I’ve divided up almost all learning tasks into several unique steps. Often you won’t need to complete all the steps to understand enough to pass a test. The steps might not always follow in the same order. You may go back to the first step after completing the second before moving onto the third.What is important is that each of these steps represents key activities involved in learning. When you repeatedly miss a step in the process, or finish it poorly, the information won’t be stored properly. Learning fails and the information doesn’t make it into your holistic web.
By examining each step and seeing how it fits into our holistic learning theory, we can have a strategy for learning. With this strategy, you can use specific tactics to fix holes in your current technique. You can also develop new methods to replace inefficient ones you have for various steps along the holistic learning process.The sequence of holistic learning is:
1) Acquire
2) Understand
3) Explore
4) Debug
5) Apply
A final step which exists outside the sequence but applies to every step is Test.
Testing is checking to see how well you are executing each of these steps. Without
rigorous self-testing (by the time you reach the exam room, you’re too late) you may not
realize a step was poorly executed.
Here are the six steps:
1) Acquire - The point at which information enters through your eyes and ears.Reading, taking notes in a class or personal experiences are all part of the Acquire Phase.The goal here is to get accurate information in the most compressed form.
2) Understand - Understanding means taking raw information and giving it a context. This would be the most basic interlinking you would need to perform in order to learn.
3) Explore - The Explore Phase is really where holistic learning takes full force. Here you form the models, highways and broader connections needed for well defined constructs.
4) Debug - The Debug Phase looks for errors in your models and highways. This phase prunes back your connections so invalid ones won’t remain, or will be constrained to the area they work.
5) Apply - The Apply Phase takes debugging to the final level by making adjustments compared to how this information operates in reality. Having a set of understandings is useless if they aren’t tailored to the real world. Failure on this step could be an example of people who have book-smarts but can’t seem to use them outside the class.
6) Test - Continuously you should be testing your methods and learning throughout all six stages. This will help you quickly identify problems in the system you use for learning, and help you develop new techniques to combat weaknesses.