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Breaking Through Learning Obstacles: Create and Select Neural Patterns to Develop Mastery, with Barbara Oakley, Professor of Engineering, Oakland University, and Author, Mindshift
Chunking
One of the most important aspects of learning and of modern pedagogy is one of the most neglected aspects and that is the idea of chunking. When you’re learning something new you want to create a well-practiced neural pattern that you can easily draw to mind when you need it. And chunking was first sort of thought of or explored by Nobel Prize-winner Simon who found that if you’re a chess master that the higher you’re ranking in chess, the more patterns of chess you have memorized. So you could access more and more patterns of chess. Research began developing and what they found was that the better your expertise at anything, the more solid neural patterns you have.
So, for example, if you are trying to learn to back up a car when you first begin it’s crazy. You’re looking all around. Do you look in this mirror or this mirror or do you look behind you? What do you do? It’s this crazy set of information. But after you’ve practiced a while you develop this very nice sort of pattern that’s well-practiced. So all you have to do is think I’m going to back up a car. Instantly that pattern comes to mind and you’re able to back up a car. Not only are you doing that but you’re maybe talking to friends, listening to the radio. It’s that well practiced neural chunk that makes it seem easy. So it’s important in any kind of learning to create these well-practiced patterns. And the bigger the library of these patterns, the more well practiced sort of deeper and broader they are as neural patterns in your mind, the more expertise you have in that topic.
Interleaving
For a long time particularly in mathematics education it was felt that if you practiced too much that it would kill your creativity. And that’s actually not true. You want to do the right kind of practice where you’re interleaving and doing one technique and then trying that with another technique.
Let’s say that you’ve got a homework assignment. You’ve got this homework problem and it’s a really difficult homework problem. So what you tend to do? Well you do it and you turn it in. That is the equivalent of you have just sung a song one time and thinking that you know how to sing that song beautifully in front of an audience. Well, it doesn’t work that way. A good thing to do when you’re learning something that’s difficult is find key – in math – key problems and then see if you can work it cold. If you can’t, take a peak at whatever hints you need to be able to finish working it. Then maybe a little later try working it again cold without looking at the answer. And maybe you go further. The next day try it again. Go a little further and practice it.
What you’re trying to do is to develop the same patterns that you would develop if you practice singing a song a number of times. And if you do this with key problems in math or if you’re learning a language key conjugation patterns, for example. Then those patterns become automatic. So, for example, with your problem after several days of practice you find you’ve worked it out enough times by pencil that when you just look at the problem you can step through all the solution steps in your mind. You’ve created a valuable chunk. And so then when it comes test time and you’ve got maybe five, ten of these key problems – so you can just look at them and know what you’re supposed to be doing. Suddenly when you’re taking that test you can pull this chunk up and connect it with this chunk and solve new problems you haven’t seen before and it’s a really, really powerful technique is to realize that all learning involves getting these neural chunks together.
Becoming an Expert
Chunking applies differently in different areas of course but you’re always just building a pattern in your mind. So if you’re learning a language you’re conjugating verbs and you’re building a pattern of what those verb conjugations are. And at first it seems insane, right. You just can’t remember let’s say first person, second person, third person, let’s see and then we’ve got the plurals and you’re trying to keep it all in mind. But once you practice for a while you can conjugate a verb no problem at all. Now what about something like art? You’re an artist. You just take the brush and you’re practicing a certain type of stroke and you practice it over and over. And after a while it seems so routine and you can put that together with other types of strokes and then suddenly you’ve got this beautiful ability to create that other people say oh, you’ve got this natural knack and it’s actually just developed from practice.