Long Term Goals and Assessment for learning

Long Term Planning is the best practice when you are willing to have success at no risk cost. It helps in giving a chance to experiment and assess our skills and implement new ideas which could improve our performance and could result in success and many a time if long term planning is implemented properly, the success rate could be very high and helps in goal achievement. Let us now discuss how we could learn and work better with proper long term goal planning.

As i've already discussed, long term goal planning gives us a chance to explore different skills and methods through which we could assess our goal path. The main criteria for this should be that initiall we should decide a system and method in which we are going to work. For this, we should properly assess our skills in the field or the way you want to learn. When you have explored different ways of learning like learning through observation, learning by listening, reading and writing. We should be able to experiment with different ways and should stick to two or three best practices. And with this we could start the process by applying the best of our skills and then properly utilizing them.

Once we have started the process of learning(or working towards a goal), all we should do is assess the pitfalls and then work to better ourselves where we feel we might lack. This helps in reducing any of our backdrops and increases self confidence. With long term planning, we always have the opportunity to correct our mistakes and work towards commitment.

Common Mistakes:

The most common mistake we do with long term goal planning is that we tend to overlook the time we have and waste a lot of time unnecessarily and then fall short of time.

As we think we have a lot of time, we divert from our schedule and the schedule keeps changing. This should never happen. We could be lenient sometimes but we must always have gaps in the schedule while planning itself to accomodate these rests.

If we plan the schedule tight, there is a chance for us to relax the schedule and when this tends to happen more, we loose interest in the subject and might drop from the track. So it is very important that we plan the time that we want to relax too, so that we don't feel out of reach or loose confidence.

There is always a different approach for each of us when it comes to long term planning but at the end of the day we all would obviously work to achieve our goals. The main point here that i would like to stress is that there is more chance of ignoring long term planning than short term planning as we become lenient with time and then shift to short term planning which reduces the quality of work. So we should always see to that we plan our things as early as possible.

Cheers,
Enigma.

Short Term Goals and Assessment for Learning

All of us have heard about these short term goals and we have our own interpretations about goals. But what exactly do we do and how we work to achieve them always plays an important role. When we want to learn or work towards any particular goals, the first thing that we should do is set a path to be followed and constantly assess our performance and work towards betterment. Now let's discuss more about Short Term Goals and what should be done to achieve them.



Whenever we have short term goals, the one important thing that should always be kept in our mind is the value of time. When we have to succeed in our short term goals, we should properly assess our learning habits and skills so that we should make best use of what we have and what we know to a great extent. The other thing that must be taken care of is experimenting. When you have short term goals that have to be achieved, then you should never try experimenting on our reading or learning skills as the more time you waste to experiment, the more is the time that you are loosing. So the best thing that should be done is to assess your skills that you are already good at and then follow by their path. For example, you might be good at learning at certain time or at a certain place and might perform less in other timings or places, so it is better to stick to what you are good at.

An other important thing that we should do before we start with our short term planning is that we should initially list out the activities that we intend to complete and the time that we have for them. Now rank your priorities for learning or working and then you must be dividing your time accordingly. Once you are done with dividing your time and ranking your priorities according to the importance and complexity of work we should start with the process of learning. The one point that should always be remembered is that short term planning always needs dedication without which it is difficult to achieve success with it.

Cheers,
Enigma

Learn Proper Planning

As soon as we hear the word planning, we get nostalgic and all those moments come into picture when we tried to plan our schedule by writing down our daily activity on a paper and preparing a time table sticking it onto the wall. But that note has vanished long back and tried it many a time and finally a conclusion "Planning never works". Now would you mind taking a chill pill and listen to what i say and get back from your thoughts. :-) Well, there are few flaws in which we plan our work and studies which inturn make us feel insufficient and feel that we are unfit for the term planning. But before you completely believe that, we should discuss facts of how you could be best in planning.

Frankly speaking planning becomes easy with right planning. Confused?? No wonder. Why do we fail to plan properly? It is because when we want to plan on our schedule, we tend to make plan with high expectations and due to which we wont be able to keep up to those expections for more than two days and slowly we move out and the plan crashes. The problem here that we should notice is that we are not able to adjust that sudden transition from our comfortable daily life to a sudden highly planned life and that results in failure.

The actual transition to a planned life should happen in a series of slow transitional steps. We should first make an attempt to memorize our plan for few days. We need not follow our plan immediately as soon as we plan, but we should try to memorize the plan accordingly. For example, John has planned in his schedule that he would work on his homework for 3hours from 6:30PM to 9:30PM, now he doesn't immediately start practicing it, instead he slowly tries to memorize the plan by reminding himself when the time is 6:30 and slowly starts with his books by 8:00 and this time gap reduces slowly. The advantage here we should notice with this type of planning is that he is still in his comfort zone and is slowly moving towards the planned zone.

Once we keep memorizing our plans, we would have that fear and our mind constantly reminding us about the plan and slowly we get used to the plan and then make it a habit. The key point here is that we should follow the proverb "Slow and steady wins the race". This might seem confusing or wierd to some of you, but if you would try planning your life this way we could adapt to any kind of life. It becomes a kind of habit and we'll start liking it. Now after we have learnt to plan our planning, we must now talk about actual planning.

