APPROACH
Suzanne Booker-Canfield, Ph.D.
FOCUSING ON WHAT MATTERS FOR ACADEMIC SUCCESS
My Objectives
To address the academic and organizational skills necessary to unlock potential
To inspire students to reflect on their own unique strengths as they plan for college and beyond
Thought Matters
Critical thinking is a core skill. I teach students to critically engage with others' views and, through reasoning, to develop their own informed perspectives. By studying logic and honing inferential reasoning abilities, they learn to stake out and defend their intellectual positions. Such analytical ability will be the mainstay of their professional lives, regardless of whether they pursue careers in business, medicine, engineering, law, education, science, social service, or the humanities.
Writing Matters
Learning to think clearly is inextricably bound to learning to express those thoughts in writing. Clarity in writing, the hallmark of an educated mind, is not easily earned.
As an experienced writer and published author, I have developed an efficient and consistent approach to writing tasks. I teach my students steps to test ideas in the pre-writing stage to make the writing process less stressful and the product more cogent.
Whether a student's next frontier is college, graduate school, or a career, writing will certainly play a key role.
When students focus on crafting highly evidentiary and logical papers, they gain confidence by knowing that they can grapple with complexity and synthesize their own thoughts into forceful and lucid writing.
Story Matters
In addition to guiding students as they develop their intellectual interests, I actively listen to them to understand their interests and the kinds of people they want to become. I encourage them to think deeply about what they want the stories of their lives to be. From there, they determine what characteristics align with their values and how to pursue their lives to honor those characteristics.
A deep engagement with literature should extend students' focus outward, preparing them for the college application process and beyond. In addition to the intellectual engagement at school, teaching self-reflection leads students to become the authors of their personal stories, celebrating the freedom and possibilities of their own blank pages.
