Free resource
The High School Study Skills Weekly Check-In.
Five questions, five minutes, once a week. It’s the whole Study Skills weekly-flow system reduced to the one page students actually need in front of them.
Why five questions
Most check-in systems fail because they ask for too much. A form with twelve fields doesn’t get filled out honestly by a student who has six other things due today. Five questions is short enough to actually run every week without it eating the period, and it covers exactly the ground that matters: grades, missing work, priorities, a goal, and a next step.
The check-in
- What’s your current grade in each class? Pull it up, don’t estimate. If a student doesn’t know, that’s the actual finding — not a failure to answer the question.
- What’s missing? Name specific assignments, not “I’m behind in math.” A vague answer here means the rest of the check-in won’t go anywhere.
- Which one matters most this week? Not all missing work is equally urgent. Picking one forces a real priority instead of a plan to do everything at once, which usually means doing nothing.
- What’s your goal for this week? One goal, stated as an action: “turn in the lab report” beats “do better in science.”
- What’s your very next step? Not the whole plan — just the next physical action. “Open Google Classroom and find the assignment” is a real next step. “Catch up” is not.
How to actually run it
- Same day, same time, every week — Monday works well since it sets up the rest of the week’s plan.
- Students fill it out themselves. The value is in the act of checking, not in a teacher doing it for them.
- Keep a running copy per student — a simple binder page or a digital form log both work. The pattern across weeks matters more than any single week’s answers.
- Follow up on the “next step” at the start of the following week’s check-in, before moving to the new one. A next step nobody ever revisits stops being real.
That’s the whole system. No app, no login, no dashboard — just five honest questions asked on a schedule. It’s the same principle behind every system on this site: the routine does the work that willpower can’t be relied on to do every single week.
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