Learning is a journey that requires preparation

How do we solve the challenge of smart learning in our learning journal? ?? In a world where attention is constantly being pulled in every direction and time is increasingly limited, the key question is how to learn smarter. Does smarter learning mean quickly mastering what is most essential? ??

The smartest learners are those who first read the ending

True learning is that which changes us for the better: it changes our way of thinking, our awareness of a subject, our understanding of the world, and our behavior. Learning is unfairly equated with cramming. Cramming is memorizing data. Students who cram don't think while they learn, they don't ask questions, they just reproduce what someone else has told them to do. With good teachers who know how to recognize true learning, crammers will receive low grades because learning has been absent.

As I listen to a crammer answering, I feel as if he has emptied a bag of Lego bricks in front of me, and then those bricks have rolled off in all directions. At that moment, I feel that the student expects me to assemble them into some whole, for example, a nice house. When I give such a student a low grade, he wonders how I cannot see the house. However, I only see a pile of scattered bricks. That student has put effort into memorizing data, but has learned nothing.

For example, mathematics teachers often give students the same tasks on tests as those they practiced in class, only changing the letters or numbers. Many students who were convinced they knew the tasks, along with their parents, remain helpless in front of this "surprising" change. That's because they memorize, they don't learn.

Every good product begins with careful observation

Over the years of observing how students behave while learning, I have noticed that the better ones have an interesting habit. Extremely simple. When they start learning, they first read the ending, then skim through the titles and subtitles, and only then delve into the lesson. They learn fundamentally. If I notice that a student at the beginning of learning starts from the beginning and underlines large sections of the text, then I know that that student is only cramming and that there will be no real learning there. They're essentially cramming.

The student who reads the ending first is interested in the meaning of the lesson, what purpose the content it covers serves. Then, as he skims through the titles and subtitles, he creates a mental map of the lesson and thus identifies what is most important. Because learning is like a journey.

Learning is like a tourist trip

?I like to compare learning a new lesson to a tourist trip. I ask the student what they usually do before a trip, and they tell me that they gather information about the places they can visit on that route. They do this to visit the most interesting and important locations and return from the trip with as many impressions as possible, which they will remember for the rest of their lives.

They don't plan or try to visit everything available to see because then they would just rush through and not see anything, the impressions would be superficial, and the memory of the trip short-lived. I conclude, less is more.

The same goes for learning, less is often more. When learning, one should focus on the most important places that will remain in our memory, create deep impressions that we will remember for a long time, and change our view of the surrounding world.

However, why do most students not do this? They say they don't have time, the deadline is short, and they believe they will be more efficient if they immediately start memorizing. They say: to learning. However, being efficient and effective are two different concepts. Efficient means being fast at performing tasks, while effective means dealing with important tasks. I have seen efficient people whose endeavors quickly failed because they efficiently dealt with the wrong things.

I recently compared two students notebooks from my subject

?In the first student's notes, the class notes were extensive, with lots of data that not only were not connected in a logical whole but the words were often misspelled. What she was writing down were just facts. Like scattered Lego bricks.

In the second student's notes, they were concise, logically connected to her conclusions, which included what she had previously learned from that subject, as well as from others. What she was writing down were information.

When the first student answered, she declaimed, that is, she quickly recited the data, and it was more than obvious that what she was answering was not understood. The second student answered calmly, with pauses in which she emphasized important points and during which she thought. She compared that material with material from previously learned lessons, convincingly connected information in her way.

I conclude that the first student, trying to write down everything said in class, missed thinking about what was being talked about; the second listened, thought, compared it with existing knowledge, and wondered what new there was that she didn't know before.

Someone might say that the teacher should dictate everything students need to know and nicely structure it for them. This makes sense for elementary school students who are just learning to navigate through knowledge, but for the high school level, it's a bad idea. When a teacher dictates the material, students mechanically write it down, don't think, don't remember. Simply, they don't learn in the class where learning is most intensive and takes place.

That's why I create lesson maps as flashcards or research tasks before class and tell students that these are the locations we will visit on our journey in class. Together we will discover why they are important.

That's why in our learning journal app, we first map the lesson using AI, possibly correcting the key points identified by AI, and only then do we learn. This way, the student will have a visual representation of the most important places from the lesson, distinguishing the essential from the less important, and will remember the image of the mind map for a long time and easily recall it.

And how do you learn?