A Little Known Way to Learn Faster and Better

Have you ever been aware of a shortcut, but repeatedly not taken it because you hadn’t used it yet? I have, but I tried a shortcut last week and it was so efficient and effective it became part of my regular route. The shortcut will help you understand any subject more thoroughly and quickly and can be used by anyone who can write. This is the story of the first time I took this shortcut.

How this Shortcut Saved Me Four Hours of Meeting Time

I started this project on a common route: my team brainstormed a topic for thirty minutes and spent five minutes talking about relationships between some of the ideas. It was enough time to capture the elements of the topic, but not enough to capture all the relationships. I meant to take another 30 minutes in the next meeting to finish discussing the relationships and another thirty minutes to capture it in a more useful format. Before the next meeting occurred, I decided to try the shortcut. In less than an hour I created a diagram. Instead of meeting with the team to discover the relationships, I met with them to review the relationships I had already discovered. We reviewed the diagram (making two changes) in about ten minutes. Team members gave unsolicited and uncharacteristic praise about how helpful the diagram was. All six of the people in the room left with the same mental picture of the elements and their relationships! Had I followed my previous plan each of us would have had a different mental model. It is likely that none of them would be complete and the process would have taken fifty more minutes. Multiply that savings by all six people and subtract the time it took me to understand the topic while creating the diagram and you’ll see that we saved a whopping four hours of time with better results! The gains in learning speed and comprehension can result in any learning setting.

The Shortcut

The technique that made this all possible is concept mapping. It was developed by Joseph D. Novak and his research students (he wrote about using concepts maps to enhance learning in his book, Learning How to Learn). A concept map is basically a diagram of concepts that address a focus question. Lines connect related concepts and are labeled with one to three words that explain the relationship. I think the best way to describe a concept map is to show you one. Look at this diagram. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

By exploring this diagram you learned many things about concept maps. Had I tried to write this as clearly in prose it would have taken many paragraphs. I venture to guess that your knowledge of concepts maps is now so good that if you think about it you also know the basics of how to create one, without receiving instructions! Imagine how much prose would be required to give that instruction and you begin to understand the power of concept mapping. What you may not appreciate yet is that the act of creating a concept map will help you learn a subject. Of course, to fully understand you need to try creating one yourself.

Your Opportunity

This is your chance to choose the shortcut—learn to use a tool that can save you incredible amounts of time. Don’t bypass the shortcut without trying it. Naturally, concept maps can be drawn by hand, but I find that using software is better for teasing out the relationships between concepts—use your favorite drawing program or a special purpose package like CmapTools from the Institute for Human and Machine Cognition. Either way, try it with something you’ve got on your mind, even something simple. I think you’ll make it part of your routine. After you try this shortcut please leave a comment sharing how it worked for you.

P. S. I’ll write about using concept maps in homeschool and unschool situations in an upcoming post.