re freshmen in high school, maybe there’s a place we’re still doing that and having those conversations, but you know, by the time they go off to college, they’re on their own, and you don’t have any say in this, so you got to wean them off that and help them own it. But you know, there’s got to be some level of accountability. And I think you give great questions to ask to kind of check and to your point, I wholeheartedly believe what you believe that we’re there to resource and support them, to be a soft place for them to land, but they’ve got to do the work. And we talk about this with career development, career advising. You know, it’s not owned at the high school, although some high schools, we have high schools that are partners of ours, that are using our program. These conversations need to happen at home. They need to happen at school. The kids have to be willing participants. But as a parent, you can’t figure out for them. You shouldn’t be figuring out with them what they’re going to do with the rest for them, what they’re going to do with the rest of their life, right? And

Katie Azevedo 28:42
two, a lot of parents don’t have these skills themselves, or maybe didn’t attend college, you know, all, all of the different reasons, but sometimes parents themselves aren’t the best people to be teaching these skills, right? Absolutely,

Lisa Marker Robbins 28:56
they Well, I, a lot of parents will say to me, I don’t even know what careers are out there anymore. Or, I know there’s careers that we don’t even know what they are, because this is what I did and what my husband did. And, you know, I don’t know what other jobs are out there that might be good and we want to know. Or I wrote, I wrote an admission on LinkedIn the other day. You know, I had a below 3.0 GPA. In high school, I was way more concerned with being social, right? Because one of my coaching clients said to me, Have you always been this discipline that I’m like, Absolutely not. And there was a point in my early 40s where the rubber had to meet the road, and then I that’s where I became a high performer. So I know these things can be learned. But I also know you just said, like, not every parent is going to know how to be the one to help, but you can be the one to resource them and support them with ways to get there.

Katie Azevedo 29:50
That’s true. That’s exactly right. That’s exactly right. So

Lisa Marker Robbins 29:53
Katie, you are in so many places that you’ve got valuable information and. So and you’re available for people to work with. So how do people find you? What are the the best ways awesome?

Katie Azevedo 30:08
So if you’re, if any of the material that we’re talking about today is resonating, your student is stuck, and you’re like, I don’t think they have a task management system. I don’t think they have, you know, they don’t know how to study, then probably my course is the best place to start. So that’s school habits, university.com, everything that you need to know. It’s the study skills, time management, task management, note taking, annotating an organization. So there’s six modules in there. It’s for high school, college and graduate students. If you want to learn more about me or just sort of my approach school habits.com. Is the website where you can find resources to everything. There’s a podcast, learn and work smarter.com. Lisa, I’m so thrilled that we’ll be having conversations over there as well. And then I’m on Instagram, at school habits, so many places, as you say. And YouTube,

Lisa Marker Robbins 31:04
I don’t know, clearly, you’ve got a good task management and time management system, indeed, yes, not be able to do all of those things. Katie, thank you for joining me.

Katie Azevedo 31:15
Thank you, Lisa. This has been wonderful. Thank you. You.

Lisa Marker Robbins 31:24
I hope this conversation with Katie has given you some practical strategies to help your teen overcome the mid year academic challenges and regain their momentum. Remember, it’s not about working harder, it’s about working smarter with proven systems for task management, time visualization and active study techniques. If you’re ready to help your teen set meaningful academic goals and create better study habits, I invite you to check out our free student goal setting framework at flourish coaching co.com forward slash goals. This framework will help your family move beyond general resolutions to create specific, achievable plans for academic success. I’m also linking to it in the show notes. If you found this episode helpful, please share it with someone who might benefit from it. Sharing following this podcast rating and reviewing helps us support more families navigating the college admissions process. Thank you for listening to the College and Career Clarity podcast, where I help your family move from overwhelmed and confused to motivated clear and confident about your teen’s future.