Learn and Work Smarter

122. The Biggest Lie We Tell Struggling Students: Why Studying MORE Isn't the Answer

• Katie Azevedo • Episode 122

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⭐FREE Parent Training: How to Help Your Teen Handle School Like a Pro

Most struggling students are in the situation they’re in because no one ever taught them how to actually DO school. We expect them to learn, but nobody ever teaches them HOW.

Therefore, the "just study more" might be the most well-meaning, unhelpful advice we keep giving them.

In this episode of the Learn and Work Smarter podcast, I break down exactly why the study harder message misses the mark, what's actually going on for students who are working hard and still not seeing results, and what the real solution looks like.

What You'll Learn:

  • Why more effort applied to the wrong approach doesn't produce better results — and what it produces instead
  • The real reason high-achieving high schoolers often completely fall apart their first semester of college (it's not what you think)
  • Why the scaffolds schools provide (study guides, teacher slides, pre-made flashcards) can work against students in the long run
  • What most students are actually doing when they think they're studying, and why it doesn't work
  • The house-building metaphor that reframes everything about how we talk to struggling students
  • The six specific, teachable skills that make up the real foundation of academic success
  • The one question parents should ask before ever telling their student to try harder

🔗 Resources Mentioned:

❤️ Connect:

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For hundreds of tutorials featuring tips on studying, productivity, organization, learning, time management and more, head to my blog: SchoolHabits.com.

