Essentials of Good Learners

This is from the book The Elements of Learning by James M. Banner, Jr. and Harold Cannon. (1999 Yale University) I always wanted to write down the ideas I have about learning, and when I picked up this book, it was like reading every idea ever had. It is a WONDERFUL book about the traits you need to work on to be a good learner, which we all need to work on. Everything here is paraphrased or quoted directly from the book.

It has eleven basic qualities of learning:

1. Industry

"By definition, real students work hard. If you don't work hard, you're either a genius or a slacker. For most of us--people who have to work to achieve what we want and can't rely on genius to achieve it -- success in studying, as in everything else, requires hard, sometimes extremely hard, work. The good news, however, is that hard work brings great rewards. "

Even the most talented people struggle to master basics, which sometimes bores them and wears them out. Study calls for repeated application (use) concentration, focused thought, and often solitude, all of which is challenging. Actual study is often tedious.

Work on Your Weaknesses

Sports, playing an instrument, creating art, or anything else requires concentrating on improving your weakest areas. It is the with studying and learning. Once you have identified your weaknesses, you need to work hard to eliminate them or improve them to the best of your ability. The way to raise your skill level overall is to improve what you do less well on, as you already are doing a good job on the stuff you do well on (usually called the "easy stuff.") Don't ever be OK with getting better. You always want to keep improving all of the time. There are always more goals. Be honest with yourself and look at what you do not do well on honestly and without fear. The things that are hardest for you are the ones you need to work the most on. You have to be honest about what you're weak at and not make excuses.

*Learning requires you to make an unending effort to keep your mind on your studying. It is natural to get distracted and for your mind to wander off. You need to make the effort to improve your concentration and focus.

* Your hardest job is to study and learn alone. The higher up you go in education, the more time you spend learning alone.

*Industry is most evident and beneficial when you go beyond what you are required to study and learn. This allows you to focus on what interests you, as most assignments are minimum requirements of instructors.

*The effort of studying requires organization. You need a planned and scheduled commitment to be successful.

Why Teachers Work You So Hard

Good teachers challenge you every minute, whether in your presence or not. They know you probably want to do something else and are trying to help you with that. You may not like that, but they are not doing their jobs if they don't make you work hard. Bad students want easy teachers. Good students hope for ones who push them and expect the most they can give. Good teachers keep asking for more and more each time. Their real purpose is to instill a lifelong habit of pushing yourself because of the expectations they've set for you, which then become your own.

2. Enthusiasm

The work of learning is hard for most people, and much of it is no fun. To make things more stimulating and interesting, you can develop enthusiasm about anything. Find something about it that interests you and will benefit you in some way. It's hard to find interest in subjects you hate, but you need to take charge of the situation and figure out how to create an interest in it. All students have been in a situation of "why do I have to learn _______?"

*Success in learning anything is likely to be a source of satisfaction. People who have accomplished great things have not done so without finding some enthusiasm in very difficult things.

*Enthusiasm begins with with your own interests. Work hard at finding something about what you're studying that interests you to build on.

*Enthusiasm means letting favorites lead the way. We always find the we like the subjects the most that appeal to our own strengths and interests. So, you have to try harder with the ones you have the least interest in.

*Enthusiasm grows by connecting what your learning with your life. Find something in a subject that might be of interest to you, because even if you don't like learning it, you will learn more easily and remember better if it is of some use to you. Eventually you learn that learning is it's own reward.

*It's better to appeal to, rather than work against, your teachers. Your enthusiasm improves your teacher's instruction. It helps save them from the boredom of repetition.

Most people are enthusiastic about something. The trick is to link your enthusiasm to what you're required to study. That's not easy. When you figure out how to relate what you're learning to something you're enthusiastic about, you'll find learning and studying become easier, more satisfying, and most important, more lasting.

Reflecting on what you learn helps make it your own.

--Think of reflection as a kind of disciplined daydreaming. Your mind needs to wander along the paths you direct.

-- Ask questions about what you're learning and what you know.

--Seek significance in everything you learn.

--Remember that understanding comes only from you. To understand something, you must reflect on it.

3. Pleasure

Because it takes hard work to learn and study, studying can temporarily drain pleasure from your life. It keeps you from your friends and activities, and it's frustrating. Everyone finds pleasure in different things, and so what you take pleasure in may be yours alone.

