Speech and Debate Success: Knowing your audience 

Unfortunately most middle and high school students don’t understand the importance of knowing their audience when giving a speech.  Students on speech and debate teams across the country fall into the bad habit of speaking the same way about the same topics to virtually all audiences.  Sure, in a perfect world we could all speak the same… Continue reading

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3 Keys for achieving goals with confidence 

Our confidence rises when we achieve success in something.  However, success is not always easy to measure.  An effective approach for building confidence is by developing challenging goals that are easier to measure.  For example, a goal could be to learn a particular skill.  This can further be broken into segments with measurable outcomes, i.e.… Continue reading

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5 Tips to Improve Critical Thinking Skills

Live long enough and you will understand that the entire life is full of making decisions.  Those decisions are often followed by actions which directly impact the outcomes we seek.  Therefore, achieving desired outcomes depends on making good decisions which require critical thinking skills.   Critical thinking is a valuable skill that anyone can improve… Continue reading

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When Will I Need This? Lessons You Can Still Take From Dull Assignments

Suppose you’re sitting in history class learning about Chinese dynastic system. Like some students, you may ask yourself: “When am I ever going to need this?” After all, you want to be a chemist. It’s a valid question. When will you need the dearth of information you absorb in school every day? The truth is, maybe never. It all… Continue reading

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Academic Expectations: Making the Transition from High School to College.

With the school year drawing to an end, recent high school graduates are scrambling to ready themselves for their collegiate journey. Between registering for classes and decorating dorm rooms, it can be easy for students to overlook preparing for the academic transition from high school to college. What factors constitute an “Academic Transition”? A smooth academic transition requires a specific… Continue reading

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