Have you ever been to school and when you came back home you couldn’t remember a thing of what the teachers taught you in class? There are two reasons why this could’ve happened. Either you didn’t pay attention in class or the learning methods the school is using aren’t that good. There are 5 methods that are commonly used by schools but are ineffective.

1. Making a summary of what you learned. The summary is the best of the bunch because you can remember what you wrote about quite well.

2. Highlighting. You don’t have to put much effort into it, which makes it forgettable.

3. Mnemonics. Those magical little memory prompts that seem capable of locking anything into your mind. They weaken your memory by thinking that you need them while you don’t.

 4. Using images for text learning.

5. The worst of all, rereading the material.

 

I shall teach you 3 things that will accelerate your learning.

Motivation is key to learning

 

I’ll begin with motivation. When you’re motivated you can do anything and solve anything. This also works for learning, but it can be amplified, by making learning the journey, not the end.  What I meant is that you shouldn’t focus on the thing you’re learning, but the things you can do when you’ve learned it. I will give you an example. When I was 5 or 6, I was into video games and still are. The only problem was most of them were in English and back then I couldn’t read English. Instead of giving up I started learning English and look what happened. The only problem is that this requires a lot of motivation. This brings me to my next point. When you’re not motivated you might not want to learn, but just start it and see if after 10 minutes you still want to quit. What should happen is after 10 minutes you are motivated and don’t want to quit.

How to take good notes

 

Notes are important to remember what you’ve learned if you can’t directly remember it. But it is possible to take bad notes or lazy notes. These are notes that you didn’t put much effort into. These kinds of notes are, like the pre-made notes the teacher gives you at the end of class. It doesn’t matter if your notes are understandable to others it matters that you can understand them. But there is a method for making good notes it is called the Cornell method. There are 4 steps to the Cornell method. First, you take a paper and split it into 3 sections, into the notes, the cues, and a summary. Draw a line at the bottom from left to right and a line in the middle from top to the bottom line. It should be an upside-down T. Then put the notes on the right side, the cues on the left side and the summary on the bottom. After that, you write anything into the notes section that might help you to make the summary. It can have graphs, diagrams or even images. Whatever fits you. Then you go through your notes and put it in the cues section. But put it nice and organized. Lastly, use your cues to make a summary. Your summary should be so that when you read it you understand the subject in the summary.

How Teaching can Accelerate your learning

 

The last thing that will help you learn is teaching students. You saw it right teaching others helps you get better at learning. How is this possible? A study shows that 90 % of what you remember is when you taught it to somebody else. This happens, because when you have to teach somebody else what you’ve learned you have to take the core mechanics of the idea. You can’t generalize it either you need to be specific.

Before I end my blog, I challenge you to try to remember what you learned here today and recall it tomorrow! You can even write some notes if you want. And if you want to know more you can buy the book I based the blog post of HERE!