Learning should be play as well as work--playing with the the ideas of people and one another. Your teachers aren't employed as entertainers. Their job requires that they engage you in mental activity, not hand you knowledge like a gift so that you can learn--or think you're learning--without effort.

Learning requires delayed gratification. It requires an act of faith that you will not get immediate, visible results from learning. Just as you exercise to improve your well-being, you do not see immediate results, but over time notice it affects many things. Many subjects have general, rather than specific applications so that you quicken and strengthen your general capacities. YOu never know how, when, or why what you learned when you learn when you're young (much of it against your will) will affect your life, but it will always affect it, and almost always for immediate gratification. That;'s why you postpone gratification--so that you have greater and longer lasting gratification later.

In this age of media and instant gratification, you have to really put effort, will, and imagination into the work you're engaged in. If you wait to be dazzled by lights, movement, music, and drama, you'll be bored within minutes. What you learn is all your own and helps you to understand a part of the world. One of the tricks to make a tough classroom more pleasant is when the tedium lifts, like when someone asks a question that strikes a chord. When that happens, go for it.

*The pleasures of learning often require that you postpone immediate pleasures. Like climbing a mountain, it will take many hours of work and effort to get to the top, but you can't enjoy the view, let alone the sheer satisfaction from accomplishment, without the struggle. Success on overcoming obstacles is true pleasure.

* The pleasures of study are often solitary.

* Gaining knowledge may demand effort, but ignorance brings misery.

* Charting your own journey to knowledge is the ultimate pleasure. It's up to you to develop your own potential to the greatest advantage. Learning must be your own creation and your own satisfaction. Those self-satisfactions are the best in life.

What to do: Question!

If you accept everything as told, your mind becomes lazy and you become dependent on others. "Why?" should always be your most frequent question. Never stop asking yourself what questions you should be asking. Don't take any answer on faith. Seek an explanation for everything.

4. Curiosity

Curiosity carries you beyond the immediate and pushes you to learn what is still unknown to you. When you are young, we are curious about everything, but often when we grow, it becomes more mundane, and as it becomes your own responsibility, thus requires work, which many want to avoid. Fear often causes us to stop asking questions.

Curiosity requires effort, and sometimes you must create it and force yourself to master something that deeply bores you. It's easy to respond to something very interesting. It's hard to generate curiosity when it's not there. You've got to search and be attentive and look around to find something that rouses your interest, and then you have to answer all of the questions it brings up.

We all have different things that makes us curious. You have to learn to focus and discipline it, so that your questions take you somewhere and they work for you.

* To be curious, like a young child, you have to open yourself to all experience. You have to ask questions all of the time, because if you don't ask them, you can't answer them, and if you don't try to answer them, you can't learn. And, aren't your questions more interesting than everyone else's?

*Opening yourself to experience means yielding to your curiosity and then directing it. Curiosity denied leads to dissatisfaction, and lost opportunities to learn.

* Curiosity kindles curiosity. The more we learn, the more it leads us to learn more and ask more questions.

* The absence of curiosity shouldn't make you hopeless. If you're not curious, you're just not paying enough attention to the world around you, or you're doing passive activities like tv and nothing else.

* Frustrated curiosity can be creative. Sometimes you can't answer your questions, but you can learn from not being able to find the answers, like you're not looking in the right place, or no one has asked that question--this is the basis of all new discoveries.

*The entire world can satisfy, as well as arouse, your curiosity, if you only use it. Anything can be the source of the answers you seek, from people to books to museums.

Wondering about something means being open to knowledge and the possibility of surprise; it means letting yourself be puzzled or astonished by something new, strange, unknown, or not understood.

Like grains of sand inside an oyster shell, little irritations of curiosity can produce pearls.

5. Aspiration

"It is always hard work to study and learn. But it;s far more difficult to do so without a specific goal in mind. . . . If you just drift along, studying what's prescribed, without investing any of your own determination and hopes, you're unlikely to learn much or get full benefit of the education you're offered."

You can't simply have an objective in mind. There are benefits to your motivations, but if you decide to study because you want to learn about the world and your place in it or achieve something in life and leave something behind, you have found the best reasons to study, because you are now linked to something beyond yourself.

