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.

Does your child’s school teach your child to take notes? This may sound like a very trivial question but a school that goes out of the way to teach its student population the art and science of note-taking shows the degree of commitment that the school has towards teaching your child to be independent learner. The term “independent learner” or “independent learning” is often been used by schools to catch the attention of parents who want their children to have the virtues of an independent learner instilled while their children are in school. Parents know that this is one of the qualities that the future workforce is expected to possess.

Yet referring to my original question again, how many schools actually teach students to do effective note-taking? Note-taking is a basic skill that everyone needs if he is to be able to learn effectively. Through effective note-taking, the student learns to make decisions about what is important about the learning that he is undergoing.  Effective note-taking implies that a lot of thinking is done by the student to help him sort out the relevant from the irrelevant and to get the information into some organized and effective structure. A student will also be a very much more active learner if he makes his own notes. Independent learners need to be active learners, in fact they have to be pro-active about their learning.

But do schools actually encourage this pro-activity with regards to student learning? To put it another way, do schools actually encourage students to be lazy? The truth is many schools do, and this is true even of the  higher educational institutions. Teachers and lecturers have been guilty of spoon-feeding students with stacks of notes. Today, some educational institutions, like some the polytechnics in Singapore, take pride that their students can get access to lecture notes online. Pride in their new ICT ability to store notes online takes precedence over real learning in such cases.  It seems that today, even at the tertiary levels of education, notes are expected to be given out even though one would expect that at least at that level, students should be encouraged to be more independent and take greater responsibility for their learning. This spoon-feeding is often seen as “good” for the students because it helps the students pass the examinations because the lectures are usually geared to the questions in the examinations.

It seems that if the goal is to produce students who are examinations smart, schools will continue to dish out notes to their students. However, it ought to be noted that such practices do not contribute in any way to the making of an independent and life-long learner. Educational institutions must make a serious effort to get students to be independent learners. It reflects poorly on such educational institutions if the basic skills of independent learning is not emphasised.

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If a school intends to cultivate thinking among its students, It is important that a thinking culture be allowed to permeate through the whole school. I believe that the cultivation of thinking skills cannot be done in silos. The whole environment where the students participate in, must reek of thinking. They must live and breathe thinking!

Here the key are the words “cultivate” and “culture“. The word “cultivate” comes from the Latin “cultivare” which means “to till” as in what is done in the farm. Now anyone who has some idea what is done in the growing of crops will know that such work cannot be “crammed”. For the crops to grow, time and lots of nurturing is required. Even with the best crops and fertilizers, the time that is required for the crop to grow is pretty long.

The other word that is key here is “culture”. By “culture”, I mean “the system of values, beliefs, and ways of knowing that guide communities of people in their daily lives” (Trumbull, 2005). By ways of knowing, I am referring to how people organize their world cognitively through language and other symbol systems. This includes how they approach learning, how they construct knowledge, and they pass it on (Rothstein-Fisch & Trumbull, 2008). By this definition, a culture exists only when there is a community of people, meaning, the whole school (and beyond), and a school with a thinking culture must be involved in making thinking a priority and goal of the community. The transmission of the correct beliefs and values attached to thinking also becomes a goal. Everyone in the school is involved and not just the students alone. Thinking guides them in whatever that the members of the school do.

Measures to introduce thinking skills only at only the classroom level is doomed to failure if the whole school does not. If it is left to only the classroom level then thinking will become only a mechanical thing. The spirit and the motivation to think will be lost. It becomes then just another “thing” for the students to learn and the teachers to teach. It becomes a drudgery.

Measures to introduce thinking must also be given time to take root and grow. There is no cramming in the cultivation of thinking skills. Teaching thinking skills is not teaching to the examinations. There is no short cut. What is required is time for the skills and beliefs to permeate into the social fabric of the school. The fruits of cultivating a thinking culture is evidenced when the student is able to navigate the complexities of life successfully.

Here perhaps, it is good to be reminded of a quote from Yoda. In the Star Wars movie, the “Empire Strikes Back”, he said to Luke Skywalker who had just failed to raise his Starfighter out of a swamp, “Do or do not. There is no try!” Half-hearted attempts to introduce thinking is bound to fail. Worse is that the failure of half-baked measures will lead to its even more sceptical reception when a future genuine attempt is made to re-introduce thinking into the schools.