Hello and welcome to the Learn and Work Smarter podcast. I'm Katie Azevedo and I just wanna say right outta the gate, if you are a parent who has ever watched your students struggle in school and thought, I just don't get it. Like they are trying so hard. Or maybe the exact opposite is happening and you're like, oh my gosh, just study more. Or they just need to work harder or be more organized, and you've watched that advice, go absolutely nowhere, this episode is specifically for you. And if you are a student listening to this, which I know some of you are, some of my audience is, you know, parents and working professionals, and some are college and graduate students, some are high school students. I have the whole the whole thing here and I love it. So if you are a student, stay with me too, because what I'm covering today is gonna reframe the entire way that you think about your own academic struggles. Now, before we get into it, quick housekeeping. As always, the links to everything I mentioned will be in the show notes. If you are watching on YouTube, all of the links are there in the description box, and while you're over there, please subscribe to the show. If you're listening on a podcast app like Apple Podcasts or Spotify, you can access the show notes just by swiping up in the app. While you're listening, while you're there, feel free to leave a review of the show or share it. I also always have a full website page devoted to each and every episode where you can find more resources, links to the videos, links to the podcast, all of that, always at Learnandworksmarter.com/podcast. And then today, that is slash 122. Alright, housekeeping is done. Grab your pencils if you wanna take notes and let's begin. All right. We are gonna start today with a section that I am calling the advice that sounds right, but isn't. This is something that I hear constantly. I hear it from students, from parents, from teachers, from literally everybody in the academic space, and it goes something like this. You just need, this is like a picture, like adults telling this to students, right? You just need. To lock in and study more. You just need to be more organized. You just need to manage your time better, show a little more grit, dig in a little deeper, work a little harder, do more, do more, do more. And like, I totally understand why people say this. On the surface, this advice makes complete sense. We know that good grades matter. We know that academic performance opens doors, right? We know that effort is a real factor in success. So when a student is struggling, our instinct, I'm a parent too, so like I'm, I do this too, or like, I know better, but my instinct and our instinct is to say, we'll put in more effort and things will improve. But here is what I need you to understand today, and this is the thesis of the entire episode, okay? I love a good thesis, more efforts applied to the wrong approach. does not produce better results. More effort applied to the wrong approach, does not produce better results. It produces more frustration, more exhaustion, more relationship conflict, and eventually for a lot of students, it produces the belief that they're simply not smart enough or not capable enough to succeed in school. And that belief is wrong and it's unfair. Now, today, I do wanna dismantle this belief completely. I wanna explain exactly why study harder and study more is not just unhelpful advice. It's very unhelpful advice, but it's not just that it can actually be part of the problem that your teen or your young adult is facing, or if you are the student. This might be part of the problem that you are facing too. And I wanna give you a concrete way to think about what's really, really going on for students who are working hard and still not getting the results that they deserve. I wanna share a story, and I share this with full respect for student privacy. I never use real names or anything like that, but this story is real. So I'm gonna call this student Morgan. I have shared this story before, but here we go. She was in the top third of her high school class. She had a D, h, D, but it was really well managed. She was sharp, she was capable, and by most measures, she looked like a student who had things together, okay? In high school. But then she went to college and in her first year, Morgan's grades crashed. Crash. Like not just like dipped a little bit, not like wobbled, but like a complete crash. She was so overwhelmed that she almost didn't go back to campus after January break of her first semester of college. She was spinning out. No one could figure out why it, it appeared that it came outta the blue. It wasn't and more on that in a sec. But from the outside, Morgan looked like someone who should have, you know everything under control and be completely fine. Now when I started working with Morgan, it became obvious to me almost immediately what was happening. Morgan did not have any foundational study skills. She had never been taught how to study. And was surprises a lot of people, in high school, that gap is oftentimes completely invisible because the system and the structures and the scaffolds are compensating for students the whole time. And that's what happened to Morgan. All of the structures and scaffolds that she had in high school were compensating. For the skills she didn't have. Her teachers gave her pre-made study guides instead of requiring students to make their own, she used teacher slides instead of taking her own notes, she used pre-made digital flashcards instead of writing them out herself. Now, when I worked with Morgan, AI wasn't as much of a factor. This is like two years ago as it is now, but like the, the today is equivalent is students using AI to make all of these things they're scaffolding themselves. But those scaffolds generated by AI have just as negative impact as the ones provided innocently and well meaningly enough by teachers, by school systems. And listen, it's not the teacher's fault I taught in high school, there's just only so much time in the day, and teacher's job is to teach the content. They don't have time to teach how to access the content, so it's not their fault either. And all of these seemingly helpful supports the ones that are designed to make school more accessible for students had slowly over the years removed Morgan's ability to learn independently and to do these things for herself. Now, none of those things like premade flashcards and slides and all that stuff are bad on their own. And some students do need these scaffolds for accessibility purposes. But collectively, they meant that Morgan arrived at college without the foundational skills she needed to handle learning by herself 'cause they're not provided in college. And when that scaffolding was gone the first semester of college, when she sat in a lecture hall. With a professor who expected her to figure out what was important, to take her own notes, to study on her own schedule, manage her own