I can memorize anything you put in front of me. Straight "A"s were always easy to come by for me in school: history, math, English, science, whatever. Memorize the rules, the facts, the story and spit it back out on a test.
Years later, I wonder why I spent so much of my childhood memorizing things that now I have no idea about. That’s the problem with short term memory – here today, gone tomorrow. But that’s how our schools are set up for students to be successful – if you can memorize, you are golden. If you rely on logic and inquiry, good luck!
The Solution: The Best Way to Learn Anything
I recently went to a conference in Atlanta, GA where I was presented with a different approach to teaching and learning. Understanding by Design (UBD) tackles it from a backwards design approach, starting with the end in mind.
When using this framework, you focus on three areas of teaching and learning:
- Transfer (what you will still have with you in 40 years – these are the coat hangers I get to later). This is the big idea or the backbone of what you are talking about.
- Meaning (this is what will stay with you for 40 months). It includes enduring understandings and essential questions.
- Acquisition (you will lose most of this in 40 days). This is the knowledge and skills you need to be able to complete specific tasks (and most of what schools focus on).
If you haven’t heard of this framework, I would recommend checking out a book on the subject, such as “the Understanding by Design Guide to Creating High Quality Units” by Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe.
Fundamentally, the approach just seems like good common sense, but so often it is easy to overlook the obvious and take the “easy” way out. The framework deals with various steps to creating good content. Some of the highlights include: being okay with a messy process, focusing on the big picture or goal, using essential questions to the extreme, and getting away from viewing teaching and learning with that cookbook or textbook approach.
The Coat Hanger Effect
The biggest take away I had from this conference is the coat hanger effect approach to teaching and learning. I truly think this is the best (and the UBD research backs that up) approach you can take to learn anything.
When you approach a new field or subject, think about setting up coat hangers in your brain. What are the all-important biggest concepts or ideas surrounding this subject? There should not be a lot of coat hangers. Then, as you go through the course or learning activities, make sure to file every piece of information under one of those coat hangers. Instead of having a string of miscellaneous facts and stories, you will have a few “coat hangers” to help provide a stable base and long term memory station for what you are learning.
A great example of this is the Steemit post I read recently by 
He talked about all sorts of particulars, but continued to bring it back to the “coat hanger” of power. And there is so much more you can learn about power. When you come across those things, continue to file them under that coat hanger in your brain for easy access to them in the future.
Just remember: find that big thing that everything else can relate to and hang it off of it. Happy Learning!