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Time to start bear wrestling!

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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 goals, learning for a grade, you might unconsciously limit your potential by only choosing new challenges that you know you can meet.  “But, if your goal is to increase your ability, you pick ever-increasing challenges, and you interpret setbacks as useful information that helps you to sharpen your focus, get more creative, and work harder” (Brown et al., 2014, p. 180).   Dad and I are extremely proud of each of you and want you to reach your full potential, so I encourage you to set learning goals that challenge you in ways that you aren’t sure you can achieve.  

Focusing on learning goals will put you in situations where acquiring new knowledge and skills feels difficult.  As you get those feelings of, “I can’t do this”, I want you to stop and remember that long-term learning is effortful and uncomfortable at the start.  John McPhee shared a strategy that might help you to overcome feelings of inadequacy and/or writer’s blog. John starts by writing a letter to his mother, telling her how awful the whole process of attempting the challenging task is.  He goes into details about why he won’t be able to accomplish the task.  Once the letter is completed, he goes back and deletes the salutation and all of the “whimpering and whining” to create a first draft that is an “awful blurting” (Brown et al., 2014, p. 220).  Then, keep pondering the task and how it might be revised and refined.  Eventually, after clumsily engaging with the new content and continuing to make the effort to explain it in your own words, you will accomplish what John McPhee calls wrestling the bear.  

As you are wrestling the bear for new learning, there are many strategies that will make your study time more efficient and effective.  Reflection is a form of practice that leads to stronger learning because it involves several cognitive activities that empirical research recognizes as valuable.  When you engage in reflection, you retrieve knowledge from your memory which is helpful for moving new learning from your short-term to long-term memory.  Reflection also enables you to connect new concepts to former knowledge and facilitates the process of visualization and mental rehearsal; all of which lead to a deeper understanding of the new concept (Brown et al., 2014).   

Similarly, any time you elaborate about a new topic, you are retrieving the information and thus helping to move it to long-term memory.  “Elaboration is the process of giving new material meaning by expressing it in your own words and connecting it with what you already know” (Brown et al., 2014, p. 5).  Teaching the new concept to another person is a great way to practice elaboration and strengthen your learning, especially if the new learner asks you thought-provoking questions. 

Both reflection and elaboration can be supported by frequent testing.  Testing will also retrieve the information and encourage you to reflect on and elaborate on the topic.  There are a couple of ways that you can engage in frequent testing that will get you the biggest bang for your buck…that is to space out your testing practice and to interleave the topics you are engaging with.  While this seems counterintuitive because it will be harder than blocking your practice, you will actually be helping to more that new knowledge to your long-term memory thus making it more valuable to you in the future.  

As you pursue your new learning adventures in the upcoming year, I hope that you will remember these empirically-based strategies to make your studying more efficient.  Let’s work together to make our studying effective leading to stronger learning as well all figure out how to “wrestle the bear”!

All my love,
Mom

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