1 Why Trust this Guide?
Ben wondered what this school year, his twentieth and last year after college and professional school, would bring. Ben knew that the year would end with licensing exams, to which he didn’t exactly look forward. But Ben wasn’t worried about those exams, at least not nearly as much as some of his less-fortunate or less-earnest classmates. Ben knew he would pass and very likely on the first try, presuming he continued to apply himself to his studies as he had for, well, nearly twenty years. But Ben also knew that his studies wouldn’t end after his licensing exam. Indeed, Ben suspected that entering his profession would begin a whole new learning curve. He just hoped he was up to that task, too.
Goal
Learning, or at least school, is a given. School is nearly all we do for our first eighteen, twenty-two, or twenty-five years, depending on where you get off the school train. Yet that’s exactly the challenge: school is so routine that we seldom give due attention to what we’re actually doing in school, which is to study and learn. We go through the motions, for sure. Schools have effective ways of ensuring that we do go through the motions. Those tools include rewards like high scores, good grades, honors, and graduations, and deterrents like low scores, failing grades, loss of privileges, and failure to advance and graduate. But those tools are all external things that disappear when the learning moves from school to the real world, where learning needs not just to continue but to accelerate. And that’s the goal of this guide, to help you step back from going through the motions of studying, to help you see how you truly learn without the artificial support of schooling. If you make that your goal, to learn how you best learn, your rewards will accumulate over a lifetime.
Metacognition
The prior paragraph describes taking a metacognitive stance with respect to your learning. This guide will try to eschew academic jargon. But in this instance, the phrase makes too much sense to ignore. Think of learning as involving two tracks. The first track is the one on which we ordinarily proceed without thinking, while trying to learn. It’s all the usual stuff like reading assignments, listening to lectures while watching slide shows, taking notes, and then maybe creating outlines to go over repeatedly to prepare for the next quiz, test, or exam. Effective learning, though, has a second track above that first track. The second track involves assessing the effectiveness of our first-track activities. It’s like looking over your own shoulder as you study, to measure how the studies are going for you. And that’s the nature of metacognition, which basically means to think about your thinking.
Guidance
Think of this guide, then, as building your metacognitive awareness. If you come away from reading this guide with a firm commitment to continually evaluate and adjust your learning for its greatest effectiveness, then both you and this guide will have accomplished your goals. The hope is that you resume your studies looking over your own shoulder at the progress of your studies, giving little nudges either to keep at it or to try this instead. But to make your metacognitive awareness effective, you’ll need sound insight into the goals and process of learning. If you are to be your own learning guide, then you’ll need to learn the shape of the learning landscape. And that landscape has a lot of fascinating features to it, including obstacles that you’ll want to avoid and routes that you’ll want to take. Let this guide build your knowledge of the learning landscape so that you use that landscape map as your metacognitive guide. Hold this learning-landscape map up for tips as you look over your own shoulder while you’re studying, to adjust, improve, deepen, and speed your learning. Does that sound exciting? I hope so.
Information
You have especially good reasons to learn how to learn today, in an age when information is only an internet search and artificial-intelligence answer away. That assertion may sound like a contradiction. After all, what’s the use of learning if answers are constantly at one’s fingertips? Let artificial intelligence handle it. But as we’ll see in the next chapter, learning doesn’t necessarily mean storing up vast quantities of information, although doing so is learning of one sort. Our role in the world isn’t to soak up information to spit out on demand, as AI-driven large language models do. Our role has much more to do with asking the right questions consistent with our purpose and then discerning whether the hypotheses we reach as tentative answers match the reality we face. With information ubiquitous, you don’t need more information. You need the wisdom to discern sound patterns within the information that will advance your purpose in the real world.
Experience
Experience is thus a big part of learning and of effective studying. If what you’re learning doesn’t work in your world, then you may be wasting your time. You may be learning wrong things that won’t show you genuine patterns promoting your purpose. And again, that’s where metacognition comes in. Even as you’re learning things, whether knowledge, skills, or ethics, you need also to be testing their soundness, consistency, and utility in the material world. Is what you’re learning working for you? The same, though, is true about your metacognition. Is your assessment of your learning accurate? Learners tend to think that they’re flying along, when their estimate of their progress is often way off. Likewise, struggling learners may think that they’re not gaining, when their striving may be proving that they are. So, you need a guide with experience in both the real world and the world of learning, someone who knows that learning landscape.
Empiricism
Lots of folks have lots of ideas about learning. Fewer folks have much interest in testing their ideas. Yet empirical study of teaching and learning has revealed startling insights. Models of learning can be beautiful and fascinating. Learning is so complex, hidden, and subtle that we need models to even get any idea of what may be going on. But models are only as good as their accuracy in predicting results. That’s what makes testing ideas about learning so important. Empirical studies show whether the models are working or not. The rich but mostly hidden empirical literature on teaching and learning can confirm the accuracy of your mental learning landscape. This guide resists presenting untested models in favor of approaches and techniques that empirical studies confirm. Let’s be real, not theoretical.
