The Perfect Mindmap: 6 Step Checklist

hey guys welcome back it's justin here and today we're going to be talking about how to build the perfect mind map now i know a lot of people have tried mind maps and many of the students that i work with will initially say that they tried it and it didn't really work out very well but what i've found is that most of the time the technique of doing the mind map wasn't done correctly and surprisingly mind maps are a complicated and technical skill that follow a specific set of guidelines and so what i'm going to be doing is teaching you those guidelines so that you can start using mind maps which in my experience i haven't really found a situation where it hasn't been effective what that's to say is that in the thousands of students that i've actually coached into studying more effectively i haven't met a student who was using the mind map technique correctly and didn't find that was effective and to my knowledge all of my students that i've personally coached are still using mind maps now before we jump into the technique of the mind map properly let's actually have a look at which parts of the research a mind map is actually utilizing and i think you might be surprised to find how technical it actually is so so brief search for the term mind map is showing me this study which is a tool to improve student metacognitive skills now metacognition is actually a crucial part of learning more effectively and what that really means is the ability to think about thinking the study here looking at junior high school students critical thinking skills using three different ways of learning tested the difference between students that were using something called differentiated science inquiry which is a form of learning based on inquiry where you're asking questions and allowing your curiosity to take you combined with a mind map compared with just the inquiry itself and then conventional models which most people are already used to and the findings for the study showed that the highest skills in critical thinking were reached by students who are using both the inquiry model and mind map in their learning in fact when we look at mind maps done in groups for example in a classroom scenario we can see that shared mind maps support students ability to learn their core curriculum and refine their knowledge structures so even mind maps not done individually are effective at increasing learning the study looking at primary student success with again this inquiry-based learning and using the mind map showed that it was a significant difference in favor of the experimental group over the control group the experimental group being the group that used the mind mapping technique student success in the study looking at their perceptions of inquiry based learning skills academic achievement and their retention of knowledge all things that we would strive for in fact mind mapping has also been shown to increase the level of creativity and creativity is something that's really important with learning because it allows us to make new and more interesting meaningful connections between relevant ideas and as this study puts it perfectly in the first sentence of the abstract mind mapping promotes all aspects of the brain working in synergy with thought beginning from a central point it enhances creative thinking knowledge attainment utilizing colors images codes and dimensions to amplify and enhance key ideas in this particular study done on the efficacy of the technique itself looking at second and third year medical students as a subject saw that their recall of factual material improved for both mind map and their normal study techniques at an immediate test but when you check that a week after the mind map group was greater by ten percent and we adjust for motivation which they found to be lower in the mind map group something that i personally have also found with my students because the technique itself can be a little bit more challenging and difficult adjusting for motivation they see that the improvement could have been 15 so the conclusion was that mind maps are an effective study technique when applied to written material however before they are adopted as a study technique there should be a way to improve motivation and this sums it up perfectly which is why i'm going to teach you mind maps the way that i teach it to students aka a way that works so how do we do this epic amazing mind map well it's actually really quite simple and i use the mnemonic grind so what i'm going to be teaching you is how to do a grind map now grind is short for grouped reflective interconnected non-verbal directional and emphasized now this mnemonic comes from years of my experience coaching students on how to do this and i found that when a student applies these principles the mind map overall tends to be pretty good now this isn't to say that the supersedes any other advice that i've been giving about learning so the five attributes that a successful student has those are still a foundation and this technique layers on top of that other things like deep processing and inquiry-based learning as always the notes are just a reflection of the learning the learning itself still needs to happen inside your own head in the brain and if the learning hair is not high quality and the learning out here is not going to be high quality as well so let's start off with the first one which is grouped now i'm not going to go through all of this in complete detail because it's a pretty big topic and i go through this more in my proper course but i'll give you enough to understand how to start using the technique to a competent level grouped means that when we have ideas we should be aiming to organize them into various groups and boxes so this organization of data into these boxes allows it to make more sense for us and simplifies the knowledge so instead of trying to learn 10 different things all by itself which is a lot for us to take in we are grouping these into categories that allow us to create these connections and it makes lots and lots of smaller concepts fit together with the big picture which are usually fundamental larger concepts and when we have these larger concepts we're able to work with