Rating: 
Summary: new understanding
Review: After reading the book I have new ideas about teaching and new ways to approaching teaching. I thought the book was very well written and informative with lots of cited literature, but at the same time it was easily read and understood.
Rating: 
Summary: Challenging typical thinking about learning
Review: Ellen did a great job with this book, giving us the why-to's explaining why we need a different attitude against learning. At large I agree with her analysis that traditional education feeds us 7 beliefs which aren't very useful once we leave the classroom to go to the school of live. Actually, these beliefs aren't useful for the classroom neither, but they seem designed into the way schools teach. As such it should be required reading for anyone considering a career in education or as trainer in a business context.Next to the analysis and showing what goes wrong, you'll get a partial solution, consisting of guidelines of how one can do better. These guidelines are useful for teachers or trainers as well as for learners. As teacher it boils down to avoiding the 7 myths, and teaching students to learn more mindfully. The book backs up this recommendation with the research findings that proves this approach is far more effective. As learner, the recommendation is that you start having a more mindful attitude while learning. The book only gets 4 stars, because it would have been more useful if it had been more of a how-to book as well. That might be an idea for the next edition. Meanwhile, other how-to books which are compatible with notion of emotional intelligence and which will complement this one are Don Blackberry's "Rediscover the joy of learning" and the books by Michael Grinder. Patrick Merlevede -- author of "7 Steps to Emotional Intelligence"
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Summary: A Fact Right Now--May Not Be a Fact in an Hour
Review: Ellen Langer has taken a thought and put great amounts of research into it. It is said that knowledge capital decreases quickly in our information-based society, so not only must we keep ourselves up to date on current changes--we must also re-evaluate the old facts we've learned. Langer points out six myths and explains them away with research to support it. One of those myths and our perception have made us medicalize an academic deficiency. We have medically treated many children, diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, when the educational system including parents do not understand that the student is being distracted by something else more attractive. The idea here is to make our learning more attractive than it currently is by allowing a more creative and questioning environment. I watched a 30-minute PBS special with Ellen Langer discussing her book and have read the book--her interview was much better and to the point. However, her book questions five other myths all related to the fact that the environment changes. To leave you with my favorite sentence in the book--it will give you a taste of what the book is about--"Not only do we as individuals get locked into single-minded views, but we also reinforce these views for each other until the culture itself suffers the same mindlessness."
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Summary: The Onslaught will Follow
Review: From the mass of information that has come out of brain research and neuropsychiatry, the field of education has managed to get hold of some of the profits. That spotlight is aimed at Mindful Learning, where author Ellen Langer, delivers a worthy introduction into the nature of study and memorization. Her work has balance and her perspective is research-based and largely positive.
The book identifies things students do and believe whose value and worth are nothing but myths. These include cramming, assuming there is always a right and a wrong, equating attention to staying awake and the dissembling of rote memorization as an inevitable and necessary practice. She even refutes the standard that it is a bad thing to forget. The material in Mindful Learning is not a prescriptive nor does the author promise miraculous classrooms with skyrocketing test scores. She is an Ivy League academic, a psychology professor and her purpose is to inform and to pique interest into further research and applications. As science will do, the massive attention to find an answer for Alzheimers and other age-related memory loss have overlapped with the public debate over ADHD and in particular, psycho-stimulant therapy. These discrete areas of medicine and neurology have spawned a spillover revolution in education; specifically the field of learning theory. The unheard of premise that a reduced amount of energy and time could result in greater memory and lasting results- has already earned some critics. The ball keeps rolling however as the primacy of sleep as it relates to depression, substance abuse and ability to maximize classroom instruction has found itself aligned with the basic study practices. These, like cramming, waking up early to finish studying and any effort done at the expense of sleep have been indicted and found more negative than positive. Instead, taking frequent breaks, exercise, nutrition and chunking parts of the whole are refashioning how we think about working hard as the way to do your best. The correct amount and type of sleep has greater weight upon how we drive and how we perform than had heretofore been recognized. Sleepy teens have as many and as deadly accidents as drunk teens. Sleep and its relationship to mood, depression, substance abuse and anti-social behaviors is powerfully shown to have a one to one relationship. Adolescence as a time of developmental paradoxes and a circadian rhythm whereby early evening is their morning and morning their mid-night REM time- is presenting itself as a challenge to districts over America that start highschool at dawn. In a nation with evidence of an epidemic of despair and intermittent suicide and violence, we will not dismiss these claims as merely unique. As a boost for special education and physically frail learners, whereby energy levels and consequences of medication and attention do so conspire to reduce outcomes, the implications are impressive. Langer offers a strong argument and justification of techniques that work and ones that are over priced gas guzzlers. If you have not been following this subject, or if you want to get a non-self-help viewpoint- and get it before the the marketplace and airways are flooded with hype- this is a good enough place to start. Science- not magic, not one person's brainchild- but smart brained.
