Renaissance Learning and Unlocking Your Potential

My Course notes for Learning How to Learn.

An important thought

Learning doesn’t progress logically, so that each day just adds an additional neat package to your knowledge shelf. Sometimes you hit a wall in constructing your understanding. Things that made sense before can suddenly seem confusing. This type of knowledge collapse seems to occur when your mind is restructuring its understanding, building a more solid foundation. In the case of language learners, they experience occasional periods when the foreign language suddenly seems completely incomprehensible. Remember it takes time to assimilate new knowledge. You’ll inevitably go through some periods when you seem to take and exasperating step backwards, in your understanding. This is a natural phenomenon, that means that your mind is wrestling deeply with the material. You’ll find that when you emerge from these periods of temporary frustration, your knowledge base will take a surprising leap forward. —- Barbara Oakley

1. Using metaphors and analogies

One of the best things you can do to not only remember, but understand concepts, is to create a metaphor or analogy for them; often the more visual the better. A metaphor is just a way of realizing that one thing is somehow similar to another. Interestingly, metaphors and analogies are useful for getting people out of Einstellung, that is, being blocked by thinking about a problem in the wrong way. Stories, even if they’re just used as silly memory tricks, can also allow you to more easily retain what you’re trying to learn. Metaphors also help glue an idea into your mind because they make a connection to neural structures that are already there. It’s like being able to trace a pattern with tracing paper.

It’s often helpful to pretend that you are the concept you’re trying to understand.

2. Work profitable with teammates

Research that gives intriguing hints about differences between the two hemispheres of the brain. There’s a great deal of evidence from research that the right hemisphere helps us step back and put our work into big picture perspective. The right hemisphere is vitally important in getting into the right track and doing reality checks. When you work in the focus mode, it’s easy to make minor mistakes in your assumptions or calculations. If you go off track early on, it doesn’t matter if the rest of your work is correct. Your answer is still wrong. Sometimes, it’s even laughably wrong. But these non-sensical results just don’t matter to you because the more left centered focus mode has associated with it a desire to cling to what you’ve done. That’s the problem with the focus, sometimes a bit left hemisphere leaning mode of analysis. It provides for an analytical and upbeat approach, but abundant research evidence suggests there’s a potential for rigidity, dogmatism, and egocentricity.

One of the best ways to catch your blind spots and errors is to brainstorm and work with others who are also smartly focused on the topic. It’s sometimes just not enough to use more of your own neural horsepower. Both modes and hemispheres to analyze your work. After all, everyone has blind spots.

The importance of working with others doesn’t just relate to learning. It’s also important in career building. A single small tip from a teammate to take a course from the outstanding Professor Passionate, or to check out a new job opening, can make an extraordinary difference in how your life unfolds. A word of warning, however; study groups can be powerfully effective for learning, but if study sessions turn into socializing occasions, all bets are off. If you find that your group meetings start five to 15 minutes late, members haven’t read the material, and the conversation consistently veers off topic, you’re best off to find another group.

3. Course Wrap up

Dr. Sejnowski: Welcome to the last video of Learning How to Learn. If you're still listening to us, then you've come all the way through the course. And may remember at the beginning, I said that brains do not come with an instruction manual. So we have to write one ourselves. And that was one of our goals. In this final video, we want to tell you how much we've enjoyed teaching and learning. We've learned from you as we hoped you've learned from us. The truth is you've always been in the driver's seat when it comes to your own learning. But now that you have a better feeling for what's under your neural hood, you can use this to help you learn new things all during your lifetime.

Dr. Oakley: What we're hoping is that as the days and months will pass you'll continue to bring to mind some of the key ideas you've learned in the course. Approaches such as switching your mode of thinking from focused to diffuse can help reduce your frustration and allow for more creative problem solving. Strengthening your chunking can give you a firmer grasp of the material. Even seemingly tiny changes in your daily approach to your work. Using the pomodoro technique, for example, can make a dramatic long-term difference in your learning and in your ultimate success.

Dr. Sejnowski: Learning is so vitally important to our future that most of us spend 12 to 16 of our earliest years of our lives in school, culminating in high school or college. But the focus in formal education is on the product of learning, not the process of learning. In this course, we've tried to give you a better sense of the learning process. Although this is our last video, we hope it's not our last chance to influence you. You have not truly learned something unless you can teach it to others. Teach those ideas to others and you will find that they will continue to resonate and deepen in your own mind.

Dr. Oakley: We hope you'll also have discovered how powerful these ideas can be at helping you broaden your interest, passion, and expertise. Many people believe that what they're initially, sort of, naturally good at is what they're supposed to be doing in life. But I myself am living proof that passions can broaden, change, and grow. The world is evolving and a broad tool kit that allows you to learn effectively in many different subject areas is one of the most powerful assets you can have.