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Mistakes Are What It Takes

July 05, 2022 / Oskar Cymerman

“Every act of conscious learning requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one’s self-esteem. That is why young children, before they are aware of their own self-importance, learn so easily.”

— Thomas Szasz

Change How Mistakes Are Looked At

This one will be hard. Jumping off a building without a parachute or at least a bungee cord to learn about gravity is risky. It’s also either crazy, or really stupid, or both, because the risk involved is not reasonable. And while this example seems drastic, it might not be far off from the way many students perceive taking risks - asking questions, volunteering answers, and being wrong - in school.

So how do we change this classroom risk aversion?

Expect and Respect Mistakes

We can create a culture of mistake making in our classrooms by communicating to our students at the beginning of the school year that we expect and want them to make mistakes, because learning is more memorable when we inspect and correct our mistakes.

As teachers, we need to communicate this message frequently, because behavior modification takes time and effort.

In addition, we can be honest about our own mistakes, point them out when we make them, analyze them, and correct them as they happen. I found that students respect me more and I build more authentic relationships when I admit my mess-ups.

Inspect and Correct Mistakes

How does making, inspecting, and correcting our mistakes help us learn better?

We tend to feel embarrassed when we get something wrong in front of our peers, which makes these experiences more memorable than instances in which we guess correctly. And the benefits of such blush moments, evidenced by the sudden rush of blood to our heads and visible on our faces, cannot be understated. Emotions do wanders for the memory-making process of information encoding.

Additionally, we tend to put time into careful processing of mistakes we make as we do not want to be wrong again, especially about the same thing. We want to show we’re smart by improving ourselves and learning from our mistakes. Such processing and reprocessing leads to deeper knowledge. Deeper knowledge is the definition of true learning.

The key for students is to keep trying, knowing they will be wrong at times.

The key for teachers is to make mistakes part of the learning menu (FREE to you). And tips are required.

“If no mistake you have made, losing you are. A different game you should play.”

— Yoda

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categories / Learning
tags / teaching teens, deeper learning, independence, lifelong learning, learning, kids, active learning, teacher resources, instructional resources, classroom strategies, hybrid learning, in-person learning, distance learning, remote learning, teaching strategies, teaching methods

10 Ideas For Increasing Your Creativity

June 29, 2022 / Oskar Cymerman

A bowl of cereal with gummy bears in it is creative twist on traditional breakfast. Being open to playing with your food or, on a bigger scale, playing with the traditional ways of doing things helps us become more creative — Photo courtesy of Gratisography

“To be creative means to be in love with life.”

— Osho

I learned today that velociraptors were turkey-sized and T-Rex topped out at ten miles per hour, which means you don’t have to be Usain Bolt to outrun one. Damn you Hollywood, Jurassic Park, and Steven Spielberg for having me think they were cool.

But my dino disillusionment aside, learning these facts while watching Weird But True with my son gave me a creative way to start this article after over a year of blog silence.

Creativity awakens imagination, spurs innovation, and provides inspiration. But for me, creativity makes work fun. It allows me to see things in new ways and create new ways to teach and help my students learn.

In my twenty years of teaching, I learned that everyone is creative and everyone can take deliberate action to increase their creativity.

Here’s a list of 10 things anyone can do every day to up their creativity.

Learn Something New

It doesn’t matter what you learn. Just learn something you did not know before. Even if the new information you put in your brain is unrelated to the work you do, your brain will find a way to use it. 3 days, or 3 months, or 3 years from now, perhaps in a form of a sudden spark of genius or a slow methodical approach - you will apply this learning to something. Consciously or without you knowing, the info you learn today will make something you’re creating in the future a bit more creative; a bit better.

Learn something new every day and you will increase your chances of coming up with new and innovative ways of doing things and creating more impactful and fulfilling work.

Listen To A Podcast

This should be easy if you commute to work. Connect your phone to your car’s stereo or use the phone/headphones combo on your public trans ride to work and voila - instant mobile university! Of course, shock-jock garbage doesn’t count, because garbage in - garbage out.

Good podcasts are not hard to find. Some of my faves are Hidden Brain, Akimbo, The Knowledge Project, Inquiring Minds, TED Radio Hour, and The James Altucher Show. Be ready to pause a podcast, so you can start writing down ideas. You can just use your phone’s note app or carry a small notebook. If driving, dictate the epiphanies and ideas your mind generates while listening into your phone’s note app.

