Organization, Execution and Expression – Tips

…or do you have to be really early just to be on time?

Technology (love it or hate it) is great when it comes to keeping appointments. It can be your friend.

Here’s how.

If you still feel it is safer to plan to arrive and hour early, plan what you can do with that time, especially if you are in school or studying for exams.

Don’t wait for the first lecture.

When you’re starting a new course, do you wait for the first lecture and expect to take in, or absorb what they teach? Maybe you will, maybe you won’t.

You can set yourself up for learning more effectively.

Most courses provide an outline of what they expect you to learn, often called learning outcomes.

Go through the learning outcomes and work out what you already know and what you’d like to know before you even begin.

Highlight the topics that the course teaches.

Now get what you already know down on paper. Don’t use full sentences. Try bullet points, mind maps, sketches or diagrams, whatever works for you.

Then at the bottom of the page, write three questions: three things you’d actually like to learn from the course.

Simple as that. It sets your brain up to be an active participant in your learning process.

If you can link what you know and what you would like to know to your current life experience and even your family and friends, emotions can be good glue.

This technique is called active learning. You can adapt it to any learning experience in your life, a whole course, a single lecture. An article or a whole book.

How is your time management?

Do you suddenly realise you haven’t got enough time to finish? Perhaps you panic when the deadline is months away?

This hack helps you visualize what you need to do and when.

Planning just one thing is not so bad. You get a wall calendar and mark on the due date then work back from there.

If you don’t know how long things take, time yourself and find out your personal average:

-How long does it take to find three relevant articles?

-How long does it take to work out what is needed?

-How long does creating the scaffold take?

How to manage when you have several projects to plan?

Your wall calendar may get crowded. It’s hard to see what is going on. Consider getting a “yearly vacation planner” which is used in workplaces with a line for every employee. Use a separate line for each of your projects/tasks.

The first thing to do when you start a course or project is to find out all the deadlines and mark them on your holiday planner. Use a line for each course/project.

You may find where several of your essays/papers/tasks need to be completed all at once. Don’t panic. The planner will allow you to figure out what you need to work on at every step.

As you fill in what-to-do-when on your planner, it begins to look like a Gantt chart (absolutely look those up if you’re not yet familiar with them). It is easy to see what is next and in what order. It’ll help you find out if at any point you may need help rather than waiting until everything is due at once and you have run out of time.

People who are preparing for standardized texts often do similar tests for practice. Perhaps you do too: reviewing past exams, or exams your teacher provided, or some that you find in books or online.

You may have received a grade on a practice exam without any feedback on which questions you got right or wrong. Perhaps you were even asked to mark the questions yourself. Those are not learning opportunities. You need immediate, relevant feedback.

So try this instead:

Examining and criticising the AI’s answer is where you learn.

Do the questions one at a time. Keep answering practice questions until most of your questions are right.

Only when you’re getting most of the questions right, do timed exams (to make sure you get the exam done in the time available).

AI can help you learn if you use it well , or it can undermine your learning if you use it lazily. Always do it yourself first. Always reflect.

It’s there, look!…

Students often are upset because they’ve got low marks.

The feedback says, they missed out important information. And they point to their essay.

It’s there! Look, it’s there! And it’s here! And it’s here!

It happens so often, we need to wonder why. What is it that stops the lecturer seeing what you’ve put in your essay?

The answer may be simple. You did not lead them from idea to idea in a way that helped them see your developing thoughts.

Imagine the reader as a great big lumbering bull.

And you’ve got to lead that bull across a swamp, and there are little stepping stones on the swamp. You need to lead the bull from one idea, one stepping stone, to another idea, another stepping stone. To keep your reader engaged, you need to show how one idea connects to the next.

The problem is, if the stepping stones are too far apart – the bull will fall in the mud. While they are struggling to get back out of the mud they are lost and confused.

That’s what’s happening in your essay.

You’re jumping from idea to idea, making those leaps too great for the reader, not joining the dots for them, not helping them go from “stepping stone” to “stepping stone” to “stepping stone”.

When they get lost, when they get confused, when they are “in the mud” they miss what you’re trying to say in the next few paragraphs.

Crashed, gone, lost. What to do now?

You know how it is when you’re dyslexic or dyspraxic or have ADHD: something kind of goes wrong and you lose the plot.

All your work down the drain. Irretrievable.

That happened to one of my students who was studying game design. There was some glitch in the game’s program and his lecturer told him to delete the program, then reinstall it.

He was in panic. Overwhelmed by the magnitude of the task and not knowing where any of the information was. He had to redo everything and he was out of time.

Familiar? Sadly it happens a lot.

So what do you DO?

Take a deep breath.

Try to calm down.

And get a BIG piece of paper and a few pens.

Make a picture of the structure you need to fill. For him it was a map of the game. Then jot down everything you can remember.

Don’t worry yet about anything you have forgotten.

Once you make a picture to look at, that relieves your working memory.

Once you break the task down, that relieves stress and makes you more efficient.

Dyslexic? Dyspraxic? ADHD? ASD, or any combination of the above? We all have challenges with working memory and processing.

The keys to success are: Make a visual map, so you don’t have to hold it in your mind. Break the task down and tackle one piece at a time to reduce stress.

You’ve created it and now you are asked to write about it

If you struggle saying more than a few lines here is a scaffold to help:

First tell them what you hoped to achieve — your intention.
Then tell them what inspired you.
Then tell them about the tools and techniques and materials you used.
Then tell them what you liked about your finished work, and why.
What you were less happy about and why.
Finally tell them what you would use again, what you would adapt or change and how.

There you have it. No more blank paper syndrome.

This art scaffold is useful for all art or design courses including architecture and product design.