Don't Sell Yourself Short

Much is made of self-esteem these days. It is not something that can be given or taught. It has to come from within and gained through your own achievements. It doesn't depend on what others think of you. It is the sense you have of your own strengths and capabilities. Evaluating your own strengths is difficult, so it's easy to sell yourself short (as well as over inflate your strengths.) Sense of self develops in your student years, and studying and learning are a major means of gaining self-esteem. You learn about yourself by learning about others, and when you achieve understanding, you gain competence and satisfaction. It is easy to fall into the potholes of confusion, frustration, and failure.

Don't evaluate yourself by other's standards. Set your own high, but reasonable standards for learning, then evaluate yourself against them. It can be difficult to set these standards, so seek advice of friends, parents and teachers, but rely on what you know about yourself. Insist on candid evaluations by others. "Don't let anyone patronize you or let you off the hook by making you think your work is better than it is. Press advisors for honesty, and prepare yourself for the disappointment and hurt you may momentarily feel when they respond honestly. Like the pain of inoculation, that temporary pinprick will be of good purpose."

Develop reasonable goals and then work hard to meet them. Sensible goals allow you to decide what you should learn in a reasonable amount of time.

Ambition is not necessarily a bad goal, but the connotation is one of benefit to self rather than to others. Aspiration is ambition linked to good purpose outside one's self, as in giving something to the world. Aspiration gives you direction and value for all of your hard work, it helps organize your thinking, sustain your during struggle, and helps you when you're still on the road to whom you want to be.

Aspiration is not easy to develop, and one must usually do it on one's won. The best of teachers usually try to persuade you that you are privileged to have the opportunity to study, that it is your responsibility to use your education for the good of others, and that you have a responsibility to those who teach you to live up to the high standards and expectations they have given you.

Too hard? No, because the aim of high standards, like everything else worthwhile in education, is to inspire you to surpass yourself, to reach beyond your limited world and envison a good life for yourself and others.

You can't aspire unless you know much, which doesn't come without hard study.You must read of what many people in many situations have done , not just about people like you. Aspiration means keeping in mind the legacy you want to leave behind. Those who are renowned are those who have worked hard and struggled "to overcome daunting obstacles to knowledge, pushing against their repeated frustrations and failures to achieve their goals."

6. Imagination

Imagination is in danger because we are given the images by all of the media available. Often now the ending or details are given instead of our minds being left to create something on our own.

Imagination is there to be summoned and applied like other qualities. You just have to know it;s there and harness it. If you can get control of it and apply it directly to a problem, you may be surprised what happens. "Think of Newton's laws of gravity or the Constitution of the US. Each was a result of applied study . . . of history and law . . . and then imagining what was not yet but might be."

Let your imagination roam free and think of ways, even silly ways, to understand what you're studying or to give your new knowledge meaning." Put what you're learning together in new, even unlikely, combinations. Make the abstract concrete,=, It helps you learn. It's worth the effort.

A video by Weird Al demonstrates this with my specialty, grammar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Gv0H-vPoDc

Imagination allows you to see yourself as a student, see yourself studying, learning, and finding satisfaction in what you come to know. The pleasure in learning comes from using your imagination to apply your own meaning to things. But, it does require discipline to keep it focused on specific tasks and not just wander off on its own. The best way to do that is o give it your own personal meaning.

Reading is an example of using your imagination. Many students say they hate to read, so just don't. But, you can read about ANY topic, and everyone has some interest in something. If you use your imagination and start reading where your interests lie, you will gain strength in reading, and reading the stuff of less interest will become easy. It's all practice.

+Application makes what you learn stick in your mind. Application of knowledge is not a way to do something, but a way to think. "Some say that literature has no practical use--as if understanding life better and being able to write accurately and speak articulately have no value!" Try to apply everything you learn to something that is valuable to you. Think of yourself in context, as in a figure in history or a character in a story.

7. Self-Discipline

The word discipline conjures many negative images, but in a disorderly world, external discipline is necessary. External rules and rewards and punishments are way to help you develop the internal, ordered ways that are essential for your own good and society. At some point parents and teachers assume they've done what they can and turn over the responsibility of conducting yourself appropriately to you, hoping that discipline is self-imposed and you are your own boss. Self discipline is when "you determine the order, methods, and conduct required to help yourself as a student."

