Set it & Forget it: Are you ready to transform your sleep?

Cheery Friday Greetings to our Learning How to Learners!

Book of the Week

Set it & Forget it: Are you ready to transform your sleep? by Daniel Erichsen.  Barb’s been doing her darndest over these past few years to try to make sure she gets at least eight hours of sleep most evenings.  Well, there’s been a problem with that.  Mostly, she just can’t get eight hours of sleep—instead, she generally spends an hour or two staring into the darkness trying to fall asleep.

Enter Daniel Erichsen’s intriguing, easy-to-read but potentially life-changing Set it & Forget it.  Dr. Erichsen is a pediatrician who has also studied sleep medicine at the University of Chicago—his passion is helping people to improve their sleep.  His counterintuitive advice?  We generally don’t need as much sleep as the “experts” say.  Erichsen suggests simple, workable approaches for detecting when you are truly sleepy, (as opposed to just tired), and perhaps most importantly, he provides advice for reducing the stress that causes so many of us to lose sleep. (Oddly enough, one of the most common stressors on top of all our other daily stressors is that we stress about not getting enough sleep!)  If you have trouble sleeping, this thought-provoking book, and other related books and podcasts by Dr. Erichsen, may help bring you to your dreams.

Aprendiendo a aprender para jovenes! A New MOOC for kids in Spanish!

Our Learning How to Learn for Youth course in English is especially geared for youngsters who are struggling to learn—or who are already excellent at learning but want to be great. The popularity of this course has meant that a new version has been created in Spanish, Aprendiendo a aprender para jóvenes, via ESIC and Austral University, featuring wonderful Spanish-speaking instructors José Fernando Gallego Nicholls, Verónica Milla, and Javier Fontoba; under the direction of María Guijarro García. “Aprender a aprender para Jóvenes es para ti, para darte una visión práctica de cómo aprender más profundamente y con menos frustración. Las lecciones de este curso pueden ayudarte a aprender muchos temas y habilidades diferentes.”

Register now for the Fall 2021 One-Day Virtual On Course National Conference!

Barb will be giving the opening keynote for the On Course National Conference on October 8th. The closing session will be given by Jonathan Brennan, author of the excellent Online Teaching with Zoom. Whether you’ve been working with On Course strategies for years or just care deeply about the success of your students, you’ll find this is a powerful professional development conference. Expect to experience and learn proven strategies you can implement immediately to help your students reach more of their potential in college…and in life. The On Course National Conference is ideal for: 

• Instructors and coordinators of student success and FYE programs
• Faculty from all academic disciplines
• Counselors, retention specialists, TRIO personnel, and student affairs staff
• Administrators looking for proven approaches for improving student academic success and retention

Register here, and learn!  

A massive—and massively useful—review of retrieval practice

This paper provides a tremendous overview of everything researchers know about the use of retrieval practice in classroom settings: “Retrieval Practice Consistently Benefits Student Learning: a Systematic Review of Applied Research in Schools and Classrooms.” It’s also one of the most thoughtful, carefully conducted meta analyses we’ve ever read. No surprise, the lead author is Pooja Agarwal, author of one of our favorite books: Powerful Teaching.

More ideas for motivating students

Here is Mr. Torre’ Mills’ motivational video for his students, which describes the  “4 Principles” that he developed based on the wonderful book Powerful Teaching. As Torre’ notes: “ I recorded the video because we are face to face but dealing with quarantines and I wanted to ensure that all understood my core values and the culture that I am trying to create in my classroom.”

Your Past Shapes your Future

Barb joins Karen and Krista in the awesome podcast Your Brain On… to discuss how the patterns and pathways picked up during past learning experiences influence how our brains react to future learning challenges when building new skills.  Here are part one and part two of the three-part series.

The Uncanny Sherlock Holmes of Science

Microbiologist Elisabeth Bik has an extraordinary talent—she is able to pick out, with superhuman acumen,  duplications in complex scientific papers. Her skill—and bravery—in exposing scientific shenanigans has opened a whole new approach to image sleuthing. We’d love to see a movie made of her, and her impact on science.  (And we’d love to see some fMRI imagery of her own brain in action!)  Although Bik’s skills are extraordinary, it looks as if she has a talent that at least some other mere mortals can learn. And artificial intelligence is homing in her methodology.

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.