Read

As a kid growing up in Poland, I was great at devouring books. Now, I suck at reading books. I wish I was better, but I’m really bad at books. I own a lot of them. I still buy books and promise myself I will read them. I still may, but for now, I am happy reading bits and pieces of whole books. A chapter here and a chapter there is my usual fare that helps me prepare and keeps me away from brain numbing solitaire.

The books I frequently keep coming back to and extract information from are Brain Rules, Atomic Habits, Ultralearning, and Make It Stick.

I still read though. Every day. It’s just that I mostly read from illuminated screens. And it’s illuminating. It gives me ideas on how to learn faster, teach better, tweak lessons, come up with topics for articles I might write, potential side hustles, and other unexpected things. I read on my phone and laptop. I use Feedly to aggregate new education, teaching, and science blogs and articles. My go tos are NPR, TED Blog, TED Education, John Spencer, The Cult of Pedagogy, and Getting Smart.

If you have close to zero time to read, use Blinkist. The app creators pull the meat out of the best books out there, summarize the gists, and provide the takeaways in less-than-ten-minute text or audio (you choose) packages, designed for the busiest of the busy bees of the world so they can keep learning and get better at creating.

Write

Listen, read, learn, and then write about it. Write it for an audience of one (you) or one hundred - it doesn’t matter. The best thing about writing about what you’re learning is not the passing of what you learned on to others, which is very gratifying, but the slowing down of your thought stream , which in turn allows for deeper reflection and the forming of new understandings. Writing then, is a way to reprocess that which you’re learning, is creative by default, and stimulates new creativity.

Flip The Script

Take a perspective you disagree with and find arguments for it. Look for things or people you disagree with and come up with positive qualities they have. Maybe you hate mosquitos. I mean they suck. Literally… But maybe they are necessary, because geckos eat them. And geckos are cool. Remember the one from the commercials? It’s one cool gecko.

Think of a recent argument you had with someone. Perhaps it did not come to blows, but you vehemently disagreed. Think back to some of the arguments your counterpart had and try to find a few pros for the views you so passionately disagreed with. I’m not telling you to start agreeing. I’m telling you to see what you have not been able to before. Flipping the script and doing it often is the essence of creativity.

Converse

Talk to the woman standing behind you in the insanely long REI line.

Ask the kid next to you if he knows what happened to all the missing Jersey Mike’s sandwich numbers. I mean, how the hell do you go from three to eighty three? Does big Mike have a love-hate relationship with middle numbers?

Ask the guy browsing the same Trader Joe’s beer aisle if he also wanted an instant refund after buying and trying that awful seasonal pumpkin gourd ale beer impostor thingy. I bought six. Big mistake. It’s Halloween special suckiness still haunts me.

But do not talk about the weather. Fuck weather. There’s too much weather talk. Just don’t. Pick a different topic and go.

Create

I love John Spencer’s creativity. But I hate him for this intro:

My goal is simple. I want to make something each day. Sometimes I make things. Sometimes I make a difference. On a good day, I get to do both. - John Spencer

I hate how perfect it is. I know, I know - perfect is the enemy of good, but still… This should be my bio and I hate that I did not come up with it before he did. I guess I just hate myself. Wait… I don’t! I’m inspired.

Seriously, to be creative, one must create. To become more creative, one must keep creating. Creating something every day, will continue increasing your creativity.

You hate that popcorn ceiling in your basement? Watch some YouTube and remove that shit yourself.

Your kid is bored? Find a PBS Kids project and do it with them.

Create an infographic flyer using Google Draw/Slides or Piktochart for that b-day, holiday, or grad party. It is easier than you think and helluva lot more satisfying than Evite.

Write a poem or rap to explain something to someone. Start small. A few lines, that’s all. If it rhymes, cool. If it don’t, you’re no fool. School others or get schooled.

Or, make up a story.

Make Up Stories

Huh? Am I asking you to lie? You damn straight I am. But it will not make you a bad person. It will make you a more creative one. Just hear me out.

People love stories. From very little, we have been learning how to be good and kind and not assholes from stories. Why stop now? Why not use storytelling to teach our coworkers or help older kids (even the forty-something ones like me) learn?

