Sharing - learning with friends

This is about getting together with a friend, or forming an organised group dedicated to learning faster.

This is ideal for learning a topic, preparing an outline for an essay, thinking through conclusions from an experiment or survey, revision and exam practice.

Learning with a friend

The most important point about this is that you and your friend must agree that the time you spend is for work, not gossip or messing about. So, you need to pick someone who wants to learn like you do. There are lots of things you can do together:

If you are both learning the same topic, split the task. Get your friend to learn part of it, and you learn the rest. Then, when you get together, teach each other. Ask awkward questions!

Get your friend to ask you questions - to test yourself. You can use questions from a book or from flash-cards that you've made yourself.

Work on a topic together, creating your own notes and comparing what you've learnt and written down. Discuss the topic.

Learning online

Working with friends on Instant Messenger can be OK, but it's so easy to get into chatting. You have to be disciplined!

Learning in a group

I'm talking here about study groups that you can organise either in school or outside. It's quite a serious project and needs a lot of commitment from you and the others. It can be very ineffective if everyone just sits around chatting, or if just one person does most of the talking. There must be a structure. They take a lot of commitment, but if they work, they are brilliant. Here are some ideas:

Be inter-dependent: Learn yourself and help others to learn. Sink or swim together. Don't work alone in a group. Here are some tips:

Assign roles: Reader, recorder, tester, observer, sceptic. (have a look at a sort-of 6 hats idea) . Sceptic might ask, "have we checked our answers, is that the only answer, have we explored all the possibilities, have we made any assumptions?

Compare notes: at the end, see if you have picked up on different ideas than the rest. Have they?

Break up the learning task into sections: Each person has a different fraction of the task to learn and teach.

Share answers: then discuss them, make improvements and vote on the best one.

Choose the right size of group: Start with just one other - someone you get along with well. Get used to successfully learning with one other person, learn what works best for you and only after you're confident, add to the group - unless of course, it's working so well that you don't feel you need to! Mixing different styles of people works better than choosing people just like you. You want a group that creates lots of different ideas.

Agree on clear objectives, and take personal responsibility for your work: Everyone should agree on a clear objective for each session. Each member of the group should contribute by preparing their own notes, doing their own research, preparing presentations, and so on. If someone is there just to listen and let you do the work, then the group will fail. You stand together, or fall apart.

You could involve your teachers; they may come up with ideas for projects to work on or give you worksheets and datasheets to use. No harm asking!

Work on your social skills: It takes practice to be able to explain things clearly to other people. By the way, this is a skill that employers will pay you a lot for! It also takes time to learn to trust and support one another and to constructively sort out the arguments that sometimes arise. It takes practice to listen without interrupting. The temptation is to be thinking about what you are going to say when it's your turn. Don't do this! Concentrate on what the speaker is saying so that you can contribute usefully. After all, you will learn more from listening to someone else than listening to yourself!

Focus on outcomes, not personalities. Avoid emotional phrases and personal put-downs. If you don't like a suggestion, direct your criticism at the suggestion (for example, "I think there might be a problem with that suggestion.") rather than the person (e.g. "I think you're wrong about that."). Think positively all the time.

Take time to reflect on the performance of the group: From time to time, even when there's just two of you, ask, "What is going well and what could be improved." Have a debate.

Keep the group together: Try to keep the team, or partnership, going - even if it seems like it's not working as well as you'd liked. Working through problems will help you learn new skills, both social and problem-solving. Some of the best collaborations are in groups that have been through bad times.

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