Once we have adjusted ourselves to a particular plan, we should then get serious with the plan as it has now become your habit. It is ok to relax our plans and work for a day in a week so that we don't feel stressed up by the planned schedule. This helps in making us feel the difference and reduces any kind of stress due to planning. Hence we should each make our proper planning and stick to it. So now i would like you people to try these out with small things instead of big ones so that you could observe fruitful results.

Cheers,
Enigma.

Learning through Reading and Writing

The most obvious ways in which most of us read are through Reading and Writing. I also know how boring it feels reading the stuff, trying to mug up and write it kind of stuff. But did you ever feel that you could make your learning process much better through reading and writing too? Now let's learn how to make most out of reading and writing too.

The basic rule that needs to be kept in mind while reading and writing is that never do it for the heck of it. Even though you know this, keep this in your mind that reading with interest for an hour is much more better than slogging on the chair trying to read for 3hours. Now what should you do if you want to quit slogging? Each of you might be interested in doing something other than studies. Now what i advice you to do, is try doing something you like other than reading for about a span of 1hour. Once you are done with the most lovely thing(it could be playing Table tennis or watching a cartoon or anything) do not start reading immediately. Now take a small gap of 15mins or 30mins and relax. Relax i mean to stay calm and then slowly start thinking of the reading that you have got to do. Like this you slowly develop interest in what you want to study or read and finally start with your reading. Now this strategy might not work with everyone of you so be careful and try it for once and if it works, then you could deliver your best.

The other tips for reading and writing is that, when you are actually reading something, do keep it in mind that you need to take down notes for whatever you study or read. Now this way of maintaining a notes helps you in quick reviews and does not take an other light year to complete the amount of reading. One more thing that should be taken care of while writing a notes is that, we should not try to make an other textbook by writing almost everything we read. We should maintain a short notes and a very brief description about any given topic that we read. If we stuff our notes with all the text book info then we would not find it comfortable to give it a second reading and would go to the text again or might ignore the subject totally. So it is always good to maintain a good notes which we would like to see again and use it as reference.

The problem with us is, even though we know most of these points, we tend to ignore them and that's the reason why i am helping you recollect them. You could bookmark this site and use it as reference whenever you need and we would always be there to assist you with any kind of clarifications or suggestions.

Cheers,
Enigma.

Learning by Listening

So what do you think does learning through listening mean? Is it just listening to lectures or is it something more than that? There are much better ways in which you could improve your learning skills and could get most out of what people talk even though it seems rubbish. In our class, when the Educator is providing a lecture on some topic, most of the time we are least bothered on what he is teaching and providing. The obvious fact is that we are either busy with our friends or most of the time not interested in those lectures.

Here I would want people to note that there could be fun as well as learning simultaneously if we just play smarter. If you feel the subject interesting, then this one is not for you. But if you feel that the lecture is going to be real boring try this once and if you feel it has helped you, then you would realise that you'll learn many things without much trouble.

Whenever you feel the lecture is boring, just take a pen or a pencil and a paper. Just keep writing the any of the words which you feel are different that your lecturer is yelling. Just have a competition with your friend or you classmate saying who would write most number of words relating only to the subject. (You could be equally serious and write down the notes too, but just for making it more interesting i am asking to try these techniques.) At the end of the class, you have a list of words that your subject deals with and also a rough idea and notes of what has been taught in the class. This might seem silly or foolish to some of you but when you give them a try jsut for once, then you would realise that it isn't that bad a try. So go have fun while getting the most out of your lecture.

Now for people who are learners by listening, pay a lot of concentration to what your lecturers are saying. Even though the professor is really boring, because of your skills in listening, you will be more pleased to see that you've learnt something out of his lecture and when you refer the topic the second time it would not seems new and you would be much comfortable learning the subject. This is a key point to success for learning while listening.

Always note the point that anything that is heard once will be retained to some extent and would always help you by making the subject familiar and seem like you already have an idea about it. So learn well by listening.

Cheers,
Enigma.

Learning Through Observation

As we have already discussed the different ways in which one can learn, here we are going to discuss the different ways in which learning through observation could help you and how you should be learning through observation.

In our daily walk of life, we learn most of the things by observing and trying things. We have been observing our parents eat and that is how we started eating, same is the case with animals too. We do what we observe and see others doing. Even a cud(younger ones of a lion) observes it's mom tear the flesh and it tries to do the same. That's how observation has always played an important role in learning things in our life. Now before you start feeling bored, let's discuss the ways through we can learn through observation.

Learning through observation always feels good when made interesting. You cannot observe your Science Professor who might be giving a boring lecture for hours together and feel happy for observing him do that. That is not the way you learn through observing. So the question is how do we learn through observing?

