High-Impact On-Demand Learning Blog

  Time to start bear wrestling! (Note:  this letter is to my daughters…one who will be a sophomore in college next year and the other will be starting nursing school in January) Dear Sunshine and Luv Bug, I am so excited for you to be starting a whole new learning adventure in the next few months.  My hope for you is that you can enjoy the process of learning and continual improvement as much as I do.  Here are a few tips that I have recently learned that can help you both to focus on learning goals rather than performance goals.  You have both been excellent students and have received amazing grades thus far on your educational paths.  However, I sometimes wonder if you are so busy focusing on the grade you will receive that you miss out on true learning…learning that will stick in your long-term memory.  This type of learning builds a strong foundation for future learning so it is very important and helpful.   When you focus on performance ...

  Dear Carlos, Congratulations on the offer and acceptance of your internship this summer with Oasis technologies!  The team at Oasis is so excited to work with you.  This is a big step for you as you will be learning all kinds of new things.  Some of these things will be technical in nature.  Specific skills directly related to coding and programming.  Some will focus more on professional skill building.  You know, those things that we all need to be able to model if we are going to be able to be a successful teammate and employee.  In order to help you succeed, below I am outlining a couple of strategies that you might find useful.   Technical skills.  We are all impressed with how you have self-taught yourself many of the foundational skills you will need to succeed in this workplace setting.  Of course, the team at Oasis will provide excellent training when you first start – I have no...

Dear Ross, Here we are. Thirty-one years into this life. A teacher and a professional learner--or so I thought. What have you been reading all this time? Who have you been listening to? And how did you manage to get this far without knowing what the empirical truth was behind the importance of spaced retrieval. Sure, you practiced critical reflection or monitoring behavior implicitly, and you even spent a good part of your study time  elaborating  on concepts, as is often required in English classes. But you also crammed and regurgitated answers to questions long forgotten, and you did so quite often. No wonder school was a nightmare for you in your early years. You were basically stumbling through school with a greased up brain--information sliding right out!  I have some information for you. And if you want to retain it, you are going to have to listen to me, you...us.  Through specific steps in structuring how we study, we can begin to arrest the constant forgetti...

Dear Oliver,   This semester I learned about strategies to support learning. Most of the strategies were about how to strengthen long-term retention of information by warding-off forgetting. Remembering basic information can in turn support deeper learning—for example, conceptual understanding, mastery of content and skills, flexible thinking, and problem-solving—by securing the essential foundational knowledge solidly in your brain for you to access, use, and build upon. These strategies for learning and remembering information are important and valuable. I will tell you about them! But first I want to tell you about growth mindset, which is also essential for supporting your lifelong learning and success.  What is a growth mindset you ask? Great question! A growth mindset is essentially the deeply-held conviction that your intellectual ability is not fixed, but depends largely on your own actions. Your brain is malleable: when you work hard and learn new things, your brain f...

Hi May, I heard that you have been staying up very late to study for your upcoming final exams. This is me when I pulled all-nighters to cram for exams and I bet you also look like this. and  this…  I used to find myself in a massive rush, trying to stuff as much information as possible a few days before exams. This approach often gave me good grades. However, it made me exhausted, stressed and it took me a long time after exams to physically recover from these crazy days. I also always forgot everything that I have learned the minute I walked out of the exam room. Realizing learning is not the same with performance, I do not let myself in this situation anymore. With a better study plan, I can space out study sessions over the course of the semester and interleave my practice. This approach allows me to forget and re-study, which makes the learning stick to my long-term memory. In the exam dates, I can work on my exam papers with a high level of confidence, concentratio...

       Come one! Come all! Step right up! Gather around and attempt to suspend your skepticism and disbelief! I have great mysteries of the world to reveal to you! You won't want to believe it, it goes against everything you know! Who is brave enough to step through beyond your own knowledge and embrace the new?     Dear First-Year Students,      You may have been trained in ways of studying such as reading, highlighting, rereading, note taking and organizing notes, writing notes by hand versus typing them into your computer. I am here to introduce you to new, mysterious methods that may seem strange and unfamiliar, yet have been shown through empirical research to be more effective than the methods you know. Are you interested?      You are brave. Here are some new things to try (although not so new, they've been around for ages but for some reason have remained locked away in a secret vault accessible only to PhDs) Quizzing:...

 Hi Candice, I know you are gearing up for the summer season and probably quite busy preparing to onboard and train your seasonal field crews. I recall this time of year well…putting together the week-long training schedule, trying to decide what key skills to focus on given that folks are employed for three months, and then trying to figure out how to fit it all into one week. Then after the training, wondering what trainees will remember. Did I just waste our time trying to cram all that information into one week? Well, I wanted to pass on a strategy that could help you plan your training and feel confident that you made the best use of the time available. Plus, this strategy has been shown to improve learning and retention of knowledge – which I know is essential because these seasonal folks have to hit the ground running! The strategy is called spacing, which means studying or engaging with a topic more than once and leaving considerable time in between each session (Brown ...