I recently told my chemistry students that I spent one college summer hitchhiking through Europe performing magic tricks dressed as a clown. Then, I poured water into a clear plastic cup, put an index card over it, and flipped it. Boom! The magic (or pressure) of the underlying air kept the card stuck to the mouth of the cup, which kept the water in the cup and not pouring on the victim’s, I mean student volunteer’s head.

Johnny’s head was about two inches below the card. A few students were sad the magic trick didn’t fail…

Then, we talked briefly about gases and gas pressure before proceeding to students performing a bunch of simple experiments that involve gases. There was energy in the room. It was fun telling the story and seeing the students engaged in the activity.

Of course, I hitchhiked through Europe at 19 years old, but I never owned a clown costume or performed street tricks. To spice up the story and the learning build up, I also claimed I made money making balloon animals. Total lie. Clowns scare the crap out of me and I’m too much of an anxious freak to be a street performer. Still, I was glad to muster enough courage to create this learning experience for my students.

Making up stories to represent a concept or to prove a point is far from evil. It’s creative and fun and necessary.

Do Something New

“Do something that scares you every day” has become a cliche line promoted by self help gurus and leadership experts. It’s true that stepping out of your comfort zone can help you level up, but you need not to subject yourself to PTSD inducing experiences to become more creative. You can do simple stuff like ordering a different-than-usual Starbucks drink or taking an alternative route back from work tomorrow - something to change things up.

If you typically eat lunch at your work desk, check out the cafeteria on Monday. If you always take the elevator, take the stairs on Tuesday. Wake up 10 minutes earlier on Wednesday and enjoy the view from your kitchen window while paying attention to every detail you have failed to see before. Wear two different socks to work on Thursday and see if anyone notices and points it out, because if they do, you can explain why and ask what they think about it. If they don’t, smirk every time your mind reminds you of your dirty little secret. And on Friday? Friday’s all you, but you get the idea. Keep it creative.

Do this sort of thing frequently to create many new experiences, because no matter how small, new experiences will lead to new outlooks and these in turn will lead to newfound creativity. It’ll sneak up on you out of nowhere; rattlesnake-in-a-desert-like.

Reinvent The Wheel, But…

Don’t take a wheel and use it as a wheel. Use it as something else. Create a new game in which players roll a wheel down the hill to kill Bill (the human-shaped wooden tower). But make sure Quentin T. is cool with it before you name it that or else you might get sued.

Take an idea from one field and use it in yours. Maybe you saw someone from a different department in your school or place of work use a neat strategy to do something? Could you repurpose it and use in yours? Could you reinvent it?

Whenever you see something neat, something seemingly unrelated, think How can I use it?

Then, use it.

Reflect and remake

Failures increase creativity if you reflect on them, learn from them, apply this learning to improve upon the original ideas, and try again. Mr. Dennis, the most epic teacher ever who happened to be my 10th grade history teacher, always talked about the first Toyota coming off the boat in the 70s, not making it up the first hill it encountered, and going right back to Japan with that whole first shipment of US-bound Toyotas.

I did zero fact checking on this and maybe Mr. D was straight up lying, but the moral of the story was that when the Toyota came back much improved the next year, it proceeded to grab a major share of the US market it still holds today. So while failure may be embarrassing, it forces new solutions, which require creativity and lead to success.

So fail, because mistakes is what it takes. Then, reflect and remake your failures.

Up your creativity through this iterative process.

Move Toward Creativity

If sitting seems wrong to you sometimes, you’re right. The insidious act of sitting restricts blood circulation and reduces the flow of the beautiful, beneficial, and creativity-inducing oxygen to your brain.

So take fluffy for a longer walk. Opt for the stairs not the mall escalator. Get an adjustable standing desk and alternate between sitting and standing while working. Take your kid to the park and swing on the swings or kick/throw/hit a ball. If you despise exercise, biking is easier. Don’t drive to the nearby grocery store. Put on a backpack and walk.

Body movement increases blood movement, which increases oxygen movement, which increases the movement of creative out-of-the-blue thoughts in your noggin. This is called divergent thinking and science proves divergent creativity is where it’s at.

Oops… This was 12. Oh well. Hope you found them swell.

Key Takeaways

Creativity is a skill we can continue getting better at.
Becoming more creative involves deliberate daily practice. Learning, reflecting, and remaking are a few ways to stimulate creativity.
Being open to new experiences, forcing yourself to look at things from multiple view points, incorporating more physical movement, and creating new things will make you more creative faster.

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Hi! I'm Oskar.

