❤️
So, what is book about:
✅ Learning is misunderstood
For the most part, we are going about learning in the wrong ways and we are giving poor advice to those who are coming up behind us.
Good teaching we believe should be creatively tailored to the different learning styles of students and should use strategies that make learning easier.
Using evidence approach, authors prove that it’s quite opposite. They describe what it makes to become an effective learner who can retain information in long term memory and apply it at any needed time.
So what to do?
✅ To Learn, Retrieve
It’s all about tests. Not as a measurement system though, but as an incredibly useful tool to find your gaps in knowledge and spotting misconceptions.
Retrieval has to be
👉effortful and
👉repeated – then learning will be durable, long-term focused ❤️
And, (on personal note) since it’s hard to believe that mindsets towards tests will shift from “measurement” to “learning” any time soon, we should!!! must!!! help our kids to understand importance of failure in learning process and life. 🙏
✅ Mix Up Your Practice
Most of us believe that learning is better when you go on something with single minded purpose: the practice-practice-practice. That’s supposed to burn a skill into memory
Repeating/rereading again and again and again does not help you learn more, scientists prove.
Instead practice should be
👉 Spaced
The time periods between sessions of practice let memories consolidate
👉 Interleaved
Practicing two or more different subjects or skills. Interleaving will help to develop ability to discriminate between different kinds of problems and select the right tool from your growing toolkit of solutions
👉 Varied
Varied practice improves your ability to transfer learning from one situation and apply it successfully to another
✅ Embrace difficulties
Long story short: easier isn’t better. Proved by to many. Period.
Effort helps:
👉Reconsolidate memory
👉Create mental models
👉Foster conceptual learning
👉Improving versatility
👉Priming the mind for learning
Learning always builds on a store of prior knowledge. We interpret and remember events by building connections to what we already know.
Long-term memory capacity is virtually limitless: the more you know, the more possible connections you have for adding new knowledge
Trying to come up with an answer rather than having it presented to you, or trying to solve a problem before being shown the solution, leads to better learning and longer retention of the correct answer or solution, even when you attempted response is wrong, so long as corrective feedback is provided.
✅ Avoid Illusions of Knowing
Our understanding of the world is shaped by a hunger for narrative that rises out of our discomfort with ambiguity and arbitrary events. When surprising things happen, we search for an explanation. The urge to resolve ambiguity can be surprisingly potent, even when the subject is inconsequential.
The discomfort with ambiguity and arbitrariness is equally powerful, or more so, in our need for a rational understanding of our own lives. We strive to fit the events of our lives into a cohesive story that accounts for our circumstances, the things that befall us, and the choices we make. Each of us has a different narrative that has many threads woven into it from our shared culture and experience of being human, as well as many distinct threads that explain the singular events of one’s personal past. lol these experiences influence what comes to mind in a current situation and the narrative through which you make sense
of it. [] We gravitate to the narratives that best explain our emotions. In this way, narrative and memory become one.
Memory can be distorted in many ways. People interpret a story in light of their world knowledge, imposing order where none had been present so as to make a more logical story. Memory is reconstruction. We can’t remember every aspect of an event, so we remember those elements that have greatest emotional significance for us, and we fill in the gaps with details of our own that are consistent with our narrative but may be wrong.
Ok. What to do then?
📎📝📎Tools and habits for calibrating your judgement: 📎📝📎
👉Test yourself. Yes, again. Verify what you really do know versus what you think you know
👉Ask your peers. Access their understanding and compare
👉 Pay attention to cues you’re using to judge what you’ve learned. Feels familiar? This is not indicator to relay on
✅ Get Beyond Learning Styles
Loved this one.
The underlying service premise says that people receive and process new information differently. Moreover, the theory holds that people who receive instruction in a manner that is not matched to their learning style are at a disadvantage for learning.
Believe in the learning styles credo is pervasive. Everyone talks about learning styles, except there are no really scientific evidence to validate them 🤷♀️
Yes, we all have preferred learning style. I enjoy most visual learning for example, but saying that I’m a visual learner exclusively would be wrong. Moreover, this approach would put individual in the fixed mindset mood that limits development
So, authors recommend
👉Be the one in charge. Decide what you’re after.
👉 Embrace the notion of successful intelligence. Don’t root in your preferred learning style only.
👉Adopt active learning strategies (retrieval; spacing; interleaving)
👉Distill the underlying principles; build the structure
✅ Increase Your Ability
Coming back to old and wise Carol Dweck and “Growth Mindset”. If you have not read this book, please do 🙏
Dweck came to see that some students aim at performance goals and some toward learning goals. In the first case, you’re working to validate your ability. In the second you work to acquire new knowledge or skill.
Bringing yourself back to “Growth Mindset” is something that we all should strive to. ☘️
✅ Make it stick
Effortful learning changes brain, making new connections and increasing intellectual ability.
❤️ Learn to Learn ❤️
#learntolearn #mindfulness #growthmindset #grit #makeitstick #goodread
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