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Truly Accelerated Learning

by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
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Image courtesy of Steven C. Hall

Today there exist many forms of “accelerated learning” or “superlearning,” some of them truly accelerated.  Most of these are defined in terms of how rapidly one can acquire, short-term or long-term, great masses of information. In other words, a quantitative approach to speeded-up learning, as distinct from the qualitative, learning-with-understanding approach we are discussing here below. A few forms of accelerated learning or superlearning emphasize effective strategies in matching to the learner the style and form of information being presented to him.

How many of these forms of accelerated learning or superlearning center on long-term intellectual understanding? On scientific understandings? On aesthetic, artistic understanding? On human understandings? Or physical understandings as in athletics or in artistic performance?A roadmap to these is what we present in this briefing.

A non-profit, 501(C)(3) education and research firm, Project Renaissance has developed a wide range and number of methods for easier, more effective teaching and learning, which do center on, improve, and accelerate acquisition of these forms of meaningful conceptual understanding. These are not memorization methods — they are learning-with-understanding methods. They bring within your easy reach, ranges and depths of understanding which you — or your teachers — or your students — never before thought could be possible.

Moreover, many of the best, easiest-to-grasp-and-use methods are freely available to you right now!

Here is where you will find complete, easy, step-by-specific-step instructions for their use:

  1. Methods organized mainly around modern Socratic Method, using mainly creative-flow-from-observation-with feedback techniques for getting at even the most deeply buried or unnoticed insights and understandings. See the instructions and articles freely posted at these addresses, among others:
  2. Methods which center mainly on sensitizing pathways between key regions of the brain, especially by techniques whose foundations were laid by Kekule, Elias Howe, and Albert Einstein; methods taken further by Synectics; then developed profoundly further by Project Renaissance. See the instructions and articles which are freely posted at these addresses, among others:
  3. Organized around the breakthrough discovery by Project Renaissance that every creativity-enhancing or problem-solving method can also be made into a unique, profoundly accelerated learning or superlearning technique. There are hundreds of effective creative problem-solving techniques now in professional use around the world, some of them having originated with Project Renaissance. Most of these techniques, however, have hitherto been used mainly in service of narrowly defined business interests.Now, however, many of these techniques have been made yours freely on the Web. Your roadmap to these begins at 
    Discover also how to turn these into powerful accelerated or superlearning methods, at
  4. Above and beyond techniques for learning, there are methods also to make the learner himself more whole, more effective, more capable. Most of these were originally published in Win Wenger’s Winsights column. See various of these at:
  5. Almost any student can methodically apply these three specific techniques to each unit of learning, vastly improving his grasp — and ease of grasp — and meaningful usefulness of grasp — of that unit of learning. Systematically, he can easily make himself into one of your very best, most perceptive, most powerful learners. See these three specific techniques in the article at
  6. A simple, easy way for a teacher to involve his students is:

     By this same direct, easy means, the teacher can: highlight the most important points of his lesson; strengthen and accelerate his students’ meaningful and long-term grasp of the lesson; and meanwhile regroup his own forces, find respite and relief, accomplish far more for far less effort, and get to far better observe-in-action and understand his own students. Please see and give yourself an exhilarating experience of the easy-focus accelerated learning or superlearning method, Dynamic Format.
     
  7. Here is an aspect of accelerated learning which may or may not seem as strange to you as Lozanov’s “negative forgetting curve” once did. Strange indeed, until you think it through. The learner can obtain far more information and insight from a unit of learning than even the lecturer or author put into it!Think that through, to see why that is the case and how to bring that outcome about. Also consider the many wider implications of this fact. And/or: see
  8. The best known, best tested, best demonstrated form of accelerated learning and superlearning goes back far earlier than the 1960s and Georgi Lozanov. It goes back far beyond even Jerome Bruner, Jean Piaget and Maria Montessori….
     
    By far the best demonstrated form of accelerated learning or superlearning is Socratic Method, which everyone has heard of but hardly anyone appears to know much about. Over 2400 years of history, use of Socratic Method consistently has led to highest-level intellectual achievement. Socratic Method’s use has resulted in a per capita rate of production of world-class geniuses some ten million times greater than that of the methods currently in standard use, despite all our modern advantages in information technology.
     
    Now, through modern science, we finally do understand what makes Socratic Method such an effective accelerated-learning method. We even know how to improve on these effects and make them far more broadly available.
     
    To understand these effects and to see how to bring them about, see these explanatory briefings:
     
    To see an easy, expense-free way to make such effects broadly available, even in large classrooms and poor teacher/student ratios, see (op.cit.)
  9. For some further overview of the field of accelerated learning, linked with relevant addresses, please see

The job ahead of us, to repair education and save generations of irreplaceable learners, is larger than even all us together. Our various methods and programs are not competing; we need instead to explore and to find synergistic combinations and new discoveries which will let us mutually magnify our strengths toward that task. What matters is that the job gets done.

Our main text of problem-solving and innovation methods is Win Wenger’s extraordinary book, Discovering The Obvious.

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