By Katie Azevedo, M.Ed.
College and graduate students often have breaks between classes, unlike the back-to-back schedule typical in high school. While many students slide into their seats with 11 seconds to spare, top students operate differently — and with a little less chaos.
By the end of this blog post, I hope to convince you of the value of arriving just 10 minutes early so you can prepare and prime before class. (What’s prime? That’s an awesome question. We’ll get to that in a minute.)
Hold up though — before you shut down this blog post and tell me nobody does that, Katie!, hear me out (and also, yes they do): the 10 minutes before class officially begins is a golden window for setting yourself up for a better lecture.
Taking just 10 minutes to prepare and prime before your college or graduate class begins will help you absorb new material more effectively – which, let’s all admit, is the entire point.
In this blog post, I share practical tips specifically designed to help college and graduate students learn how to prime before class like top students. Two tips are priming strategies and two tips are preparation strategies.
Note: If you’re a college student with a weekly no-class day, use these tips to get ahead when you have no class.
How to Prime Before Class
Priming doesn’t have to be complicated or take a long time. In fact, you can benefit from the effects of priming in just 10 minutes before class. But first, let’s start with what priming is.
What Does Priming Mean?
Let’s get an important definition out of the way before we begin. Priming is a common word in the education space. Priming is when students are exposed to material before fully learning it. In other words, it’s when a student experiences a preview of information prior to a lesson.
Priming is effective for learning because it “prepares” the brain to receive new information. The enables us to better understand, process and store new information for next time.
Many teachers will build priming activities into their lessons. But students can also prime themselves, which is what some of the following tips address.
Priming Strategies for Students
You don’t have to use both of the following priming strategies together. Using both will have a greater impact, but if you only have 10 minutes to prepare and prime, pick and choose one.
1. Review Previous Class Notes
Skimming through notes from the last class is a terrific priming strategy. Reviewing your most recent notes helps you recall key points and encourages your brain to start building connections with the new material.
Why is reviewing notes necessary if we just took the notes one day before? Because according to many studies, including the original study conducted by memory psychologist Harmann Ebbinhouse, we now understand the Forgetting Curve. The Forgetting Curve tells us that ”a day or two after attending class or reading a chapter or article, students will have forgotten approximately 75% of what was learned. Moreover, most of that forgetting happens within the first hour” (Witman, John). (Yikes!)
Reviewing our previous notes 10 minutes before class starts not only solidifies the information we learned the day before – which is a huge advantage in itself – but it also gives the new information we’re about to learn a place to land, so to speak.
2. Pre-Read or Skim the Day’s Topic
I’m not suggesting you fully teach yourself lecture material before class. But if you know the topic for the day, it can be helpful to quickly skim through relevant textbook sections, slides, or any pre-assigned material to give yourself context for the lecture.
Where do you get this information? If you’re in college or graduate school, you would use your syllabus. You can also log into your course portal and see what your professor has posted. Often there are slides, readings and other resources posted inside the portal that we don’t necessarily know about because our professors didn’t mention them in class. Opening and skimming even one of these materials in the 10 minutes before class is a great way to prime yourself for the upcoming lecture.
How to Prepare for a Class
In this blog post here, I teach you how to prepare for class in a much more complete and robust manner. Those strategies are tough to cram into the 10 minutes before your class starts, but they really are the most effective.
Preparation Strategies for Students
Below, I’m sharing 2 things you can easily fit into the 10-minute prep window before class starts. In fact, you can easily do both.
1. Prepare Your Note-Taking Setup
It makes no sense to wait until your teacher starts the lecture to get out your note-taking materials. So in the 10 minutes before class, get your notebook, device, or note-taking app ready, and create headings or an outline based on the day’s topic.
If setting up an outline of your notes before class starts sounds too difficult, at least open to a fresh page, put the date on the top, and draw a line down the page if you’re using 2-column or Cornell notes. (Not sure how to take notes in a lecture class? Start here.)
Having an organized note-taking setup can make it easier to stay engaged in class and capture information accurately.
2. Organize Materials and Clear Distractions
Take a few minutes to set up a clutter-free workspace by putting away any non-class-related items. Silence notifications on your phone and your primary device.
You might be coming directly from another class, in which case you might have irrelevant tabs open: close them. Or you may be coming from a movie session, in which case you may have Netflix playing in the background: close it down. Take a few minutes before class starts to prepare your device and your workspace.
Other ways to prepare your workspace before class include:
- getting out your notebook and putting it on your desk
- finding and getting your writing utensils ready
- putting everything unrelated to the class in your bag
Final Notes about Preparing and Priming Before Class
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: success in school doesn’t come from one singular heroic act. Rather, it comes from the cumulation of many small habits each day.
When we have a good note-taking system, it’s easy to review our notes before class because our notes are readable and organized.
When we have a good task management system, we know where to access upcoming readings to skim before class.
When we have a good time management system, it becomes possible to arrive to class 10 minutes early to prepare and prime adequately.
Again, it’s the cumulation of the small school habits we implement every day that leads to the greatest, most life-changing results.
The post How to Prepare and Prime Before Class (In Just 10 Minutes) Like Top Students appeared first on SchoolHabits.
