I have been a big fan of mind mapping and I used to teach my classes how to mind map. Many schools in Singapore do get their students to learn mind mapping through external agencies. But usually these efforts to teach mind mapping go to waste because the teachers in the school very rarely follow-up upon the training by not insisting that students make their own mind maps of what they have learned. Teachers even sabotaged these efforts by providing students with teacher-prepared notes.

Perhaps we can all gain by watching this video where the originator of mind maps himself, Tony Buzan, explain the thinking that goes on behind the use of a mind map. Enjoy.

Many years ago, when I was a teacher in a secondary school in Singapore, I used to teach my students some basic skills that I thought were important. These included mind mapping and the various memory systems. These are among the well-known accelerated learning techniques. Most of them were skills I had picked up through reading after I had left the university.  I remember then feeling that I wish I had known how to use them when I was in the university. It would have made life a lot easier for me as a student.

Even after I had taught them, I found that the students found it difficult because they would apply these skills only for my classes but not for the others.  The other teachers in the schools would still do things the traditional “school fashion” way. Only a few really determined students would actually use them fully and it was heartening to get messages from them about the usefulness of these skills later at the tertiary level.

Today schools in Singapore, for example, have as part of their enrichment programs, exposed students to these accelerated learning techniques. However, as in my experience above, it is almost never followed up by the teachers in the classrooms. Teachers still dish out prepared traditional, linear notes to the students and students become addicted to these notes. To be fair to the teachers, quite a few feel pressured by their supervisors to provide prepared notes to the students.

I believe accelerated learning techniques work. In addition to mind mapping, and memory systems, students should also be taught speed reading and even some Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) techniques to help students get a better mind set for learning. These skills should be taught as core skills in any school.  Teachers too should be taught such skills.

But perhaps more importantly, these skills should be made the core of the study approach of the school. There is no point that these skills are learned and not put into practice. The school leaders must insist on their use by both students and teachers. In an earlier post, I had talked about note-taking skills as a fundamental skill of the independent learner. I will like to add here that all these accelerated learning techniques that I have outlined here are essential for the independent learner. Schools should shed their stodgy teaching and learning approaches and embrace these techniques. The usually heavy school curriculum demands it. The information explosion demands it. The new work place of the future demands it too. Most of all, do it for the sanity of the students immersed in an overloaded school curriculum.

When I was a teacher in schools in Singapore, I always make a point to teach my students to learn how take notes. I would usually teach them how to create Mind Maps. This is my favorite way of taking notes and is the way that Tony Buzan advocates. I like it because it gives me great flexibility to arrange my notes in a structure that makes sense to me. It’s arrangement reflects the way I think of the subject.

The Mind Map is a very effective graphic organizer. Graphic organizers are diagrams that represent the relationships of ideas through the use of abstract symbols and words. Graphic organizers in fact can be used to help us frame our thinking and many different graphic organizers have been designed for the specific kinds of thinking that we want to do. The graphic organizer to help someone do a comparison is different from a graphic organizer that helps someone to show how to make a proposition with reasoned arguments.

Graphic organizers help teachers and students be focused on important information. It helps students and teachers to sieve through a lot of information at a glance. Graphic organizers also helps to arrange information in a coherent manner so students and teachers can see the relationships between concepts and elements. Too often students get bits of information from their books and teachers but if they cannot make sense of the information, then it remains only as disparate bits of information and not knowledge. Knowledge is attained only when students make sense of the information. Graphic organizers help students to make knowledge out of information by allowing them to see the relationships between concepts and elements.

Teachers must make greater effort to use graphic organizers in their classrooms. They must also teach their students to choose the correct graphic organizer for each of the thinking skills that the student is going to employ. Graphic organizers help make our students knowledgeable.