Most important step

In the last post I promised to discuss time-saving, Return On Investment strategies for learners. As a teacher, I like to use what I think are “big bang for my buck” strategies to put learners in position to learn best. By “big band for my buck” strategies I mean strategies that take little time to create and/or facilitate and return robust learning for the students. In other words, my ROI is big—little time and big learning.

Learners can develop their own time-saving, ROI strategies to facilitate their own learning. So the first step is to notice how you best learn.

One of the best time-saving learning strategies is to determine which is your personal best learning strategy. Choose your most important first step.
Marking is one of the most important steps to me. It is important to hightlight important information so you can go back to the information, review it, and build on it.  I have to always remind myself to be selective in what I highlight. When I am reading a hard copy text, I have a tendency to mark too much material as important and then reviewing still takes too much time since I have too much marked.

The biggest mistake beginning highlighters make is to highlight too much information. Always highlight phrases rather than sentences and limit yourself to no more than three most important phrases per page when you first start highlighting.

Highlighting via electronic methods has a real advantage for me since I can unhighlight a phrase or sentence when I find something else more important than what I had previously highlighted. I cannot unhighlight when using a regular highlighter--my regular highlighter does not have an eraser.

Next post we will narrow the highlighting even more with a technique I call “Three Little Words.”

In the meantime, I invite you to share your personal most important step here.