Reading-Writing: Free Scholarship Opportunity for the Mind

"Learning about what you don't know and then writing about it is akin to continuing your education on a scholarship." Marshall Krantz (1996)

Read-Write Connection

This line from Krantz's book Ideas and Research reminds me that reading and writing go hand-in-hand. I'm quite aware that reading and writing are cognitively diverse operations. Reading is about decoding symbols and connecting personal knowledge with the author's words to generate the author's intended message supported by the textual evidence. Writing is about composing ideas from personal, situational, and worldly contexts then transcribing them into words - articulating noises in our minds - that we must then conjure up appropriately-related symbols that eventually will convey the same thoughts as we intended them to mean. 

Mind Tools

My point is that reading and writing are tools of the mind - a way to process and share thoughts.

Often learners (and tutors) don't want to write because the process (especially spelling and grammar) seems cumbersome. And, writing always takes more time than talking. Writing, however, forces us to think and articulate our thoughts in ways that are very different than talking. 

Deep Thinking

My push is to get more people to think more deeply about what they are learning or want to learn and get them to record these thoughts on paper. 

Writing about what you've just read in your own words requires reflective thought. Time spent in reflection strengthens and deepens learning - creating and dedicating more synapses to the content and process of our intentional focus. 

What do you do to help you think 

deeply about what you are learning?

Motivation: Bookmarks

Keeping Agreements
Sometimes holding that agreement with ourselves is difficult. Don Miguel Ruiz reminds us in The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom (1997) that our self-agreements are the most meaningful and crucial as well as the easiest to slough off.

Even when we make commitments in front of a group, we can easily not follow through. We all know that what we say and what we do may be two different things. When we set goals with ourselves, do we really want that to happen?

Setting Goals
In adult literacy programs, we set goals. Learners & tutors set goals. We help each other make goals that are meaningful, actionable, and time-bound. We set one month goals. These goals often include learning a new skill, exploring a topic, completing a task, or finishing a book. 

Most of us, especially when the goals are not written down, forget the goals we make. We all need reminders. But, who wants someone nagging us to focus on the goal we set for ourselves?

Bookmarks
This past summer, we turned our goals into bookmarks - skinny pieces of card stock to mark a page in a book. Some of us put these bookmarks in the books we were reading daily. Some of us slipped them into the front vinyl cover of our 3-ring binder. Some of us posted them on our fridges or mirrors at home. And, we posted a set of them on our classroom bulletin board under our calendar. You get the picture - we put them where we'd see them to remind us. 

The bookmarks became the nagging voice that reminded us to focus - what's one thing I can do right now to move this goal forward.

As you can see from the bookmark at the top of this screen, each one had three parts. The top listed the person's name, career goal, and target dates. The middle section described the goal - the specific, measurable actions to be completed. The bottom section listed the way the person would celebrate. 

Did this strategy work? 
It worked for us. We had our highest rate of completion yet.

What are some things you do to hold 

your feet to the fire to get things done?

Speaker Jitters?!?

Photo by Robert A. Young

Remember the first time you had to officially "speak" in front of others?

Most of us are not comfortable, at least not in the beginning. Yet, presenting ideas in a group setting where everyone's eyes are on you is very much a necessary skill for work, home, politics, and society at large. The more comfortable you become, then the more likely people will listen and hear your points.

How do you prepare?

Tell us how you prepare for speeches in the comment section below.

Reflection

A quiet place to think about your day.

Reflection is an activity often ignored in our busy world. The closest many of us come to reflecting on our lives is in the minutes before we fall asleep. You know, those moments when we review our day, pulling up all of the negative conversations, happenstances, and images of our immediate past. Not a good idea.

If we listen to Carmen Simon in Impossible to Ignore, reflection supports long-term memory. Do we really need to remember all the insignificant, but emotionally-charged,pains of the day? Just to kick ourselves again for our behavior. Absolutely not. Unless, perhaps, we are working on ways to re/act differently next time.

We'd be better off if we use reflection to encode strategies and processes into our long-term memory. For example, over the weekend I made a blueberry pie with a new recipe. The pie was flavorful but far too juicy. The cooked blueberries tumbled out of the pie along with all of the juice. As I reflected on the process of making the pie. I realized that the recipe didn't include any thickener. Rather than lament on how poorly the pie held together, I reflected on the process and what to do in the future. I made notes in the recipe for future reference.

This same reflective process can be used for any action that we want to make accessible in our long-term memory. How does this work? Reflection is abut elaboration - connecting to the past, adding features, and identifying examples. The point is to build bridges and links in the brain so that we have more hooks in our brain to more easily retrieve or get information out of our brain. 

Reflection--thinking deeply about things--allows us the opportunity to build these synapses and strengthen retrieval. So, we need to take the time to think about the things we really want to remember, those things that will truly impact our future, rather than the negative moments.

Just before you fall asleep tonight, celebrate your successes and enhance the processes and strategies you want saved into your long-term memory.