Dear counsellor,

Please advise me on how i can encourage my colleagues to study. They seem less interested and focused in their academics, and i feel i should help. However, they are all older than me, so i don’t want to offend them.

Yours, Thomas

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Dear Thomas,

Students’ academic success is largely influenced by the people around them. These may include teachers, parents and classmates regardless of their age. One great way to help your colleagues out of a failure is changing their mindset to appreciate that academic weaknesses are opportunities to improve their performance. Students who struggle in school typically have real strengths and weaknesses within their underlying learning skills.

You should take time to examine your friends’ academic strengths and weaknesses and find ways to capitalise on the strengths while striving to minimise the weaknesses. Study how best your friends learn things and find methods that will best utilise the way they learn. Establish a friendly association with them and use good communication skills to discuss the best ways of achieving academic success and approach teachers for further clarification on the areas that seem complex to understand. 

This can be developed through making intensive group discussions and getting engaged in different academic ventures so that your colleagues gain academic independence and excel in their studies. Remember that poor academic performance can be influenced by a number of factors including teachers, parents, individual intelligence levels and motivation.

Advise your friends to attend classes regularly and do all the assignments, tests and meet due deadlines. Establish strong lines of communication with teachers and other fellow high-achieving classmates to obtain expert knowledge and assistance from different sources to accelerate their understanding of different concepts and ultimately improve their performance. 

It’s all about making yourself more available for interaction and training your friends to develop organisational habits that will teach them to be self-managing and organised students both of which have great contribution to academic performance. 

The relationship which exists between academic achievement and the amount and quality of student effort is the most significant part of the learning process. You must help them to understand that the connection between learning and academic success is a powerful weapon for any promising student and one can’t achieve high academically until there is deliberate effort to improve their performance.

If your friends offer to individually get committed to improving their grades, they will be well on the right way to a journey of greater academic victory.