Make It Easy

Do you have a special interest? It might be gardening or golf, art, music, sports, math, mechanics, carpentry, science, history, cooking, sewing, or helping others. Do you enjoy learning in your special area of interest? Probably. Most likely you own a few books or magazines on the subject. Early learning in your area of expertise was fairly easy for you because of your talent for it. Then, because you had already enjoyed success, you were eager to learn more.

Talented students achieve success readily, but not all students are gifted in every subject. The challenge is to make difficult subjects easy for reluctant students. Believe it or not, it can be done.

One way to make the difficult easy it to connect the new learning with the previous knowledge or experience of the learner. A reference to a TV character, a vacation experience, or something pleasant the student already knows may be good introductions for the lesson. When the student connects the new material with something pleasant that is already known, the result is much like plugging in an electric cord. The energy begins to flow.

As the lesson continues, it's vitally important to keep on connecting new learning with previous knowledge. Students readily remember phonics, spelling, or vocabulary words with letter patterns or meanings they already know. For example, recalling that a bicycle has two wheels makes words like "bisect" and "bilateral" easier to remember. Also, words about circles or cycles can be associated with the fun and familiar bicycle. On the other hand, students quickly forget unassociated pieces of information. Defining a new word with an unfamiliar word is less than helpful. For example, informing a student that a mochila is a knapsack when the student never heard of such a thing confuses the student and subtracts from learning. Better to define a mochila as a backpack for a horse. Children tend to know what backpacks and horses are.

Assisting students to organize information effectively makes learning easier. Eating a piece of bread is much simpler than consuming a bowl of crumbs. Likewise, it's much easier to learn an organized set of facts or processes than to remember miscellaneous crumbs of knowledge. Diagrams, maps, graphs, and other graphic organizers help students see at a glance how bits of information are related to each other.

A Venn diagram has two intersecting circles that compare a set of individuals according to a certain characteristic. For instance, breeds of dogs may be large, small, or have large or small kinds within the breed. German Shepherds, Great Danes, and St. Bernards would be in one circle, Chihuahuas and Pekinese in the other, and Poodles in the intersection of the circles. Venn diagrams help students compare and contrast their ideas.

A concept map is another graphic organizer. A concept map shows how the various facts about a certain topic relate to each other. A concept map about the ocean might show circles labeled "waves", "currents", "depth" and "vessels" with other concepts connected to them. The student can keep the concept map in mind and connect incoming information to the proper place on the map. At test time the relevant information will be easy to retrieve.

A third method of making learning easier is the process of fading cues. This one is especially effective with beginners and with super discouraged students who greatly dislike the subject being taught. Fading cues allows the student to enjoy success throughout the lesson. It works like this: The teacher gives a task or problem, such as adding fractions with unlike denominators, and does the task while explaining it. Then the teacher gives a similar task or problem. This time the student does the work. The teacher supplies plenty of prompts so that the student does the task correctly. Then the teacher praises the student and suggests that the next time perhaps the student will need less help. With each successive problem the student usually needs less assistance until finally the student can do the problem independently. Younger students find it motivating to write one star for themselves when they need help and two stars when they have done the task with no help at all. At the end of the lesson they count all their stars.

Sometimes students are labeled with words like "learning differences" which can imply that they are incapable of learning like other children. But with methods that make it easy, those students can learn too. To people who claim that some students can't learn, I ask, "Who says?"

Mary Sue Laing, M.Ed.
Resource Teacher, St. Ambrose School
newskill7@msn.com

by Mary Sue Laing, M. Ed., New Skill, Inc. Academic Tutor