If you work in public relations you’re likely learning new things each week. You might be getting educated about a new issue your client is facing, coming up to speed on an entirely new market sector, or learning how to help colleagues develop and expand new skills.
Continuous learning is one of the things I love most about my career in PR, so it was with great interest that I watched the video “How Practice Builds Our Hidden Learning System,” by Barbara Oakley, Ph.D., and professor of industrial and systems engineering at Oakland University.
The session, which took place during Course Hero’s 2020 virtual Education Summit, has some great insight, whether you’re a teacher, parent or working professional. I encourage you to watch it, but here are a few points that resonated most with me.
- Practice what you learn. When you learn, you create new neural links. Often these links are weak at first, but as you practice what you learn, these sets of links become stronger and broaden. However, if you learn something and don’t practice it, the neural connections won’t become as strong.
- Prioritize sleep. When you sleep, the neurons in your brain remain active by sending signals across these link sets. This helps you consolidate memories and make them stronger. This is one of the reasons that learning over several days is better than trying to cram all the learning into a single day.
- Recall the information. The most powerful technique for learning is to practice retrieving or recalling it. This is more effective than re-reading material, highlighting it or creating concept maps. When you retrieve information from the memory in your brain, you’re making the connections stronger and practicing remembering what you learned.
- Understand the systems. There are two systems of learning information and moving it to long-term memory: declarative and procedural. Both are necessary for learning but there are important differences between them. Below are some characteristics of each learning system.
| Declarative | Procedural |
| You’re mostly conscious of it | You’re not conscious of it |
| Develops through explicit instruction | Develops through practice, especially spaced repetition |
| You can explain it | You can’t explain it (or not easily) |
| Involves sequential tasks | Involves complex patterns |
| Fast to learn, slow to use | Slow to learn, fast to use |
| Flexible | Inflexible |
I’ve often wondered why I can’t explain the writing process more easily with coworkers and now I understand that writing likely involves both declarative and procedural learning systems.
When describing how to complete a writing project, for example, I can suggest a series of sequential tasks, such as beginning with research, coming up with a theme, developing an outline and then writing the article. These would involve the declarative learning system.
But organizing information and writing the article, depending on the topic, is likely to require the expression of complex patterns. This will involve procedural learning. I won’t be able to easily explain how to do the research or the best way to arrange the information, and these things will take more time to learn.
Dr. Oakley uses an even better example of the use of declarative vs. procedural learning in the course. She describes learning Spanish. You can learn verb conjugation fairly easily by looking at a chart and using the declarative learning system, but speaking and understanding it in conversation is learned through procedural systems.
I hope you’ll take a few minutes to watch this video for some great reminders and tips for deepening your ability to learn and recall information.