time, make her own study guide. She had no framework for any of it. So what did she do when she started struggling? What did everybody around her, well-meaning people tell her to do, to study more, to try harder, to be more organized, to work harder. And she was already trying as hard as she knew how to try the problem, never was her effort. The problem was that she had never been taught the right things to effort on. She was never given that blueprint. So here's what we actually did. Morgan stopped wasting time on the hacky study methods that she found online on TikTok. She started using legitimate research backed study techniques that actually truly honestly work. And by work I mean take less time and give you better grades. She learned how to take notes in a way that she could remember the material more and deeper. So that by the time a test came around, like she already knew most of it'cause she was learning it gradually along the way, which dramatically cut down on the amount of time that she needed to spend studying it. Like there was no big, chaotic dramatic study sessions anymore when you just learn it along the way. She learned how to manage her time and her tasks in a way that was realistic. And sustainable using very real systems that I know she still uses today. Now, I don't honestly work with Morgan in a coaching capacity anymore, but she's still inside SchoolHabits University, you get lifetime access. And so she has access to all of those skills for life. And back a few months ago, she emailed me. It was the best. I love when students do this. She emailed me a picture of her class notes and was like, look, it's working. They were beautiful. Like it made me so happy. But was she skeptical at first? Absolutely. And when I introduced her to these skills, she looked at me like, okay, like Katie, this is like cheesy. Like she didn't say that, but sometimes I can get the sense from students that they're like, no way. Like nobody does this. Yes, they do. They just don't talk about it. But when she started, that's like the secret right there. When she started seeing the payoff in her grades. When she realized that she wasn't pulling all-nighters anymore, when she finally understood that memorizing material is such a fraud, like learning, it is so much easier. The hack is not memorizing it. The hack is actually learning it. Right. That's when she was like, wait, I'm like, this works. That's when she bought into it. No. Every single time that I work with a student like Morgan, I think the same thing. I think if only they had learned this sooner, Morgan would not have suffered the way she did if someone had just taught her these skills sooner. Okay. So. Why does the study harder advice fail your student, or if you're the student, why is it failing you so hard? Okay. We're gonna get into the mechanics of why this advice misses the mark, because I don't want you to just, you know, take my word for it. I want you to understand the logic so that you can see clearly when it's happening in your own home or in your dorm room, or to you or to your teen. Here is the core problem. The skills. Lean in a little closer. The skills that we tell students that they need, time management organization, knowing how to study, those are skills that students have never actually been taught. We assume they have them. Teachers assume it. Parents assume. We assume it's one of those things that students just figure out as they go or pick up naturally as they move through school. But the reality is nobody ever sits them down and shows them how to do any of it and to boot. These concepts are don't really abstract to begin with that like most people don't even know what they mean, like time management, like time's invisible. So like what do, what does that even mean? Like how do you manage something you can't see? What does that even mean? And if you think back to your own experience, if you're the parent, did anybody actually ever teach you how to study, how to manage your time, how to organize your academic life? For most people, the honest answer is no. So when we tell a student who has never been taught how to study to just study more, like what exactly are we asking them to do more of? We're asking them to do more of something they don't even know how to do correctly in the first place. And doing something incorrectly more often does not make anyone better at it. It just makes us more efficiently wrong. And this is where that kind of unfairness or injustice piece comes in when students try harder and they still don't succeed, they internalize it. They start to believe that they must be the problem, that they are not smart enough that they don't have what it takes. In my private coaching practice, I see this all the time, like kids come in with this full narrative of, I am not enough, and I'm like, you've never been taught like these, these poor kids. And the parents and the teachers, encouraging them to push harder are not trying to be unhelpful. They're the people who care the most in the world, and they're giving the best advice that they know how to give, but they are recommending a solution to a problem that they don't fully understand because nobody ever taught them the real answer or the real process either. Now, let me give you a concrete example. Think about what most people mean when they tell a student to manage their time better. I'm coming back to this one'cause I think it's a good one. Most people just picture like a to-do list, right? And you work through it until everything is checked off. And sometimes that means just finding more hours in a day. Actually, we can't invent time, so that's not a strategy, right? Maybe just stop procrastinating and push through and handle the list. Okay, well, there's genuine reasons why people procrastinate and we need to address those first, right? That is not what real time management is. Just make a list and do the things. I wish. Real time management is about knowing how to create a realistic plan based on a student's very real, actual life commitments, not some idealized version of their schedule. It's about understanding the difference between urgent tasks and important tasks. It's about knowing how to break a big, long-term project up with like a distant deadline into smaller pieces with micro deadlines. How to build in flexibility into a schedule for when things don't go to planned. And let's be honest, like when did things ever go to plan? It's about knowing the difference between a short-term task and a long-term project and how to balance and complete both without losing your mind or losing steps and deadlines along the way. And if your student doesn't understand those distinctions, telling them to manage their time better is like telling someone who's never cooked a a darn thing in their entire life to just make dinner. It's like the instruction's not wrong, like dinner does need to happen, but without knowing how to actually cook without a recipe, the instruction is completely useless