Improving Ease and Powers of Understanding
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
A typical student in The United Kingdom will
study 6-7 academic subjects during a seven-period day, with each lesson period
lasting 35 minutes. How can this student develop a regular revision strategy,
i.e. same day, 24 hours, one week, one month that will encourage deep-level
learning so that the information is meaningful? Should the notes be re-read?
This question came from the UK, but such conditions are not all that
different elsewhere, including here in the USA. Answering that question afforded
the opportunity to pull into a simple single focus much of what anyone can do to
tremendously improve his ease and powers of understanding when learning a topic,
subject, skill or whatever proficiency. Here for your use and that of people
whom you care about is this simple single focus, in this one short letter.
We've started recommending three particular processes to use with each unit of
learning which involves much in the way of understanding. These are:
- At the conclusion of each substantial unit of learning, 10-20 minutes of Freenoting, so it is your
own free associations which are engaged with the topic instead of someone
else's. All learning IS by association. This connects you with your
understandings. See full directions in Freenoting. I cite this first, since it's an easy
method and has no pre-requisites, contrasted to what I recommend below for the
start of every unit of learning. Where the material is easy or trivial and is
more memorization rather than understanding, it may not be practical to Freenote each lesson for
10-20 minutes, but make that a routine for units which are more of a challenge
to understand.
Windtunnel is a way to Freenote for those who
prefer talking to writing.)
- During each unit of learning, substantial or otherwise, use your imagination
to make for colorful, sensory-involved experiences and, indeed, engage the
processes of "Frame
One", which you will find described in
Beyond Teaching and Learning. Make this type of
process routine for both your classroom experiences and your assignment reading.
- At the start of each unit of learning, take a moment to set
Predictive Imagery. For this, you may have to first learn
and practice Image-Streaming;
but once you have that, this process is extremely time-productive for you and
much else will also work better for you.
All three of these procedures should be practiced until they are automatic
reflex for you. #2 and #3 will then cost only moments and return hours where
you'd otherwise be wrestling with your notes, marginal notes and highlighted
passages. #1 costs some minutes but returns huge dividends in major
understanding.
Use Borrowed Genius mainly with special subjects, special skills, anything it
is something of a challenge for you to master. Your first encounter with it
could take 30-60 minutes with full focus and intensity, but after 2-3 rounds you
should be able to alternate 3-4 minutes of Borrowed-Genius experience with 5-20
minutes of real-time practice and exploration of the same topic or skill,
alternating these back and forth until the inner genius experience becomes one
with the outer real-time efforts.
If you've learned
ImageStreaming, then it will be easy, practical and productive for you
to rebuild your aptitudes in a particular topic or skill or subject area, via
the procedures which are waiting for you in the article,
"Build Your Ability to Understand Everything!" (Winsights No. 44, August 2000).
You can easily remove stress, generally via
"Breathing as a Way of LifePart 1" and "Part 2", and with regard to
particular topics or fields or skills, or even "blocked" subjects or even
phobias, with simple ways of using your breathing, as per
"Breathing As Therapy?" (Winsights No. 69) and
"How to Unblock Blocks and Undo Phobias"
(Winsights No. 82).
There are plenty of other methods also which can boost your learning way out the
top of your situation. Some of them are ours, some of them by other sources. In
fact, one thrust we've recently developed is a way to turn i>any problem-solving
method into a Superlearning method. See the four questions and article posted at
A Huge Untapped Resource. Since there are literally hundreds of
various effective problem-solving methods now in professional practice use around
the planet, many of them freely available to you, you have plenty of sources and
resources to draw upon. Enjoy the road, not only just anticipate where you want
the road to take you to.
It is entirely and directly in your hands, how well you learn, in and out of
school. You can be in a top school and learn brilliantly. You can be in a truly
awful schoolsome of them areand nevertheless learn brilliantly (though
that might not translate directly into grades). You now have these toolsthese
are now times when you might well want to upgrade your own proficiencies as well
as strengthen the success of children and people whom you care aboutand your
level of success is now entirely up to you. And what becomes available to you
through learning is a good part of the human adventure.
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Win Wenger |