I teach, write, and create to make teaching easier and learning simpler.

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categories / Teaching
tags / teaching teens, deeper learning, lifelong learning, learning, active learning, teacher resources, instructional resources, classroom strategies, in-person learning, distance learning, remote learning, teaching strategies, teaching methods, creativity, increasing creativity

Are Your Students Dual Coding? How To Make Combining Verbal With Visual The Usual

November 20, 2020 / Oskar Cymerman

Dual Coding: Combining Verbal and Visual increases memory, understanding, and retention.

Warning! This is my second article in a row that is full of cheesy and rhymy graphics designed to promote nerdy and sciency research-supported learning strategies. Luckily, the strategies described below work and are different than these methods, which also work. As always, read at your own risk of being slightly entertained and, on my good day, enlightened. Thanks for reading!

“Learning how to learn is life’s most important skill.”

— Tony Buzan

In this and my previous article, I condensed research-based effective learning to six strategies: Active Learning, Teaching, Visualizing, Smart Practice, Chunking, and Mistake Making, which be viewed as a set of micro skills - smaller but integral parts of the macro “Effective Learning” skill.

This article covers Visualizing and deliberate use of Dual Coding to help learners of all walks of life, but especially our students, learn how to learn. If you’d like to read about Active Learning, Smart Practice, and Teaching to Learn click here.

The strategies are universal — they can be used in any subject, field of knowledge, or profession to learn anything. They should be used if the learner is planning to actually learn and not just do the thing where he just crams and passes the test.

And if the teacher wants her students to actually learn and not cram and forget? She must teach them how to learn and apply, use these practices in her classroom, and show them how to learn when on their own. Knowledge is only power if they can apply it and they can’t apply that which they do not have. Let’s show them why dual coding works and how to use it to make sure they have so they can apply.

“We do not see with our eyes. We see with our brains.”

— John Medina

John Medina, the developmental molecular biologist and author of Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School suggests that vision trumps all other senses, because throughout human evolution it has been the most dominant sense that relies on about half of our brain’s resources.

And let’s not start talking about that icky, long-debunked learning styles theory, because it’s a bunch of road apples. Every human being has their own learning style that uses all of the senses to learn. But vision’s the shiz.

Making Information Visual

Some civilizations have used written symbols to convey what anthropologists consider coherent information for four to five thousand years, but most cultures have only known writing for a few centuries. Our species has been around for two hundred thousand years and for almost the entirety of that time we were not learning through reading and writing.

We used our senses, and because we can see farther than we can hear, or feel, or taste, or smell (thankfully) our vision was the sense that served us best. Along with the other senses, we predominantly used vision to find food so we could feed, to spot predators so we could fight or flee, and to evaluate members of the opposite sex so we could f… breed.

Vision had time to evolve through many millennia. The brain systems that help with decoding text, while promising, are still developing and long-term storage of verbal information is hard. Perhaps the case for using more imagery in learning is best made with the picture superiority effect (PSE), a well-researched phenomenon that shows we remember and retrieve information presented in pictures better than verbal (written and spoken) knowledge.

But doing it is not be as simple as it sounds. Telling students to imagine a concept will not be enough for some, because their spatial capacity — the ability to make, manipulate, and modify visual images in their mind — might not be well developed as a result of its previous underuse. Anyone can close their eyes and conjure a tree, but take a highly abstract concept such as the atom and most students will revert to the age-old, crude, and full of misconceptions “solar system” model. And then chemistry teachers, myself included, wonder: Why oh why do they miss so many easy atom questions on the test?

All kids start out curious. We see this in babies when they gaze in amazement at new faces and objects. Where does this curiosity go and why do some students dread high school science classes and often mask anxiety with indifference? We could blame traditional schooling, but do we truly know? It’s not that simple nor does it do us any good to dwell while teaching. The best course is to show them how to reawaken their imagination.

Imagination awakened — that’s a powerful learning tool. While not in the job description, it is the teacher’s job is to help students use their imagination in the context in which it’s often underutilized — the classroom. The more abstract the concept we teach is, the more important it becomes to create visual reference points, mental imagery that makes it more concrete. At first, we can provide visuals and model how to generate them to our students.

