If your child is struggling to achieve solid grades, achieving grades lower than his or her abilities would indicate, or achieves solid grades but lacks real understanding of the material, then you need our Learning to Learn: Study Skills and Methods Program.

Our program is a one-to-one study skills and methods course taught by Hayden Shumsky that gives students the tools to master all of the areas of the curriculum. We present a reading, note-taking, and test preparation method that is customized to each area of the curriculum and to the strengths, weaknesses, and learning style of the student. We can teach this method to students of any level of achievement and ability and help them to acquire grades that they and their parents can be proud of. For students with learning and attention problems, we customize this program to the exact dimensions of their cognitive challenges.

In more than twenty-five years of offering this program, enrollees have changed their thinking and organizational patterns to their advantage and grades have shot up. The Learning to Learn Program gives every student the fundamental tools for efficient learning and retained understanding. And for those students who do not have convenient access to our office in the Houston Galleria-area, we offer the Learning to Learn Program via web-videoconference.

There is no more crucial set of academic skills than those that lead to efficient long-term retention of key concepts, important information, and main ideas. Unfortunately, such skills are lacking in all but the most sophisticated 5% of students. Most students get by with inefficient and disorganized procedures for learning. With each new school year, teachers present material that is the foundation for the higher levels of complexity that will follow in future years, but fail to teach students the essential skills to classify, organize, and retain information over long periods of time. Even those who acquire top grades are often achieving high scores strictly through memorization rather than through real mastery. Each new year, the pace of school quickens, concepts move more to abstraction, and memorization becomes more difficult and far less useful.

Many students, without a native set of skills and tools to organize the curriculum in an orderly fashion, treat all pieces of information as near-equal in importance. Yet, no student can hold on to large piles of information over time; there simply is not enough space in one’s brain for all that data. At the forefront of efficient comprehension is the ability to organize large amounts of material in a hierarchical fashion from most important to least important. Many students fail to achieve grades equal to their capabilities because they do not know how to separate inessential details from important points. Further, because they do not organize material with any useful system of classification, students have difficulty applying critical, abstract, and higher-order reasoning to the material that is presented to them.

In approximately 6 hours, your son or daughter can master the steps to retained understanding and efficient learning. With the Learning to Learn Program, he or she will know exactly how to read texts and novels for meaning, how to take useful notes from texts and lectures across the curriculum, how to efficiently prepare for tests, and how to write coherent essays. Learning can be easier and more productive than ever before when one has the tools and methods that lead to comprehension and retention. For more than 25 years, this method has been effective for students of every caliber and at all age levels from middle school through college.