If you work hard on your game but are dissatisfied with your progress, you probably don't learn efficiently. "Efficiency" measures how much you learn for the time and money you invest.
You can blame the school system, because it teaches students how to pass multiple-choice exams but not how to understand what books really
mean and how to
use that knowledge. After students have passed multiple-choice exams about a book's specific facts, some educators have asked:
• What were the author's purpose and organization?
• How can you apply the author's principles?
Many students haven't even considered these questions, because they rarely appear on exams.
Active Learning
You don't have poker exams, but if you can't understand and apply principles, you lose money. To develop yourself rapidly, you should learn
actively.
"A passive approach to books or lectures is much less efficient than an active one, in which you ask and answer questions, challenge the author, and relate the material to your own experience …
"Meaningful learning is much faster and more efficient than rote learning. If you understand what an author or lecturer is trying to do and the way he is attempting to do it, you will learn much faster and retain much longer."
Those words are from my book,
A Student's Survival Manual. It stated that - since most professors don't know how to teach - students had to become efficient, active learners. Active learning is so important that a Yahoo! search got more than 2 million hits. If you check some websites, you will see how badly you were taught.
Avoid Lectures
Most professors don't understand or apply active learning principles. They lecture, and the students listen or pretend to do so. Because they grew up with them, many poker teachers rely heavily on lectures, and players pay good money to listen to them. They are all comfortable with using an absurdly inefficient instructional method.
Before the printing press was invented, books were too expensive for most people to purchase, and teachers read books aloud while the students copied them. When the printing press was invented five centuries ago, lectures became obsolete, but they are still the primary teaching method.
Teachers like them because they can stand there reading their notes, and the students have to listen to pass the exams. Lecturing is much easier than designing the sort of active learning exercises I will describe in later columns.
Lectures are extraordinarily inefficient. If two groups are exposed to the identical lecture, but one listens while the other reads a transcription, the reading group learns much more because:
• You can read much more rapidly than anyone can talk. You can read it again and again in the time it takes to listen to it once.
• You can reread any parts you don't understand.
• You can relate points to each other by moving back and forth.
• The lecturer will go too fast for some people and too slow for others.
• You can underline and make marginal notes.
• While trying to understand and take notes about what the lecturer just said, you often will miss what he is saying now.
• Instead of frantically scribbling notes, you can concentrate on what the lecturer
means.
The transcription's advantages increase dramatically over time. In six months, your lecture notes will be almost useless. You may be unable to read them, and they will cover only a small fraction of the lecture. But the written materials will still be the same, and you will have any added marginal notes, underlining, and so on.
Books are also
much less expensive. A book costing $25-$40 contains much more information than a lecture or "seminar" that costs much more.
Because the academic world is 500 years behind technology, so are most poker teachers. Since they have listened to lectures all of their lives and have never studied learning research, they naturally repeat their teachers' mistakes.
Most poker classes and DVDs are lectures. Some DVDs use technology more intelligently, and you should buy them. But don't waste your money on "talking head" lectures, whether they are live or taped. Instead, get more value by buying the lecturer's books. If he hasn't written a book, buy one by somebody else.
Some professors and poker teachers have angrily disagreed. They insisted that
their lectures were much better than printed material because they were so skilled at using their voices, gestures, and visual aids, and students could ask questions. These advantages don't offset the intrinsic inefficiency of lectures.
However, if a teacher allows back-and-forth discussion, he is applying active learning principles. Alas, most lecturers regard attempts to create discussions as disruptions.
You may enjoy listening to a good lecture, but you won't learn as much as you would by reading the same material. Some people object that they learn better from listening than reading. If you attend lectures because you prefer listening to reading, you should learn how to read well.
Don't rely on an inefficient method just because you're comfortable with it. Some poker teachers have said that you must get out of your comfort zone to develop your game; exactly the same principle applies to how you learn. That is, you have to decide whether you care more about being comfortable or improving your play and results.
The Most Important Learning Principle
Most teachers know almost nothing about the research on learning. As students, they concentrated on mastering their subjects, but studying chemistry, psychology, or poker does
not prepare anyone to teach these subjects.
Most teachers - including poker experts - focus on what they will do, not on what the students will do. They have it backward. Since the learning must take place in you,
the important thing is what you do, not what the teacher does.
Teachers can affect your learning only indirectly, by causing you to take the right actions. Despite this principle - which is supported
by thousands of research studies - most teachers devote virtually all of their preparation to what they will do: the words they will say, the examples they will give, the visual aids they will use, the references they will cite, the jokes they will tell, and so on.
If they looked at what students are doing, they would realize that they are sitting there passively, perhaps listening, perhaps not, which rarely produces much learning.
Conclusions
Because most poker authorities don't know how to teach, you have to become an efficient learner. Don't just sit there, waiting for an epiphany. Take an active role in your own development. My next columns will tell you how to apply active learning principles to three subjects:
1. Poker theory
2. Other people
3. Yourself
Active learning will speed up the learning curve for all three, and it has more impact on No. 2 than No. 1. It is absolutely indispensable for understanding yourself. You simply can't learn much about anything - especially yourself - from reading books, listening to lectures, and other passive activities. So, if you want to make large, rapid improvements in yourself and your game, you must learn actively.
Dr. Schoonmaker ([email protected]) coaches only on psychology issues, such as controlling impulses, coping with losing streaks, going on tilt, and planning your self-development.