For example… The atom is the simplest building block of matter and one of the most abstract and difficult concepts to correctly understand for students, because it’s unlike anything they’ve ever seen. It’s very small, yet the electrons are very far away from the nucleus — relatively speaking… The nucleus is where pretty much all of the atom’s mass is in the form of protons and neutrons, but it is the smallest part of the atom — relatively speaking… The electrons weigh close to nothing but make up the largest region of the atom we call the electron cloud as the electrons create a sort of an “after image” when they revolve really fast (some calculations have it close to 5,000,000 miles per hour) around the nucleus in the so-called orbitals, which aren’t even paths electrons follow, but rather probabilities of where they can be. Moreover — due to the fact that the electrons are about two thousand times smaller than the protons or neutrons, and they are spaced out, and they are sparse — the electron cloud and the atom itself is comprised of mostly… empty space.

If you don’t teach chemistry, are not a science nerd, or always thought of an atoms as a bunch of balls revolving around a cluster of balls in the middle like planets around the sun, it’s perfectly normal if you’ve developed a migraine reading the above. Scientists don’t completely understand what the atom looks like themselves, and if they tell you they do, they are lying.

I always draw a (very unartistic) football stadium to represent the atom and to aid the student understanding of what it might look like and its scale. I draw the coin the ref flips in the center of the field and ask students to think of it as the nucleus. Then, I draw a few randomly spaced out tiny dots where the stands are and ask my students to imagine they are grains of sand — each ''sitting” in its own seat far away and each representing one electron. Then, I ask them to create this mental image: Remove the stadium, refs, seats, and everything else your mind conjured previously and leave only the coin and the grains of sand suspended in space. Finally, I tell students to animate it: imagine the grains of sand (electrons) revolving around the coin (nucleus) in a three-dimensional space — not like planets around the sun, but rather, the would-be-paths can be horizontal or vertical or skewed in any direction around the nucleus.

The point is to help my students to start seeing things with their mind not just eyes - to use their imagination to draw mental representations of concepts - and to do it often. Ideally, students will learn to create mental images for everything verbal they learn so it is stored in two different but connected parts of the brain, which will then aid recall and understanding. While such practice of converting verbal into visual is natural for some people, other learners must be shown how to do it and given frequent opportunities to better develop their visual-spatial awareness and abilities through deliberate practice.

Dual Coding

The mental model of the atom I created in my own mind for myself is something I share with my chemistry students to tie the insanely abstract to something more tangible. But there’s more to it…

The Dual Coding Theory (DCT) explains two ways of storing memories in the human brain — verbal (text, speech, hearing) and non-verbal (focusing on images). The benefit of having two separate systems of information encoding is that our mind can hold information related to one concept in two different regions of the brain. During initial processing, neurons in different regions of the brain “fire and wire” together connecting the verbal and the visual representations of the same concept. Through repeated processing, these neural pathways thicken (myelination) leading to more elaborate recall, faster application, and deeper understanding of the concept. It’s like having two different people continually discussing a concept and learning from each other by bringing two different ways of looking at the same thing into their interactions.

Thus, it serves our students well to learn to effectively visualize written or spoken information — it might not be easy, but is always possible. Visualization is a skill that must be practiced, because images enhance recall of verbal material. When a concept elicits an image, it has a higher chance of being retained in our memory and can be recalled more easily.

It does not matter if the images are created through deliberate action and not conjured automatically by the brain — they are just as effective, because the learner’s brain forms two distinct neural memory and processing pathways for the information. But because many students do not spontaneously generate mental images to support their learning, teachers should include plenty of visuals when teaching. Additionally, teachers can provide image-generation practice by creating classroom activities that call on students to physically draw or digitally create pictorial representations of the concepts they are learning.

The point is… students don’t have to be Leo-flippin’-Da-Vinci to take full advantage of dual coding. We can help them develop the ability to visualize so they can internalize. Seeing with their brains not just eyes will help them be more wise. Learning how to learn best will help them capitalize on many opportunities and win the ultimate prize - a meaningful life.

Dual Coding: Combing Verbal With Visual Key Takeaways:

Visual learning is more potent as evidenced by picture superiority effect (PSE) but is at the same time underutilized in many classrooms.
Information retention, understanding, and recall is increased when it’s dual-coded.
Ability to visualize isn’t always automatic but it is a skill that can be developed with practice.

References:

Medina, John. Brain Rules: 12 Principles for Surviving and Thriving at Work, Home, and School. Pear Press; Second edition (April 22, 2014).

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Hi! I'm Oskar.

I teach, write, and create to make teaching easier and learning simpler.

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