To help students build confidence and skills in learning, Salt Lake Community College offers seven free study skills workshops at the Taylorsville Redwood, Jordan and South City Campuses.
All workshops being held are meant to be valuable to students. Because attendance at every workshop is not required, any SLCC student is welcome to attend only the workshops they are interested in.
“The individual classes are part of a whole and feed off of each other to provide tools and techniques to help students understand and learn new material or skills,” said Linda Richards, Learning Enrichment Program Coordinator. “It helps students to integrate the new information with what they already know in a way that makes sense to them, and to have the ability to recall the information or skill later.”
One reason for the workshops is that a lot of students have difficulty getting the key points of out of a textbook. They don’t realize the importance of reading the current chapter before attending class. These workshops can help students learn how to better understand the material that will be discussed during class by the instructor. Then if they don’t understand something in the text, they can discuss it with the instructor.
Each campus has an instructor for the workshops, which are open to all students at the college. Linda Richards teaches the workshops at the Taylorsville Redwood Campus, Steven Lewis teaches at the Jordan Campus and Michelle Thatcher teaches at the South City Campus.
The first workshop at the Taylorsville Redwood Campus was held on September 8. It covered time management, where students learned to prioritize and organize activities and prepare for test taking. One of the concepts of time management is “back planning.” This gives a “bird’s eye” view of what needs to be done, when assignments are due and allows the student to be ready for tests.
On September 15, fourteen students attended the second workshop, titled Learning and Memory. It is a fact that without memory there would be no learning. This concept helped the students at the workshop develop strategies to remember more efficiently. One way a student can improve their ability to remember is to use their unique learning style and to alter their style if they want beter results.
“It (the workshop) helped me learn some good study techniques because I’m an audio and visual learner,” said James Hall, a surgical technology student.
“It’s good to see the different learning and memory strategies,” said Renee Wu, a dental hygiene student.
The next workshop at the Taylorsville Redwood Campus, called Textbook Reading/Notes, will be held on September 22. Getting key information out of a textbook will be the topic of conversation. The following week, on September 29, students will learn different note taking techniques.
Workshops at Taylorsville Redwood during the month of October include: study skills on October 6, stress management on October 20 and Strategies for Test Taking Success on October 27. All workshops at the Taylorsville Redwood Campus will run from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m., and will be held in BB 120.
The remaining workshops at the Jordan Campus include: textbook reading and note-taking on September 28, classroom note-taking on October 5, study skills on October 12, stress management on October 19, and test taking strategies on October 26. These workshops will be held in SP 208 from 2:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m.
At the South City Campus, workshops will follow the same schedule as the Jordan Campus, but will be on Tuesdays from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. in N305. The next workshop there will be held on September 27.
