Special Message for Whoever Teaches, Trains, Learns, or Creatively
Solves Problems...
by Win Wenger, Ph.D.
By now all professionals in problem-solving and creativity should know
this. Whatever is your favorite method of solving problems or of being creative,
you can take immediate advantage of it in a huge domain, the domain that
pertains to all matters of education. Here is also a simple reminder to anyone
involved with learning or with teaching or training - - -
Hundreds of different ingenious problem-solving methods and creativity-related
techniques are successfully in professional use around the world....
Convert any one of these - or all of these! - into a superlearning, accelerated
learning-with-understanding method. Here is how: where one would ordinarily
feature the problem statement, use one of these four questions below, at the
conclusion of a lesson or a chapter:
A reminder that every one of the creative problem-solving techniques - including
those of ours you cited - can also serve as superlearning techniques for the
understanding mastery of contents. Just use a rotation of these four questions
where the problem statement would go otherwise:
"What are the
ramifications of the main point in this lesson?"
"What main point in
this lesson do I most need to give further attention to, & why?"
"How do the various
points in this lesson relate to one-another?"
“What in my experience
- or in my whole life thus far - does the main point of this lesson somehow
remind me of? I wonder why that somehow reminds me of that....
...and then Windtunnel, Freenote, or otherwise rapid-flow express and record
freely whatever comes to mind in response... (see
http://www.winwenger.com/part72.htm &
http://www.winwenger.com/freenote.htm, respectively).
Teachers, 5 minutes invested thus, having students buzz such questions with each
other in pairs at end of your class, will more than double your students'
long-term retention of what you've taught them, and profoundly improve their
understanding thereof. If there is value to what you've taught them, then this
seems a worthwhile investment: "Students, please turn to the person next to you
and in the next couple of minutes, see how best between you that you can answer
this question...." If you listen to those buzzings, you will discover more
clearly than any tests or drillwork could show you, how and what you've gotten
across, and how best TO get across what you've been trying to teach.
Teachers: if you have conventional classroom setup, for the sake of the
classrooms next door have your buzzing students huddle close together so their
conversing-to-answer will be a mild buzz-murmur instead of a cocktail-party
roar.
Students or teachers: a rotation among those four questions is probably
best, from occasion to occasion, instead of repeatedly using the one of them
every time.
What simpler way to more than double the value of every lesson and every unit of
learning-with-understanding? "Are you sure you can handle this now?" What does
it cost you to try this out once and see what happens?
Coming soon here: I will soon post here the test results from last spring in a
school which started teaching with our modern Socratic Method. All the faculty
there since have reportedly begun using our modern Socratic Method and we are
looking forward eagerly to the new round of those no-longer-dreaded tests.
....win
http://www.winwenger.com/dynform.htm
http://www.winwenger.com/solving.htm
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