and we can't get mad at the person for not cooking dinner when they don't know how. So let's just talk about studying, okay? Because this is one where I see like the most well-meaning parents get it wrong again through absolutely no fault of their own, okay? I'm not blaming you if you're a parent. When most parents ask their kid, did you study? They're so satisfied when the answer is yes. Yes, mom. I studied, yes, dad. They see an open laptop, maybe a notebook on the desk or on the kitchen table. The student says that they did the review game posted to the class portal. Maybe they looked over their notes, they reread the chapter, they feel ready. Or maybe you're a parent and your kids in college, and so you don't actually see that they're studying, but they're like reporting that like school's going okay. Because you haven't seen the grades yet, right? None of those things like having a laptop open and notebooks in front of you. That's not studying, and I wanna say that so clearly, reading notes is not studying, rereading notes is not studying. Reviewing materials is not studying. Recognizing information when you see it in front of you is not the same thing as being able to retrieve it when you need it. Real studying involves a very specific set of active recall strategies that build the neural pathways connected to long-term memory and retrieval. And before that sounds too complicated. It's not, I promise.'cause listen, these strategies take the exact same amount of time, often less time than what students are currently using. The difference is that they actually work. So when your student does all the things that look like studying and then gets a mediocre test grade and you or their teacher tells them like, you should have just studied more, you should have worked harder. What is that student supposed to do? Spend like more hours doing something that doesn't even work in the first place, right? Like more hours of ineffective, bad studying that still feels like studying does not produce better learning, or better grades, or a better learning experience, or a better mindset about school. It produces an exhausted, demoralized student who's starting to believe that the problem is them and it is not them. Okay. This can be no surprise here, but I love a good metaphor and I want to give you a way to really visualize the message of this episode today. And I think this metaphor that I'm about to walk you into makes my point clearer in a way that logic sometimes can't. So humor me as I give you this metaphor. Imagine that you ask your teenager to build a house, but you don't give them a blueprint. You don't give them any training. There are no instructions, no how to manual. There is nothing. You just tell them, Hey, a house needs to get built. Here are some materials. Go. So they try. They pick up shingles 'cause they know that a roof is involved. They get some tile.'cause like floors are a thing. They grab sheet rock because obviously there are walls and they have all of these materials and they start trying to put these things together in whatever order they think they can. Right. And they try to build the roof, but the roof has no walls to hold it up so it collapses. The sheet rock is falling because there is no foundation underneath. Nothing fits together at all because. Without a blueprint, there is no sequence. There is no structure. There's no logic connecting any of it. And then, right, get this, they're struggling. They're really struggling. And we as parents, we walk over and we say, try harder, like dig in more. You need to work faster. You need to do more, more, more. Where's the effort? So they start hammering like more nails, but they have no idea if those are even the right nails in the right spot into the right material. They're cutting deeper, but they don't know if they're cutting in the right place or the right thing. They're working harder and longer and faster, and they're doing more and more and more. At the end of the day, they are completely exhausted, surrounded by a big pile of materials, and there is nothing resembling a house. Here's the thing though, and it's kind of sad. Honestly, the effort was real. The materials were real. That time spent. Efforting was real, but tools and materials alone do not make a house. Effort without a blueprint, does not build anything. And this is exactly what's happening. For students who are working really hard and they're not succeeding, they have the tools. A planner, a laptop, an iPad, a study app, and AI subscription. Good gosh, don't even get me started. They have the materials, so they've got their notes and their textbooks and the class portals and the YouTube tutorials. They're doing things that they found online. Things that even their teachers suggested. They are trying. But without a blueprint, without knowing, you know, actually how to learn, how to actually manage their time, how to actually study the tools don't work. The effort that they're sincerely putting in does not compound into results. And so they keep working. Their grades don't improve, and everyone is confused, everyone's frustrated, and eventually everyone concludes that the kid is the problem. They're not the problem. What they haven't been taught is not their fault. It's not their fault that school doesn't teach these things. It's not their fault that they don't have that blueprint. So what is the blueprint? I wanna be very specific here because I think foundational academic skills can sound really vague, and vague is not useful. The blueprint is knowing how to learn. It is a specific, teachable set of skills. And I wanna emphasize teachable because this is not about like intelligence or grit. It is about skills that can be learned by any student when they're taught correctly, it includes knowing how to take notes. And I don't just mean like writing things down. I mean taking notes in a way that actually helps a student process and retain information, whether they're sitting in a fast-paced lecture, maybe watching a recorded video, working through a dense textbook chapter. These are different environments that require different approaches, and most students use the same strategy across all of them, and it doesn't work. It includes knowing how to study, not just reviewing and highlighting and rereading, not recognizing. Knowing the specific active recall strategies that build long-term memory. Knowing how to match the study approach to the format of the test, knowing how to study effectively so they're not spending three hours the night before an exam is still feeling unprepared. It includes knowing how to manage time and tasks, not just that to-do list, right, but a real system for catching all of the things for school, their job after school activities, life, personal stuff, how to plan realistically, how to break big projects down, how to build a schedule that can flex when life happens.'cause life always happens. It includes organization. Now in a world that is so digital and, and