Learning How to Learn: How to Succeed in School Without Spending All Your Time Studying; A Guide for Kids and Teens

by Barbara Oakley

It’s important not just to practice a given technique or item. It’s also important to practice choosing between techniques or items. This is true when you’re learning all sorts of topics. Practicing different aspects and techniques of the skill you are trying to learn is called interleaving.4 (Just remember your interstellar friend, Leaf. Interleave—get it?)

Practice your new skill over a number of days, making sure you get some good sleep each night. This helps your new synaptic brain-links to form. You want to broaden the forest pathways—thicken the links—for your mental mouse.

To become a soccer expert, each skill needs to be practiced separately during training, then interleaved. You want your reactions to become automatic during the heat of a match.

Whether you are learning martial arts, dance, an additional language, knitting, welding, origami, gymnastics, or the guitar, it’s all the same. Deliberate practice with interleaving. Focus on the hard stuff and mix it up. That’s how you become an expert.

A key idea here is that you are not blindly memorizing solutions. You are looking at problems and learning how to build your own brain-links. Once that solid, beautiful set of links is formed, it can easily be pulled up into working memory when you need to. With enough practice independently solving the problem (not looking at the solution!), each step in the solution will whisper the next step to you.*

Lady Luck Favors the One Who Tries

Looking at a solution or watching someone else practice can get you started in learning something new. But just looking or watching doesn’t build your brain-links. Actively working through a problem, or doing an activity, is what creates brain-links. You create and strengthen sets of brain-links through deliberate practice. That’s focused, repeated work on the more difficult parts of a concept. Don’t waste much time on the easy stuff that you already know.

Interleaving is the other important part of making an expert set of brain-links. Switch around within a subject. This will give you a sense of the topic as a whole. Your neurons will eventually link up and you’ll have completed a whole “puzzle.”

If you’ve always studied in the library, but your tests are in classrooms, your octopus can get confused. In the classroom, your octopus can have trouble finding the geometry links, because there are no library flavors around to guide it. You may end up doing worse on the exam.

We learn best when we use several different senses—hearing, seeing, and, perhaps especially, being able to feel with our hands. At deep levels in your brain, you see and hear. You see and smell. You hear and touch. When your brain creates its impressions of the world, you want as many senses involved as possible.

Interleave. Don’t just keep practicing with slight changes in the same basic technique. Switch back and forth between different techniques. This will allow you to see when to use a technique. Books usually don’t help you interleave. You will have to practice skipping back and forth between the ideas in different chapters yourself.

Passive reading and rereading. You need to practice active recall, not just let your eyes pass over the same material.

Lazy learning. Don’t just practice easy material. That’s like learning to play basketball by focusing on your dribbling. Use deliberate practice—focus on what you find most difficult.

Third, Santiago was flexible.

One of the most important parts of learning is to be able to admit mistakes and flexibly change your mind.

I were being rescued from a fire, I would choose a firefighter who had physically practiced rescuing people from a burning building. Firefighting is a dangerous activity, where every second counts. The firefighter needs to be able to react quickly and appropriately to the danger that is swirling around. The firefighter needs well-practiced sets of brain-links that he or she can call on even under conditions of high stress. Such sets of links do not develop by simply watching.

“Rut think” means that your mind gets so used to running along certain mental pathways that it becomes stuck in a rut. You become less flexible in your thinking.

My First Book About the Brain, by Patricia J. Wynne and Donald M. Silver (New York: Dover Children’s Science Books, 2013), 32 pages. This award-winning coloring book is so informative that it is used in some regular classes. Suitable for ages 8–12, but grown-ups also seem to enjoy the relaxing process of coloring while they learn.

Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning, by Peter C. Brown, Henry L. Roediger III, and Mark A. McDaniel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014). One of our very favorite books on learning for adults.

Mind for Numbers: How to Succeed in Math and Science (Even If You Flunked Algebra) by Barbara Oakley (New York: Tarcher/Penguin, 2014). Even if we do say so ourselves, this is actually a great general book on learning—it relates some of the ideas of Learning How to Learn but from an adult prospective that includes many additional insights.

Mindshift: Break Through Obstacles to Learning and Discover Your Hidden Poten...

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise, by Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool (New York: Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016). Incidentally,

Neuroscience 35 (2012): 391–416.

Psychologists call this general idea “Einstellung” or “functional fixedness.” But these can be hard words to remember, so we prefer “rut think.”