This week's article summary is 5 Strategies to Demystify the Learning Process for Students.
Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset research over the past dozen years has influenced teachers to guide their students to become neuroscientists, i.e., to know how their brains function: how knowledge is stored, how it is retrieved, and how new knowledge interlaces with other stored knowledge.
The expression “Name it to Tame it” comes to mind when we ask our students to think metacognitively—literally to think about thinking.
Through my student years I never consciously thought metacognitively. Instead through trial and error and experience I gradually learned what worked and didn’t work for me when I has some sort of assessment that required me to demonstrate my learning and understanding—be it a test, a paper, or even a classroom presentation.
Like most of us, I went through the stage in high school and college of thinking I was being studious by underlining and highlighting textbooks like mad and then reviewing and re-reading my copious notes before big exams. I was working but not efficiently or effectively. During exams I often found myself picturing exactly where the critical information was in the textbook or in my notes yet I just wasn’t able to pull the details to the surface.
By the time I was a junior in college, I had begun to be much more judicious in what I underlined and wrote summary notes and questions to myself as I listened to lectures and class discussions. When I studied, I systematically reduced my notes to the essentials, so I had a fuller grasp of big concepts. Rather than passively re-reading my notes, I used to pretend I was giving a speech on the topic at hand and walked around my bedroom (luckily I didn’t have a roommate) as if I was an esteemed professor.
Without knowing it, I was using more effective, active study techniques, and not surprisingly my grades and confidence as a student rose accordingly.
The article below provides some basic metacognition a-ha’s all students will benefit from knowing, understanding, and using to learn effectively and, most critically, long-lastingly.
Joe
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The field of metacognition offers educators many techniques that are rooted in brain research
When students do not understand how their brains learn and retain material, they can develop misconceptions about themselves as learners — such as a faulty assumption that they are bad at a subject or that they suffer from performance anxiety.
Think about the common experience of students who reread their notes and think they know the material — only to enter a test and find that they cannot retrieve the information. They simply haven’t been taught how to study in a way that allows them to retrieve the information.
Most teachers are not at all comfortable with or trained in neuroscience.
Below are some key principles teachers can use in the classroom and share with students to help them demystify the learning process.
The Hiker Brain vs. The Race Car Brain
Start by teaching students the difference between focused and diffused thinking. When the brain is in focused mode, you can get started on the task at hand. But deep understanding is not fully accomplished in this mode. Diffused thinking occurs when you allow your mind to wander, to imagine and to daydream. In this mode, the brain is still working — consolidating information and making sense of what you are trying to learn. If a concept is easy for you to grasp right off, the focused mode might be sufficient, but if a new skill or concept takes consideration, you have to toggle back and forth between these two modes of thinking as you get to true understanding of the material — and this doesn’t happen quickly. Because toggling is essential to learning, teachers and students need to build downtime into their day — time when learning can “happen on background” as you play a game, go on a walk or color a picture. It’s also one reason why sleep is so vital to healthy cognitive development.
Since students tend to equate speed with smarts, use this metaphor: “There’s a race car brain and a hiker brain. They both get to the finish line, but not at the same time. The race car brain gets there really fast, but everything goes by in a blur. The hiker brain takes time. It hears birds singing, sees the rabbit trails, feels the leaves. It’s a very different experience and, in some ways, much richer and deeper. You don’t need to be a super swift learner. In fact, sometimes you can learn more deeply by going slowly.
Chains and Chunks
In cognitive psychology, “chunking” refers to the well-practiced mental patterns that are essential to developing expertise in a topic. This can also be described as chains. Learning is all about developing strong chains. For example, when you are first learning how to back up a car, you have to consciously think about each step, from how to turn the steering wheel to how to use your mirrors. But once that process is chained, it’s easy — it becomes automatic. Similarly, once solving certain equations becomes automatic in math, students can apply these equations to more complex problems. Teachers can help students identify the procedures in a unit of study that they need to master in order to take their learning to the next level — from the steps of the scientific method to fundamental drawing techniques. Any type of mastery involves the development of chains of procedural fluency. Then you can get into more complex areas of fluency. Here’s another way to think about it. We all have about four slots of working memory that we can use to problem-solve in the moment. One of those slots can be filled with an entire procedural chain — and then you can put new information in the other slots.
The Power of Metaphor
Metaphor and analogy are extraordinarily powerful teaching tools. When you are trying to learn something new, the best way to learn it is to connect it with something you already know. The formal term for this is “neural reuse” — the idea that metaphors use the same neural pathways as the concept a metaphor is describing. So familiar metaphors allow a learner to draw on a concept they have already mastered and apply it to a new situation. Metaphors “rapidly on-board” new ideas.
The Problem of Procrastination
Procrastination is the number one challenge facing most learners. To train the brain to systematically focus and relax — to toggle — try the “Pomodoro Technique.
Developed by Francesco Cirillo, this strategy uses a timer to help the learner work and break at set intervals. First, choose a task to accomplish. Then, set a timer for 25 minutes and work until the timer goes off. At that point, take a five-minute break: stand up, walk around, take a drink of water, etc. After three or four 25-minute intervals, take a longer break (15 – 30 minutes) to recharge. This technique trains your ability to focus and reinforces that relaxing at the end is critical to the process of learning. Teachers can build a similar rhythm into the school day, providing brain breaks and movement time to help students toggle between focused and diffused thinking.
Expanding Possibilities
When we teach children and teenagers how they learn, we can blow open their sense of possibility. Tell your students that they don’t just have to be stuck following their passion. You can broaden your passions enormously. And that can have enormous implications for how your life unfolds. We always say ‘follow your passions’ but sometimes that locks people into focusing on what comes easily or what they are already good at. You can get passionate about — and really good at many things
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