10 Learning Strategies: How to Practice Active Learning

Learning strategies are different approaches to either teaching students or teaching yourself new information. Novice learners in lower grade levels up through those in high school, higher education, and beyond can benefit from exploring different learning styles. There are many different approaches to pedagogy and the learning process, so it’s important to try out different strategies to find what works for you specifically.

For example, one person might learn a foreign language through traditional classroom instruction, while another might require immersion into a different culture. Neither approach is innately better than the other, just different.

Understanding how you best learn is a form of metacognition (an awareness of your own thought processes and mental habits). It’s difficult to know the best way for you to learn until you try a few different strategies. Every single individual is a unique case study when it comes to problem-solving and learning new information, so it stands to reason everyone will have a different way to learn best for their own purposes.

Education research supports the idea that a wide variety of learning environments and styles can all be conducive to specific types of learners. To keep students engaged, they need to feel they can overcome any learning differences or challenges to acquire new material. From studying in middle school to majoring in a specific subject at college, students need exposure to many strategies to see how they learn best.

Learning is more accessible if you know the right strategy for you. Here are ten possible learning strategies to consider trying as part of your next learning activity:

1. 1. Brainstorm different solutions. Work with teachers to develop multiple hypotheses about how you can solve any single problem. For example, this might mean using visual representations alongside more traditional written ones. This strategy helps develop both the concrete and abstract thinking skills necessary to solve math problems, argue a point of view in an essay, and more.
2. 2. Combine learning styles. Look over several examples of active learning techniques and combine them into a single style that works for you. Some people refer to this metacognitive strategy as dual coding, since people who employ this strategy use two or more skill sets at a time. If you’re a graphic organizer, try to fit your drawings into more traditional note-taking, for instance. If you’re an auditory learner, write out your notes in class but then record them to play back later. Focus on self-monitoring what seems to work best for you.
3. 3. Facilitate group discussion. When you engage in class discussion, you draw upon the learning capabilities of all your classmates while you offer them your own. This cooperative learning approach might include talking with a small group of students or participating in a conversation with your whole class. The point of group work like this is to see how other people think and how that can help anchor in any learning strategy training of your own.
4. 4. Find real-world applications. One way to encourage memory retention is to participate in a real-life situation where you would use a new skill. For example, to learn a second language, you could team up with someone fluent in the language to act out ordering food at a restaurant. Through this sort of role-playing, you can practice your language acquisition skills in a realistic way before applying them in the real world.
5. 5. Focus on the most difficult problem. Use your prior knowledge and learning skills to focus on the most difficult content area for you. This more focused instructional strategy works best when you need to really hone a specific skill.
6. 6. Practice at various difficulty levels. As a cognitive strategy for better learning outcomes, alternate the difficulty level when you do practice tests. This form of interleaving helps you incorporate old skills with new knowledge. For instance, language learners should quiz themselves on more basic conjugation and vocabulary while they try to acquire more complex grammatical skills.
7. 7. Quiz yourself regularly. As a form of retrieval practice, quizzing yourself often can be effective. This test-taking strategy helps you memorize things in the short term, and it helps you simulate what it will be like when you take a test in person.
8. 8. Take breaks to summarize information. Between each learning task, take a moment to summarize any new concepts in the course material. By using your own words to describe the subject matter, you both improve your reading comprehension and further cement the material in your own mind. It can also help to take breaks to simply relax and let the information percolate as a form of self-regulation or affective learning (feeling good about the learning process).
9. 9. Try teaching students just like you. This interactive teaching method doubles as an effective learning strategy. When you learn something, try to teach it to someone else. This process of elaboration will help you meet your own learning goals, practice critical thinking skills, and further cement understanding for your companion. Give them an opportunity to ask open-ended questions to help with their own learning as part of your learning-by-teaching strategy.
10. 10. Use mnemonics. Coming up with a catchy mnemonic device helps with memorization. You might be able to work with your teacher to implement this study skill for your classroom as a whole.

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