You need goals for self-discipline, and those are helped if you have aspirations. To get to the level of success you wish, you need to be able to gain from your struggle with the many frustrations and disappointments so you can gain hard, disciplined study the deep satisfaction and contentment of earning it. You need to have your own reasons for your struggle so you have freedom from other's expectations. AS long as you do this, no one can keep you from taking your own course and learning all there is to get there. Adjust for your needs, not what others are doing. Don't let distractions get between you and your goals. Revise your goals only for strong reasons, as in health and unsuitability, not for difficulty.

Others can see if you are self-disciplined and give examples of it, but you alone must put in the work to get there. It often requires behavior that, at first, may seem unappealing, like putting off socializing and planning ahead for an assignment.

Self-discipline is a plan or method by which you direct your efforts and schedule your time. It is study and activity tied to your aspirations and pursued with perseverance and method. To study and learn you need a clear idea about what you're trying to achieve, a program to achieve it, and enough self-knowledge to understand how to implement it. Know your strengths and weaknesses and how to use them and get help.

Self-discipline requires you resist the lure of activities that can't contribute to your accumulation of knowledge. When you learn, you do so for yourself. When you fail to learn, you're wasting and opportunity that benefits only you. It requires setting high standards, measuring your progress and knowledge against them, and you being the toughest judge. In doing so, you adopt the standards set by the teacher, if they are high enough. But always consider setting higher ones, even those beyond you. The idea of this is not to fail, but to hold out the possibility of learning more than you thought possible. You may have to make hard choices between interests and desires. Establish your priorities and work towards achieving them. It requires postponing immediate gratification for later, and greater benefits. It requires self-denial--putting off what you want now for gains that will bring you much greater benefits later.

"Though lonely and demanding, self-discipline, when achieved, is exhilarating. You have to achieve what you seek by yourself; and to achieve it you must often try and try again, though exhausting practice and repetition."

8. Civility

Civility is an aspect of responsibility towards others. If you listen to an argument you disagree with without attacking, you are being civil. When you are being civil, you're acknowledging people's rights to speak and act in ways that are not injurious to you are anyone else. You accept your responsibility to them, and you assume theirs to you.

Whether you find competition spurs achievement or don't think it helps, you are always in competition with yourself. Whether competition for you is doing better than others or improving your grades or mastering something you failed at before, it's all good and will demand hard work. Some think competition is not civilized, but it is built in for many people and often a motive for achievement. If it works for you, use it to spur yourself on.

"Civility is thus the side of the coin with 'self-control' written on it, the other side carrying the legend 'self-expression.' You can't have a one sided coin." It is critical in your student life as the foundation of a respectful, generous and quiet atmosphere of learning. Civility is more than courtesy, consideration, or respect, it allows others to think, act and behave as they choose as long as it isn't harmful to others. That doesn't mean you need to agree with people or others can't voice their differences or criticize you, it just has everyone on a level playing field with the same rights and responsibilities.

Civility requires you to distinguish ideas and arguments from the where they come. A challenge of study os to distinguish the good from the bad, so you must accept the truth or understanding from someone you may normally disagree with. "Facts, knowledge, points of view, and theories can all be valid without reference to those who express them." You can learn from people you don't like or respect, so listen where you can.

Why is civility important in learning?

Civility tends to breed civility.

Civility is in your interest.

Civility comes in all forms, great and small.

Civility is an aspect in learning that requires you to think of your responsibility towards others, not just yourself.

Repress your feelings and impulses in order to learn what you can from other people. Civility protects your right to be heard and introduce your own ideas so that the strongest ideas emerge. You are judged by the way you tolerate, accommodate and learn from those who are not like you, do not have conventional opinions, and hold minority views.

What to do--admit ignorance. Ignorance is lack of knowledge, not a weakness of the mind, and can be reduced through study. It is a friend for acknowledging what you don't know and a condition for learning. Don't kid yourself about what you know. Admit ignorance so you can remedy your lack of knowledge. Use your ignorance to determine what you need to learn, using it as a motivation.

9. Cooperation

10. Honesty

11. Initiative