A lot of students at FHN feel as if they have never been taught how to prepare for upcoming assessments in their classes. Sean Fowler has officially been teaching here at FHN for a decade, among his several courses he strives to make an impact starting the year with a unit titled “What Works in Learning.”
“I do it hoping that they learn how to learn better and study better for my class, but also that they can apply this to all of their classes,” Fowler said. “I’ll have students that will contact me in college and be like, ‘Hey, I don’t know if you know this, but that’s really helped me in college’ and things like that, I think it’s great.”
Boston Party Winchester is a prior student of Fowler’s AP Psychology class.
“The way he lectures very interactively instead of just reading off a slideshow is what I most like about his teaching,” Winchester said. “I took with me that the most effective way you can study for a test is to take practice tests. It’s something that I learned and applied in a couple of my other classes.”
Studying might seem as simple as completing a study guide, but in reality learning and retaining information to later apply it, is a process learned with time.
“By studying psychology the last 17 years, more in depth, especially cognitive science, I’ve learned that the more we’ve learned about neuroscience, now we understand how it actually works,” Fowler said. “It basically creates a long term potentiation in the brain, which are neural connections, and the more you make connections and try to recall things, the stronger those neuron connections are, and the more efficient it is for you to recall that information.”
In order to enforce those connections in the brain, doing things such as taking margin notes, taking practice tests, recalling information in any way, are all important.
“Whenever you’re reading anything, trying to summarize, you’re putting it into your own words and you’re pulling out
the most important stuff, and then trying to recall that later on,” Fowler said.
Anyone is capable of applying themselves in order to reach academic success. A lot of things come with first steps, and an important first step is learning how you can best learn the material, rather than how to find the easiest way out for a good grade.
“For some people learning just comes easier,” Fowler said. “That’s the variety that makes us human. But everyone is capable of learning.”
