5 Strategies to Demystify the Learning Process for Struggling Students Oakley recognizes that “many educators are not at all comfortable with or trained in neuroscience,” so she breaks down a few key principles that teachers can use in the classroom and share with students to help them demystify the learning process. 1. The Hiker Brain vs. The Race Car Brain Start by teaching students the difference between focused and diffused thinking, says Oakley. Diffused thinking occurs when you allow your mind to wander, to imagine and to daydream. 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. Since students tend to equate speed with smarts, Oakley suggests sharing this metaphor: “There’s a race car brain and a hiker brain. 2. In cognitive psychology, “chunking” refers to the well-practiced mental patterns that are essential to developing expertise in a topic. Learning is all about developing strong chains. 3.
How to Teach Analysis Like a Boss – The Rhetor's Toolbox In my last post, I made a case against the five paragraph essay as an appropriate analytical structure for high school students. The closed thesis, redundancy, and built-in limitations to critical thinking ultimately hold students back from their best work. If not the five-paragraph essay, then what? I’m going to take you on a tour of the process I teach for close reading and written analysis. Keep in mind that there are many instructional entry points to these steps, and they should certainly be adapted for longer texts. 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. Only now are students ready to start writing. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. Before the shift/after the shiftBeginning, middle, end 11. This organizational structure is superior to the five-paragraph essay because it allows the importance and complexity of the student’s thinking to build along with the text being analyzed. This process requires much more teaching and practice than the five-paragraph essay. Like this: Like Loading... In "AP Language and Composition"
A Skill Strong Readers Share Students in classrooms across the United States spend an estimated 85 percent of their school day on assignments that require reading texts. A key difference between students who can read well and those who cannot is the ability to use metacognition. Metacognition can be regarded as a conversation readers have with themselves about what they are reading. Metacognitive readers enjoy reading because they can find meaning in texts and think deeply to comprehend what they’re reading. Those who have not yet learned to be metacognitive often have trouble reading fluently and comprehending what they read. Before Reading We consider the prereading stage to be of critical importance. Allow students to select their reading material whenever possible. When students have made their selections, facilitate a class discussion around questions like these: Examining the cover, title, illustrations, and main headings, what do you think this text is about? While Reading Rereading Summarizing Evaluating
Teach the Seven Strategies of Highly Effective Readers By: Elaine K. McEwan To improve students' reading comprehension, teachers should introduce the seven cognitive strategies of effective readers: activating, inferring, monitoring-clarifying, questioning, searching-selecting, summarizing, and visualizing-organizing. This article includes definitions of the seven strategies and a lesson-plan template for teaching each one. To assume that one can simply have students memorize and routinely execute a set of strategies is to misconceive the nature of strategic processing or executive control. Such rote applications of these procedures represents, in essence, a true oxymoron-non-strategic strategic processing.— Alexander and Murphy (1998, p. 33) If the struggling readers in your content classroom routinely miss the point when "reading" content text, consider teaching them one or more of the seven cognitive strategies of highly effective readers. Instructional aids References Click the "References" link above to hide these references.
Reflective Learning: Thinking About the Way You Learn Reflective learning involves actively monitoring and assessing your knowledge, abilities, and performance during the learning process, in order to improve the process and its associated outcomes. For example, if you’re studying for a test, you can engage in reflective learning by asking yourself how well you understand each of the topics that you’re studying, and based on this figure out which topics you need to spend more time on. Reflective learning can be beneficial in various ways and in various contexts, so it’s often worthwhile to engage in it. Examples of reflective learning An example of reflective learning is a person who starts a new hobby, and asks themself how well they’re learning the new information that comes with the hobby, whether there are any gaps in their knowledge, and which learning strategies they enjoy using the most. Other examples of reflective learning appear in various domains, both in academia and outside of it. The benefits of reflective learning
8 Important Skills to Learn in Just Under 8 Hours Each | by Danny Forest | SkillUp Ed | Medium Updated: December 2020 8 hours? Are you kidding me? It takes 10,000 hours to learn a new skill! Wrong! 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is the amount of time it takes to be a top performer in a highly competitive field, according to Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers. In the past 2 years, I’ve proven time and again that you can learn valuable soft and hard skills in about 15 to 20 hours of practice. Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett, Barack Obama, Oprah, and many more top performers dedicate a lot of their time to learning a variety of skills that allowed them to be where they are today. I was very careful in choosing skills that are as applicable today as they will be years from now. Each of these skills can be learned to a level in which you can be good enough in it in under 8 hours of practice — one full workday! But be careful, practicing any skill for long hours will not yield the results you expect. Do you want to change your life forever?
Boost Your Leadership Skills With The Feynman Technique Have you ever wanted to become an expert in something but didn’t know the right approach? Or perhaps you’ve got an exam coming up and you need to make sure you’re crystal clear on the content? Being able to understand concepts and communicate them clearly is essential, no matter what you’re doing. As a leader, it’s important to be able to grow and share knowledge with those around you. But sometimes it’s overwhelming to think about really learning a subject. What Is The Feynman Technique? The Feynman Technique is a way to study and build your knowledge of a subject. Start by picking what you want to learn. Once you’ve got your topic, apply Feynman’s four-step process like this: Write down everything you know about the topic. Sounds like a nice cycle, right? Why Does It Matter To Leaders? So this sounds like a great study method, but what does it have to do with being a better leader? Using Trello Ready? List What You Know The first step is to list what you already know about a subject.
SuperMemo.com True history The popular history of spaced repetition is full of myths and falsehoods. This text is to tell you the true story. The problem with spaced repetition is that it became too popular for its own effective replication. Like a fast mutating virus it keeps jumping from application to application, and tells its own story while accumulating errors on the way. Who invented spaced repetition? This is the story of how I solved the problem of forgetting. Back in the early 1990s, I thought I knew how to turn education systems around the world upside down and make them work for all students. To root SuperMemo in science, we made a major effort to publish our ideas in a peer-review journal, adopted a little known scientific term of " spaced repetition " and set our learning technology in a context of learning theory and the history of research in psychology. If you read SuperMemopedia here you may conclude that "Nobody should ever take credit for discovering spaced repetition". Credits