Learning to Learn

Our primary goal at Smarten Up is to help students become learners. We want them to learn how to read and do math, to learn about the history of our world and the science behind it, and to learn about themselves. To do this, we empower them with a robust set of tools and strategies that they can use to tackle the wide range of challenges they are likely to face in their academic careers and beyond. The key to making this happen is teaching students the difference between “knowing” and “understanding.”

Tests, quizzes, writing assignments, and classroom discussions are tools that teachers use to evaluate how effectively students have learned the material. As we know, assessments range from multiple choice and short answer questions to word problems and essays. The former evaluate a student’s rote knowledge—how well she can recall a definition or perform arithmetic; the latter gauge children’s ability to use information in order to answer a question or solve a problem. 

Genuine learning occurs when students can build their understanding of a given concept from the ground up, from knowledge through evaluation. It is the difference between cramming for an assessment by memorizing a collection of vocabulary terms, and learning those words in context, with the support of graphic organizers, outlines, mnemonic devices, and other memory aids. While the latter may take more time and effort before the test, that energy will pay off when it’s time to study for a midterm or final exam. Even if a child doesn’t remember everything, she will have an efficient set of familiar, useful resources to fill in the gaps. By taking the time to learn and understand the information the first time around, students can avoid the chaos and anxiety that comes with last-minute scrambles or disorganized efforts (or both).

This is where it becomes most important for us to teach our students about themselves as learners. We need students to understand the difference between working smart and working hard (or not so hard in some cases).  They’ve been told to create outlines before they begin writing an essay, though they often don’t do it. Teachers ask them to annotate as they read, but their books often show either pristinely clean pages or ones that are so filled with highlighted text and underlined sections that they are impossible to navigate. They have to study for a test or quiz, and often they simply reread the relevant information and declare themselves “prepared.” They are told to create a plan of attack for short-term and long-term assignments, and they simply open up their portal to look at what is due the next day. 

A large part of this disconnect is due to a lack of understanding. Students know what they should do, but they don’t always understand why or how to make those extra steps meaningful. The goal of Smarten Up’s March blog posts will be to share our favorite tips, tricks, and strategies for helping students learn how to become learners. 

Reading for Meaning

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By the time we reach middle and high school, what we learn is increasingly built on what we’ve learned before, reliant on the scaffolding of connections our brains have been constructing for us since we were crawling across colorful living-room carpets. But these connections, clusters of experience and information that help us make sense of the world, are still developing all the time — and the more that students can consciously access these categories of information and experience as they absorb new knowledge and master new tasks, the more confident and creative they will become. One of Smarten Up’s core messages to students is that learning itself is a learnable process: that the skill of being a student can be developed through a set of reflective habits and creative practices. 

Let’s consider the best habits for reading, a skill whose importance in the life of a student is hard to overstate. All of the work that students have done in elementary school to master the technical building blocks of reading fluency pays off as reading becomes a critical skill across disciplines, from biology to history, and from foreign languages to English literature. By this time, the decoding process has become more automatic, and students can put a larger share of their brainpower toward constructing meaning, analyzing connections, and processing information. While many of us remember ‘learning to read’ as young children, it is at this stage in our academic careers that we learn to read critically and deeply. 

There are concrete steps that will improve students’ ability to go past knowledge into understanding — this active reading checklist is a good place to start, with habits for before, during, and after reading. This is also where reflecting on the way we read different types of texts can be useful.  There is a clear difference between reading and writing poetry, and reading biographies of historical figures. Students should be able to approach each task with a strategy that fits its specific needs, while also recognizing the connections between distinct tasks and subject areas so that they’re not reinventing the wheel every time they approach a reading or writing assignment. One starting place is to ask: How does this content relate to what I already know? Or: how does this assignment resemble other tasks I’ve tackled in the past?

When students consider these questions, they activate prior knowledge that will shape how they understand the new content. Students should also consider, as they read, other connections they can activate to enrich the perspective they’re bringing to the text, and make the information stickier in their memory. Consider text-to-text, text-to-self, and text-to-world connections. How does Hamlet’s relationship with his uncle compare to the bonds in your own extended family? Hopefully, not too closely! Can you think of any links to the often melodramatic history of royal households in medieval Europe, or the family politics in your favorite television series? What songs would you put on a moody Hamlet playlist? Ultimately, the takeaway is simple: the more that we bring with us to the reading process, the more we get out of it.

Executive Function and Learning 101

While learning seems like a fairly automatic process, it is actually a pretty complicated one.  That’s because in order for a piece of information to really stick in the brain, and stay stuck, we have to make sure that it gets to the right “place.”  That way, when we need it to answer a question on a test, connect a string of ideas in an essay, or find our way from school back home, our mind knows where to find that piece of data in order to help us solve the problem at hand.  So the question is, how to we make knowledge more sticky?

You can think of your brain like a giant closet, and yourself like a shopaholic.  All of the items you see in the store are like the data coming into your sensory memory.  You will purchase what looks good, and pass on the rest.  Then, your working memory will kick in to either decide if you want to return an item you are not so hot on, or if it is appealing enough to place in a pile with other similar articles or objects.  Last, once you have sorted through your purchases and identified “the keepers,” it is time for you to put everything away some place safe where you will be able to find it again.  This is like your long-term memory building schema.  Whether you sort your items by color, use, size, or shape doesn’t matter, so long as there is an organized system that you can rely on to track them down whenever necessary.  The stronger and more thoughtful that organizational strategy is the better.

When we learn, our brains are constantly working through this process.  Whether in a classroom, or sitting at home, we tune out distractions and extraneous information, focus on identifying the main ideas and supporting details or explanations, and create a strategy for building that information into a sticky schema.

For the brainiacs this happens fairly automatically; their minds are like a giant gob of super glue - everything just sticks.  The process isn’t quite so simple for those hard-working A students; instead, this group knows how to use subject-appropriate mnemonic devices, graphic organizers, and other processing tools to sort their knowledge into well-defined, easily accessible chunks. Lacking an organized system for schema development, the last group of students, will try really hard to remember everything, but lose most of it in the process.  Some bits of knowledge will be passed over by the sensory memory as unimportant, other ideas won’t make it past the confines of working memory, and the parts that stick in long-term memory just won’t be enough to build a useful schema come test time.

That's why it is so important for instructors and parents to teacher their child how to learn.  Any successful person has developed a repertoire of organizational and study skills over the years. Some are super efficient, others are less useful.  But, the point is to have a "toolbox" full of strategies, and to understand when, where, and how to apply each one.