The best way of learning through observing is by using pictorial methods of learning. Find related pictures/images that describe your topic which you might want to learn. If you dont have proper sources then search in the internet. There might be many books and articles which might have dicussed the topic much better with pictures and photos. Try to find those sources without wasting much time and then go through them. You would realise that you have learnt much more than what was actually there in your book. Our main aim is learning and not just reading or studying, so we should always try to improve the way we learn things as that is the ultimate thing that leads to self-satisfaction and not just turning the pages or reading the suff. So find the right content and use it to learn better.

The other way of learning through observation is that we have to experiment things to gain knowledge. Why do we find Cricket or football interesting than to learn a lesson from our class notes? Why do we learn that quicker than the latter? It is because we work and do it and experience the learning out there, whereas we have nothing to experiment but write or read with our class notes. That's the reason why we like to play than to read.

Finally the concluding point here i would like to make is that, we should try to make our learning playful and involve more fun in it by understanding and discovering ways in which learning is made playful with fun involved in it. These days there are videos that you find for each and everything, go find videos, experiment things by yourself, do the stuff to think better. If you fail once, try doing it again and finally you WILL succeed.

Cheers,
Enigma

Common suggestion for Everyone

The first thing to be noted here is that we're not going to learn everything through a single method. We learn different different things from different methods and each method varies from the other. The one point that is to be noted here is that even though we might be good at learning in one particular way, we should be equally interested and willing to learn by exploring other ways too. Even though we have analysed that we learn from a particular way much better than the other, it doesn't mean that we wont learn from other ways. It is just that we would learn in a particular way much better than other ways. But after realising that, the next thing we should be doing is besides implementing the best outcome of our learning methods, we also have to explore other ways of learning which helps in making our learning interesting. We should not stick to a particular way of studying and learning and that leads to creative learning.

So we should be able to explore all the methods possible and stick to the ones which we find the best. So it is always good to test ourselves with different methods of learning and then finally choose the best of them. Use the Trial and Error method to discover your skills and that helps in experimenting and realising facts about ourselves much sooner. So read all the methods and choose the ones that you find you are more comfortable with. There is no compulsion that you should implement a particular method only. It is always good to explore new ways and learn better techniques. So go explore yourself.

Cheers,
Enigma.

Analyze your Kind of Learning

In this post i am going to tell you about a very important factor which helps you learn better and this needs a homework from your side. So read carefully.

Each of us are different humans and each of us feel it better to learn in different ways and we all differ in the way we want to learn things. Now there are three key factors here. Learning through vision, learning through hearing and learning through writing. Now each of you might have heard of different myths like "10 times reading is equal to one time writing", "one time listening is equal to 10 times writing" and vice-versa or different combinations of these kind of statements from our elders. The fact here that is to be noted is that even though these statements are true to an extent, they differ with the person and his mentality and his habits.

Now for an example, Smith is a university college student who would learn quick if he hears something rather than reading it from a book or a notes. He might grasp more quickly by hearing a lecture or by listening to his friends explaining the subject and his efficiency might not be the same in other ways of learning like by reading the same book or information by himself.

In an other example, consider Tom, a graduation student, who is a quick learner by observing things. He can remember anything that he observes and remembers them very well. He could recollect things that he has learnt by his obsevation and that picturization of his learning helps him remember things well.

Similarly, let's consider Jim, a student in school who would learn things if he reads them even for once and he may not require a second glance. He might not be able to pay attention if he's being explained about the same topic and may feel disturbed. He might not be able to visualise things properly and might not be able to recollect his observations too. But he is best in reading things and that might be his best way of learning.

Finally, the point that i want all of you to understand is that none of us are same and we have our own learning skills which we have got to analyze discover and unwind them to utilize and make the best out of ourselves. So from this, you must take time, think back, analyse your skills. You must peacefully sit at a serene place and think about your past where you might have felt that you have learnt things better in some particular way. Now is the time to discover that skill through which you could learn better than any other means. Start learning from that way and you would find that you are learning better.

Cheers,
Enigma.

Introduction

Hi Everyone,

Here in this blog we are going to discuss different techniques that would make our process of learning smart. It's a common tendency in most of us that we don't like to learn for long hours or rather we can frame it as “we read or study for the sake of doing it and we actually don't learn”. Now we are going to see different ways in which we could manage your studies, work, stress, time and almost everything that you should know for making your learning better. It’s not that we cannot study, but the fact is that we miss on how to study smart and that is what we are going to discuss here. So, let’s begin this journey for smarter learning.

Now you might be thinking "I am lazy and have tried all possible ways and have failed and finally quit trying. So Forget it". But even now, remember that you are reading this post to give a try, so why not give our best try? Let’s not miss any of these topics that would make us realise one fine day that we are lagging one step behind. Let’s hit the Bull’s Eye. Adapt these techniques by giving them a simple reading and see how success knocks your door again and again. So, let’s start smart learning and give it the best try and then the day is not quite far where you find yourself actually learning.

Feel free to post me your suggestions, feedback or questions for any clarification. You could even email me regarding any of your problems and we will try to assist with the best possible solution. I intend to make this so interesting that you would Bookmark this site and even refer your friends. We would be making this discussion more informative by providing you with the best information and techniques about learning. Please do visit us regularly for our updates.

Happy learning...

Cheers,
Enigma.