Insight
I came to that view, that we need to test and approve our learning as real and working, by a curious route. About mid-life, I moved from the very real world of professional practice into the not-so-real world of teaching. There, I did what other instructors did, assuming the traditional and common forms, habits, and practices of teachers around me. Soon after, I was leading two campuses, including recruiting, orienting, equipping, and evaluating new instructors. I was also dealing with accreditors who were closely examining and frankly challenging the quality of our instructional program. No question, we had to up our instructional game. As a school of access, we had both brilliant students on full free rides and struggling students who couldn’t get into any other school. And I knew that we needed to support them all, especially the strugglers whom traditional instruction simply wasn’t serving well. We needed fresh insight into better ways of helping students learn.
Solution
My solution was to find a brilliant, up-and-coming behavioral psychologist at our university who was directing an institute of students pursuing Ph.D. degrees in instructional design. His student teams were already working in corporate offices, manufacturing plants, special-needs programs, and any other places people at all stages of life were trying to study and learn, and not just learn head knowledge but also real skills that work well in the world. The institute director graciously lent his student teams to my campuses, so that we had doctoral students studying whether what we were doing in the classrooms and clinics was effective in helping the students learn. The institute director and his students introduced us and our students to new methods for learning. The director also fed me their research and empirical studies supporting their methods. And we kept assessing our students’ performance to measure what was working. We labored together at the reforms and enhancements for several years, making gradual progress, until we eliminated student attrition and raised the graduation and licensure rates well above our comparison cohorts on a consistent basis.
Growing
I had the privilege, then, of sharing our work in presentations at national teaching and learning conferences and in scholarly articles and book publications, where I met and got to work with others interested in learning reforms. Their efforts were wringing similar success out of similarly challenged instructional programs. The journey was my most rewarding work of a lifetime, especially because it involved helping others learn and grow. The whole point of our common efforts were to equip others with the tools, practices, methods, insight, and inspiration to learn and grow. We wanted nothing more and nothing less than to open others’ capacities to do well through education so that they and their families could flourish and, in doing so, turn to help others, too. And I can say that I’ve had that satisfaction, too, to see students whom we helped to learn, and in some instances taught to learn, open their doors and follow their paths into rewarding lives and careers. Personal growth is a beautiful and precious thing. And growth requires learning, effective learning, not just beating one’s head against a wall. Hence this guide, sharing in a different format for a broader audience some of what I learned about study practices, helping others learn, grow, and flourish.
Roadmap
So, here’s a roadmap of this guide. The first few chapters, like this one, explore the nature of learning and studying, to give you a stronger and deeper framework for what you’re trying to do well. The chapters then begin with learning basics, one by one, while building on to more-complex learning challenges and skills. In that way, the guide starts with a foundation before building the structure upward toward the most-complex learning skills. The guide ends with some chapters on special learning challenges, learning resources, and what might be learning’s pinnacle for you, indeed what learning success may look like. When you start on a journey, it’s good, after all, to know where you might want to go. One hears that it’s all about the journey, but the best journeys know their fruitful destination. Keep your eyes upward as you climb toward education’s mountaintop. You need the right vision to reach your learning goal.
Integration
Your best use of this guide requires that you integrate what you learn. Don’t just read for points of interest. Instead, make good use of what you read. The guide includes two features to help you do so. Each chapter begins with an illustration. See if you discern yourself in those illustrations or discern where you could find yourself some day. We learn by stories. Indeed, we communicate and live by stories, just as we are part of a grand story, the grandest story of all. So, let the illustrations help you place what you learn in this guide within your own story, while you connect your own story with that grandest story of which all stories are a part. Every chapter also concludes with a set of reflection questions covering the chapter’s main points. Mull the questions. Take a minute to think about those questions that most hit home, the ones that resonate with something going on with you that you might want to adjust, adapt, or otherwise address. Let the reflection questions help you measure yourself and your study habits and practices, until your mind, body, spirit, and soul align with what’s sound, true, useful, and right. And enjoy the journey. See you at the mountaintop.
Reflection
What made you pick up this guide? Something called you to seek an insight and make an adjustment to reach farther than you currently can. Keep that call in mind as you read through this guide. In that voice, you may have already discovered what you need. Do you already have a metacognitive stance toward your learning? Can you identify study practices that you have already adjusted for better progress? Do you regularly seek and accept guidance about your study habits and practices? Or do you resist advice and cling to what you ordinarily do, even when you’re not satisfied with the results? Are you satisfied with your current learning? Whether you are satisfied or not with your study skills, are you open to expanding and increasing those skills? A better attitude may be most of what it takes. Do you appreciate the difference between acquiring information and learning useful knowledge, ethics, and skills? Do you regularly measure what you learn against your own experience of the world? Would you like to know that your study practices have empirical support, proving their effectiveness? On a scale of one to ten, how interested are you in your own growth?
Key Points
Keeping in mind your goal for studying helps you achieve it.
Thinking about your thinking, or metacognition, helps you learn.
Accepting guidance can make big differences in how quickly you learn.
Recognize the difference between acquiring information and learning.
Test new knowledge against your own experience of the world.
Trust study habits that have empirical, evidentiary support.
Fresh insight into your study habits can vastly improve them.
Trust study and learning insights already proven in real-world fields.
Integrate your insights into your own practices, putting them to work.