Renaissance Learning and Unlocking Your Potential I

“During learning process, your brain restructures understanding from time to time, causing you to temporarily find making progress quite difficult.”

How to become better learner

• Physical exercise! - helps creating new neurones in hippocampus
• Practice is important
• Create (visual) metaphors and/or models.
• Chunking - spaced repetition.
• Best learning is done by doing and practicing, not just from reading an explanation.
• Einstellung - previous ideas block new ideas.
• Deliberate practice, specially on the most difficult topics.
• Taking responsibility for your own learning (and not leaving it to teacher).
• Perseverance!!
• Work/learn with others and not in isolation.
• Testing, recall tests, in important.
• Sleep is as important as everything else if not more.

“We can make significant changes in our brain (neural structures) by changing the way we think”

Value of teamwork:

Research indicates that right hemisphere helps gain a big picture perspective. Where as left can make you over confident. Focused mode is more left hemisphere than right and hence working intensively on a problem with out allowing diffused mode and right hemisphere to kick in can lead to wrong learning/solutions.

Tricks for doing better on tests:

1. Prepare checklist by Richard Felder before the test and review it.
2. Start with hard problems, but don’t get stuck on them.
3. Attitude before taking the test.
4. Focus on breathing if you are stressed.
5. Cover up answers for multiple choice.
6. Get plenty of sleep day before the test.