analog and hybrid and chaotic and messy, things are constantly shifting. And so an organization method that is flexible, that recognizes the hybrid world we live in, that's essential. And our kids need to know how to do that. These are not abstract concepts. These are specific learnable skills, and the reason that most students don't have them is simply that they were never taught. Nobody sat them down and said, this is how to learn. This is how to make school easier. They're told that they have to learn and they're supposed to, you know, know the Spanish words and know the Revolutionary War and know the things, but how that piece is left out. Now, I think the hardest part for parents to hear honestly is even that the most involved, the most educated, the most well-meaning, well-intentioned parents often can't fix this on their own, and it's not because these parents don't know enough. Not at all. Well, sometimes. But sometimes parents do know these things or they know their version of them, but because your student needs to own these skills themselves, the best outcomes I see happen, and remember, I've been an educator for 20 years. Over 20 years, I have worked with over 3000 students in a one-to-one capacity. That is not even including School Habits University, which is the online program. This is in my like one to one, not even when I was a high school teacher where I had classrooms. So when I talk about that number, I've worked with 3000 students, I'm not talking about students in my high school classroom when I taught high school, okay, this is one-to-one, and I say that so you know that I know what I'm talking about. So when I say things like the best outcomes I've seen happen, it is based on evidence. Two decades of evidence of working with students and talking to parents, and the best outcomes I see happen. Or when students are given the blueprint and the instructions to read it for themselves, not when it is handed to them or done for them, when AI does it. No, when they build it themselves with the right guidance. Now, I'll be honest, my own kids roll their eyes sometimes at my suggestions, and I am the actual expert. So if you have tried to help and it hasn't landed, like this is not a failure on your part, this is just how it works sometimes with parents and families, and that's just the reality of it. So if you have a student who is struggling despite the effort, or a student who's getting by, but maybe grinding way harder than they should have to, I want you to take one specific thing from today's episode. Before you encourage your student to study more or try harder or dig a little deeper, ask a different question. Ask, does my student actually know how to do this? Not in a general sense specifically. Do they know what effective studying looks like for the kind of tests that they're about to take? Do they know how to take notes in a way that helps 'em actually retain the information for that particular type of class? Do they have a time management system that accounts for their real life and not some idealized version they wish it looked like? And if the honest answer is, I'm not sure, that is a gap in their training. And gaps in training can be closed with skills. No student is born knowing how to do school. Some pick up pieces here and there as they move through high school and into college. But especially if someone has, you know, executive function deficits, they're not learning these things through observation. Okay. Even kids without a DHD and executive function deficits don't always learn these things through observation. And what if the kid doesn't have somebody to observe who has these skills mastered? Right. This figure it out as you go approach is really slow and it's really painful way to develop skills that can be learned systematically in a fraction of the time with the right framework. And not every student figures it out on their own. Right? Like, because if they could have, they would have already. If your a student has tried and is still struggling, it is because they haven't learned the steps yet, that I promise you is fixable. Now I wanna point you towards something that I think is going to be genuinely helpful here, and I say that because I built it specifically for parents who are watching their students struggle and have no idea how to make it better. I have a free training called How to Help Your Student Handle School Like a Pro with Study frustration, assignment overwhelm, or all the drama. It is a free training. In this training, I go deeper, not just on the myth that we covered today, but two other critical things that are keeping students stuck where they are, including the truth about academic confidence and motivation. And the one thing that actually prepares students for success in school and beyond that is never ever taught in schools. If today's episode resonated with you or if you find yourself thinking, yes this is exactly what I am watching happen. Or if you're a student and you're like, yep, that is me. The free training is the right next step. You're gonna walk away with a clear picture of exactly what your student needs and a path forward. You can find the link to get that free training in the show notes, or you can head directly to schoolhabitsuniversity.com/freetraining. The second you enter your email, you get the training automatically. So there's like no waiting or anything like that. And at the end of that training in full transparency is an invitation for students to join me Inside School Habits University. That's my online program where we dive deep into every single skill that students need to make school easier. Task management, time management, note taking, annotating study skills and organization. And there's also an option to do live coaching with me for a full year. All of that is explained at the end of the training, as well as special pricing just for those who watch the training. But even if you don't join me Inside School Habits University, the training is probably the most valuable piece of content I have ever created besides the program itself. And I want you to have it again. That link is below and it's at schoolhabitsuniversity.com/Freetraining. Okay, my friends, that wraps up today's episode. The core message I want you to carry with you is this. Effort is not your student's problem skills are the problem. Doing more of the wrong thing faster and harder and longer is not the path to better results. The path is learning how to do the right things in the right order, and that is entirely, completely learnable. If this episode resonated with you, I would love for you to share it with another parent who needs to hear it. Leave a comment on YouTube if you're watching over there, and then come find me on Instagram @schoolhabits. Keep showing up. Keep doing the hard work. Keep asking the hard questions, and never stop learning.

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Katie Azevedo

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