In my last post I talked about the Fixed and Growth Mindset in relation to using Gabe Wyner’s punctuation trainer.
I talked about how I seem to have hit the Fixed Mindset approach to getting things right with my pronunciation trainer. It seemed that I was’t really “learning’, merely transacting.
Even though I am putting in lots of effort, it feels like I am just going through the motions. Doing just enough to satisfy a fixed mindset craving.
There seems to be a lot of learning that is being missed.
Why Not Use Mind Mapping To Help?
Well I hit on the idea of capturing the pronunciation lessons I had learnt in the form of a Mind Map.
I am a huge advocate of Mind Mapping and have been teaching it for over 20 years now.
Mind Mapping is a very powerful tool for a variety of reasons.
More of that in a later post, so let’s look at how I used it to help me here.
Well I felt that one of the reasons I had got sucked into just “transacting” the cards was that I wasn’t really learning. And part of the reason for that was not gathering the lessons – I was just experiencing them.
So as I went through the lessons, I began to capture the various forms of pronunciation and produced a rather nice mind map of the information.
This is just part of the mind map which is created in iThoughts HD – a fabulous iOS Mind Mapping app.
I use it on my iPad and it is the engine room of the way I handle information, not just learning Spanish.
Now I am not going to get into a long discourse about the power of Mind Mapping here because I have written about it extensively elsewhere.
The key point to understand about one aspect of using Mind Mapping is that it is the thought process behind its creation that makes it so powerful.
Many Mind Mapping “experts” will focus on the Mind Map itself – the pretty pictures, colour, structure etc. But they are really missing the point.
The power is in the sorting and organisation and making sense of the information to create the final mind map.
It is the DOING and not the DONE that is important.
At the end of the process it will look like the perfect finished article but that is not the point.
I have just tidied up all of the capture I have put together so far to make it look good. That sorting process actually helped me make sense of some of the pronunciation differences and similarities.
This is learning in action.
Being presented with data only gives a superficial transfer of information. Actually processing it to make sense of it is where understanding and learning takes place. It is here where information is transformed into knowledge.
Having done this exercise, there are still some gaps and I have some questions.
For example some of the Y related cards in the system indicate that the sound of it in that word is a “Juh” yet it is pronounced “wuh”. That might be an error in the cards themselves
But again, that is what the learning journey is all about. Dealing with uncertainty, ambiguity and confusion. The magic happens where those are resolved.
The important point is how do you go about understanding the pronunciation – this is one more way.
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