iDoRecall

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

A new video on Learning How to Learn!

Barb has just made a new video for Learning How to Learners on how to easily create flashcards for retrieval practice while you are in Learning How to Learn—or in any Coursera course.  Check the video out here. (You may need to reset the deadlines for Learning How to Learn, or alternatively, you can find the video here on YouTube.)  The flashcard program, “iDoRecall,” also works well for YouTube videos in general, as well as web pages, pdfs, or what-have-you.

This is one of the most powerful—and easiest—methods we’ve found to retain the information you are learning in MOOCs. Barb loves this flashcard system so much that that’s why she made the video (it’s not a paid product endorsement).

ASEE Presents: Master Class On Effective Teaching, May 17, 18, & 19, 2022 12:00 – 4:00 PM, ET

The next edition of the upcoming Master Class on Effective Teaching, led by none other than Barb, has now been opened for registration.  Feedback on previous sessions of this workshop have been phenomenal: “Three words for this course:  – Astounding  – Invigorating  – Invaluable” “Brilliant insights” “This was amazing…Best $199 I’ve ever spent in my life!”  

This workshop will give you a chance to review and internalize some of the best insights about effective teaching that recent neuroscience provides.  Most great teachers (like you!) are great because you intuit what learners need, and when. This upcoming Master Class will provide you with insight into why you do what you do in your teaching. This insight can help you leverage your natural teaching intuition even further. The materials are based on the critically praised Uncommon Sense Teaching: Practical Insights in Brain Science to Help Students Learn.

Books of the Week

I Love You All the Time and You Have Feelings All the Time by child development expert Deborah Farmer Kris, illustrated by Jennifer Zivoin. These wonderful books are meant to reassure children about your enduring love for your child, whether they are mad, glad, or sad, and also to help your child to recognize and manage their feelings.  Start by skipping past the delightful illustrations to read the letter to caregivers at the back of the book—you’ll get a sense from these brief instructions of how to best use and teach the ideas in the books as you go through the book with your toddler or pre-schooler.  Then enjoy paging through the book together reading aloud with your little one.  Highly recommended and engaging for youngsters!

The Social Learning App

For those of you who would like to join a study group with fellow students, we encourage you to try out this tool: www.wer6.io. It’s going live next week, but you can sign up now.  Give it a try—group learning can increase your motivation and chances of completing the course!

Further insights on Ukraine

In response to last week’s Friday email highlighting information about Ukraine, Russia, and Eastern Europe, we received the following email from a LHTLer:

“Years ago, I joined Learning How to Learn course, and even if it did not change my life, it pitched pretty close to that. Since then I got a scholarship for a Masters degree in the US, and lived in 4 different countries … I am Russian, and the letter hit the sensitive spot. I appreciate your team for speaking up about the invasion and sharing, as usual, useful resources. Me and my many other compatriots are deeply affected by the injustice of this war, and our inability to resist our government…

“My Ukrainian friends are spending hours in the basements studying for exams or learning new languages not only for a much appreciated disruption, but also to keep up with their lives and goals. I see that as bravery and wisdom. My Russian friends are burying themselves in news and history books while observing from afar the destruction that we have involuntarily caused. I am not comparing, of course, but for both sides their learning conditions have changed. What would be your advice on how to make though a new vocabulary list if your house might get bombed, or you receive a notification about another absurd law that might send you to jail? How to keep up concentration and move forward, even in baby steps, when you are in a condition of high uncertainty where your bare survival might not be guaranteed?… I believe that your team’s advice might be valuable for those who are now living though much harder challenges, and still setting up learning goals for themselves.”

As it happens, on Tuesday, Barb gave a lecture on “Teaching Kids in a Stressful Time” for the Ukrainian learning organization Osvitoria. You can access the talk:

In Ukrainian

In English

Stanford Prof Debunks Research Behind New California K-12 Math Standards

Brian Conrad, a Professor of Mathematics and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Math, Stanford University has made waves with his criticism of the fundamentally flawed curriculum of the proposed California Mathematics Framework (“CMF”).  As Conrad observes: “The abundance of false or misleading citations I found in the CMF calls into doubt the credibility of all citations to the literature in the CMF… My grade for the CMF’s accurate representation of the cited literature is F.”

It appears that those with good critical thinking skills may at last be making an impact about the de facto privatization of good teaching the proposed CMF would bring—privatization that would cause the most harm to students with the fewest resources. If you would like to add your voice to the criticism of the non-scientific nature of the proposed CMF, you can discover how to chime in here. 

That’s all for this week. Have a happy week in Learning How to Learn!

Barb, Terry, and the entire Learning How to Learn team

• Mindshift—the book behind the MOOC
• The critically acclaimed Uncommon Sense Teaching (and MOOC!)
• The newest on learning: the book Learn Like a Pro (and MOOC!)
• The LHTL recommended text, A Mind for Numbers
• And Learning How to Learn, a book (and MOOC!) for kids and parents.