Niece-y. Okay, okay, okay. Here's the situation. I know you're ready and anxiously awaiting the start of your next chapter. BUT, before you pack up, put your energy, confidence and inspiration into that magic box to carry along with you, and head off into the wide open spaces of University, just give me a moment. Let me spout off, aka share, some revelations from my class about learning this semester.  Everything your teachers told you about how to study and succeed MAY have been wrong. No joke, it's true. All the note-taking, all the highlighting and re-reading and memorization may only be making you feel  like you know what you're studying and therefore, what you're talking about. Scary, right? I did a double take this semester in my program, too. Why? Because I have always done all of those things throughout my years in school and so far, I have been quite successful. So, I'm not necessarily telling you to stop doing those things, but I may be able to give yo...

  Dear Jacob, As you start your first year of medical school, I am writing you this letter to offer you some words of wisdom on effective study strategies and debunk some widely accepted, yet wrong, theories. In my courses this year, I have been learning about the best ways for students to encode information, learn for longevity, and do well on exams. As I am studying to become a professor, I have found some of the things that I have learned along the way surprising. Did you know that the reputable method of identifying your learning style and catering content to be presented in that particular style for best results is actually not based on any kind of empirical research?   It’s important to remember that set-backs and frustration are signs of improvement and effort. When learning is effortful, it is more successful. It helps to think of these moments of chagrin not as failures, but as desirable difficulties because without them, there is no advancement in learning.   Th...

  Dear English Composition students, Congratulations kiddos! You have successfully finished a year worth of a college writing class and most of you are on your way to the next chapter of life: actual college. This past year, our theme as been about embracing the chaos and uncertainty in our worlds. We focused primarily on the chaos and uncertainty of going to school, growing up during a pandemic, and surviving the best we could mentally with all the challenges that have come up throughout the year. One thing I have consistently preached (yup, got on that soap box and beat it into your hearts and minds), has been that failure is a necessity for proper growth and you must take chances in this crazy world, especially when it comes to learning and being successful. Sometimes you might be thinking that Heller is off her rocker and full of it, and somethings I am slightly looney about certain things. But the one thing I continue to be transparent about is how you must fail to succeed, ...

  Maya,    You are about to start high school. Your high school academics will impact your future in a variety of ways. The better you study, the better you will perform in class, the better grades your grades will be. Better grades lead to advanced courses and advanced courses will lead to a college going future. As I’ve shared with you before, higher education is one of the best ways to get out of the cycle of poverty. It worked for me and I know it will work for you. I hope you trust me enough to apply what I share with you in this letter. As boring as this letter may be for you, this may be the best knowledge I pass on (my kind of wealth advisement). What I have below is a snippet of what I want to say, but if I make it too long, you may not read it. So, here go my 2 cents… (I give you 2 cents and you invest that in your future…catch my drift here??)  =)    Cent 1: Take your time (space out your studying).    Previous research shows the mo...

First, you all are beautiful and I miss you. I’ll be home to visit soon. But, I wanted to tell you all about what I’ve been learning about since I’ve started going back to school. You know that Tee Tee is trying to be a doctor, right? J Well, I’m in a class called Human Learning, Cognition and Motivation. I know you all have probably heard of or used most of those words, but the word cognition may be a new one. Cognition is a fancy word that explains what our brain goes through when we’re learning something new. How we think, how we remember, how we know, how we understand. But, in this class I am learning about something called the science of learning . Did you all know that you can learn how to learn? You can gain new skills about what learning is and how to learn best. It’s pretty cool stuff. Destini, Danae, Brooklyn and Kennedy, how do you all learn? If you have a test or quiz, how do you study? Are you trying to memorize the words or the lessons from your teachers? Are you jus...

 Dear Gabe,  I know you have always been a great student, but now that you will be a college student next year, I have a bit of advice on how to perform to your ridiculously high potential. What's even more is that this advice will not only help your performance, but it can help you to better learn the material your being presented and retain it in your memory over a long period of time.  The first thing I would recommend you do is to establish a schedule on your calendar (whether that is physical calendar or a phone/computer app does not matter) in which you organize your time. Be sure to schedule time into each day for completing assignments and also time for reviewing material learned earlier in the semester (more on that later). Be faithful to stick to your schedule as the hours of a day can disappear so easily disappear with you even noticing it! Do build in time for recreation each day, and avoid trying to study for huge blocks of time. Provide some opportunities fo...