Learning How To Learn: Book Review for Uncommon Sense Teaching (Part 2)

By Zainab Cheema

Do you remember the story of the hare and the tortoise? As it turns out, Aesop’s fable is grounded in neuroscience. Hiker brain learners (the learners who take considerable time to master a concept) often have an advantage over the race car brain learners. Neuroscience shows that tweaks to traditional teaching techniques can benefit students with different learning styles, helping them to master concepts. In my last post, my review of Barbara Oakley, Beth Rogowsky, and Terrence Sejnowski’s Uncommon Sense Teaching highlighted how educators can get the maximum dividends by understanding how learning takes place.

Uncommon Sense Teaching is not only useful for educators, but also for anyone interested in hacking the biological process of knowledge creation for their business or personal life. Any of these tips can easily be adapted towards running a meeting; rehearsing and giving a presentation; or just having fun in your personal learning goals. 

As we know, the end goal of learning is planting knowledge in one’s long-term memory. There are many pitfalls that an experienced educator will confront along the way: minimizing frustration for the hiker brain learners, getting race car learners to overcome procrastination, among others. In my last post, I reviewed the book’s findings on retrieval practice and spaced repetition in the learning process. It’s a no brainer that repeated bursts of learning with breaks for sleep and relaxation are critical to mastering new material.

Here’s the key takeaway—value the period of relaxation between the learning sessions. Deep learning means making creative new neural connections—this means forging often wild and crazy configurations between neurons that might not be located next to each other in the brain. Oakley, Rogowsky, and Sejnowski observe that the best way for the brain to make those connections is when the brain goes from focused to diffuse mode. In other words, the diffuse mode (when our brains are not externally focused on something) is when unexpected neural connections form between different areas of our brain. This offers clear science to back up study methods like The Pomodoro Technique. This also explains why great thinkers and inventors such as Carl Jung and Thomas Edison were able to harness their sleep and daydreams into creative inventions.

Uncommon Sense Teaching  builds on the interplay between the focused and diffuse mode of learning to offer practical tips on short circuiting the frustrating moments of problem solving at high difficulty levels. When confronted with an extremely difficult problem on a test (or in real life!) it’s helpful to continue struggling with it till the peak frustration moment and then to redirect oneself to simpler problems. After completing them, return to the difficult problem and prepare to be amazed at how easily you’ll be able cracked it. Going into the diffuse mode allows the insights we make with the difficult problem to seal in our brain, helping us to forge ahead with the problem when we return. The problem is that students often rush towards procrastination or distraction, which weakens the neural connections we have begun to forge with the hard problem. These slights tweaks can do wonders for your students’—and your—productivity.   

Given the massive success of Barb Oakley’s Learning How To Learn MOOC, I also appreciated the book’s chapter on best tips and practices for putting together an online course. While some of her suggestions can be found by searching on Youtube and Google,  it was helpful to have Barb’s best practices compiled together in one place. The chapter reinforces data on the hybrid classroom as being the learning forum of the future, where the educator blends asynchronous and synchronous learning techniques to guide students towards deeper mastery (and towards having more fun in the classroom!)

Uncommon Sense Teaching makes the point that the learning community has long been aware of—master educators must be master planners. Knowing the brain science behind the way we learn helps us to tweak our best practices for astronomic rates of return. One of my favorite chapter is the one on Lesson Plans, where the book offers strategies for organizing the roadmap for a day’s learning session. Oakley, Rogowsky, and Sejnowski stress the important of bell ringers and hooks in a day’s lesson plan. A bell ringer could be an activity that students can begin to work on as soon as they enter class to gain a powerful recap of material they’ve previously learned. This cuts dead time, boosts retrieval, and focuses your class on the day’s objective.  A hook is a powerful, emotional connection between the material and what your students are experiencing and thinking about in their personal lives. A thoughtful GIF, video, podcast clip—or even a rhetorical question—could do the trick.

Uncommon Sense Teaching is a valuable resource for the classroom, conference hall or the home. Anyone can be a master learner. Not only should we try, we should know how to try.