Rating:
Summary: Turned My Head Inside Out
Review: I can't guarantee it will have the same effect on everyone, but this book affected me profoundly. I've heard the same ideas repeated in other contexts before but nothing hit home like this book did. Challenged a lot of very deeply held assumptions about the value of "competence." I don't know whether it's actually that great a book or if it was just exactly what I needed to read at that point in my life.
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Summary: Mindful learning leads to mindful teaching
Review: I read this book from the perspective of a college teacher, looking for new ways to think about what goes on in the classroom. My eyes were opened! Langer argues that learning need not be boring and students don't have to think of education as "work." She suggests ways to re-frame activities in ways that engage students in what they are doing and give them a reason to care about the outcomes. Langer attacks the myth that rote learning & blind memorization are the foundation for higher-order skills. She makes a strong case that "forgetting" is often a good thing. Teachers should be concerned about students understanding the contextual limitations of what they learn, rather than with "covering the material." Coupled with Bob Boice's several books on mindfulness in teaching, this book changed the way I think about college teaching.
Rating:
Summary: Mindful learning leads to mindful teaching
Review: I read this book from the perspective of a college teacher, looking for new ways to think about what goes on in the classroom. My eyes were opened! Langer argues that learning need not be boring and students don't have to think of education as "work." She suggests ways to re-frame activities in ways that engage students in what they are doing and give them a reason to care about the outcomes. Langer attacks the myth that rote learning & blind memorization are the foundation for higher-order skills. She makes a strong case that "forgetting" is often a good thing. Teachers should be concerned about students understanding the contextual limitations of what they learn, rather than with "covering the material." Coupled with Bob Boice's several books on mindfulness in teaching, this book changed the way I think about college teaching.
Rating:
Summary: Power of ideas
Review: Langer's style is more popular than academic. She presents plenty of empirical evidence to support her ideas, though there may not be enough data to satisfy some scholars. What she does well is challenge conventional wisdom, for example, that you have to learn to do the basics before acquring a new competence. Or, that we should encourage our children to 'pay more attention'. She dissects these beliefs and exposes the relatively shallow assumptions that underpin them. This has had great power for me, and I have tried to apply these insights mindfully. It is over a year since I first read this book. In that time I have found endless applications for Langer's concept of mindfulness. My training designs have been completely transformed by the idea, backed up by empirical evidence, that teaching people 'steps in a process' is essentially meaningless. I have borrowed constantly in writing and speech from her suggestion that 'conditional' language is more persuassive than 'unconditional'. Most importantly, I have learned to help other people become mindful about solving their problems in my coaching work.
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Summary: The Nature Of Learning
Review: Ms. Langer effectively conveys her theory of mindful learning and its implications for education wherever it takes place - in school, on the job, in the home - and does so in a clearly expressed nonacademic manner. What is mindful learning? It is learning that involves "openness to novelty; alertness to distinction; sensitivity to different contexts; implicit, if not explicit, awareness of multiple perspectives; and orientation in the present." What might this all mean for us? Perhaps our educational curriculums need to be taught differently, maybe our jobs could be more enjoyable, and self-improvement less onerous. She states the myths of conventional learning:
1.The basics must be learned so well that they become second nature.
2.Paying attention means being focused on one thing at a time.
3.Delaying gratification is important.
4.Rote memorization is necessary.
5.Forgetting is a problem.
6.Intelligence is knowing "what's out there."
7.There are right and wrong answers.
Each chapter discusses, in a nondogmatic manner, theory and possible reasons why these myths are not always helpful. This is not, as Professor Langer states, a "how-to" book with prescriptions and study programs for the self-help "professional learner" (as one reviewer phrased it.) It doesn't have cute little "mind-maps," and it isn't a De Bono's "Thinking Course"-type book. The reviewer (Adamson, January 22, 1999) might have learned something if he'd been less smug about his naive faith in those "accelerated" learning books which don't deliver half of what they claim. Personally, I found this book extremely helpful in my own personal studies - from learning to play tennis and golf better, becoming more fluent in Spanish, improving my chess - since I try to find alternative methods, perspectives, and just plain fun in learning. I don't try to be perfect. I don't think there's only one way to do something. Try it.
Rating:
Summary: The Nature Of Learning
Review: Take the time to read this short analysis of sideways, mindful learning. Langer calls for us to allow for lateral thinking, to strive to cultivate it in our schools, and to approach each day by being open to life's multifariousness. She writes, "the very notion of intelligence may be clouded by a myth: the belief that being intelligent means knowing what is out there...An alternative view, which is the base of mindfulness research, is that individuals may always define their relations to their environment in several ways, essentially creating the reality that is out there. What is out there is shaped by how we view it" (p. 100). Reading this will help set you on your toes. Mindfulness is viewing the world from several perspectives; seeing the familiar as a novelty; attending to things with the full force of perception; and looking for more options when others say enough (p. 111). She calls for us to mature in our thinking, so that we will have intelligent ignorance in making the best of situations. It is good reading, good learning.
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