these and a little bit more flexibility than if we had every individual detail it's kind of like if you imagine a tree you know if you cut down a tree and you have all the big branches that you've cut off from it you can build a lot of things with that you can rearrange them to create different types of frames now imagine if all you had to work with were the leaves well then you're really limited because the leaves don't provide much structure you'd have to have a lot of leaves to provide just enough structural support to produce pretty much anything and it's the same with learning when we have leaves of knowledge it's really hard to do anything with it when we've got big sticky groups and trunks of knowledge that are a lot more robust we can actually start rearranging those concepts and connecting them in more interesting ways and creating something called flow which we're going to come to in the directionality part let's move on to the next one which is reflective this one simply says that whatever your notes are however they look on paper should be a reflection of whatever it is that is going on inside your mind and for those of you that are wondering this is a mirror now this is actually really important because a lot of students are used to writing notes left to right down a page like this and this is a type of note writing that i call linear now linear note writing is not very good because it often doesn't reflect the way that we learn it inside our own heads it doesn't reflect our learner journey so if you think about something you know really really well then you probably don't think about it inside your head left to right in paragraphs or lists or bullet points on a page but because we just so used to learning it this way it tends to be the default but it's actually important that we break away from this style of learning because linear note taking ends up being a waste of time and will probably not get much learning out of it anyway there are alternatives that are producing better learning that are more time efficient and then we're not gonna have to redo our notes again and again or recursively read through it multiple times and smash it into repetition much like how you should smash the like button if you're enjoying this type of content the next one interconnected means that we're grouping these ideas and categories of information that we already created before and we're connecting them between each other we're not just connecting ideas that already seem connected we're actually looking for more connections outside of just that small scope or box which we would normally have thought inside we want to give ourselves the opportunity to make new and distant connections that potentially might be even more meaningful because that's going to allow us to appreciate the big picture more holistically and it's going to stop knowledge from becoming isolated and isolated knowledge is weak because the connections going to and from it are weaker and therefore more forgettable and the non-verbal is the same thing that i talked about in my five attributes of student success which is that we don't really need to be making notes that are super verbal because we're already learning in that form a lot anyway and writing notes in a heavily verbal way often takes a lot of time by forcing us to use more creative methods of expression like doodling or arrows and symbols and shorthand and even the spatial awareness of where ideas are on a page this all contributes to increasing the retention of that knowledge and the depth of that knowledge as well as improving motivation and creativity and all the other things that we know that mind maps can help us do so i often find that people that do mind maps for the first time transitioning from a linear note-taking style like we see over here to something that's a little bit more free-flowing and non-verbal much like how i have actually been doing my notes here where you see there's very few words the main difference tends to be that there's a sense of insecurity with removing words and to that i'll just say remove a little bit and just try to cut down over time until you become more and more comfortable with having less words in there you don't have to dive into the deep end if you're comfortable with that by all means go for it but if not then shave off the words little by little making full sentences a last resort and eventually making words themselves a last resort now the other objection that i get is that people say well i can't really doodle well it doesn't take a lot of skill to do stick figures and just abstract representations of ideas i'm not asking you to draw a mona lisa type painting what i'm saying is just have an idea and express it on paper or on a tablet in a way that just makes sense to you so that when you look at it you can think okay i know what that was meant to represent now directional directional is super special so i'm going to give it this green star next to it because directionality is talking about the idea that we're creating not just these connections that we were talking about before between these and not only are we looking for new and distant connections but we're actually arranging these connections in a way that has a specific order and directionality to it so if we say this is a and this is b and this is c we can see that the flow of ideas goes from a to b to c likewise if we had more ideas we might see something that looks like this we could have a and b combined leading to c joining in with d contributing towards creating e which combines with f and that all comes together to j which actually feeds in to that so you can see this is what a mind map should look like there's a strong directionality to it now this is really important because directionality actually gives us flow and the flow is really talking about a cause and effect relationship and cause and effect relationships are fundamentally logic so when you've got good directionality and good flow what that tends to mean is that it's organized in your head you've got the grouping done well you've got good levels of interconnectedness and you're able to arrange it in a way that makes sense it's a higher level of learning not only are you thinking about the concepts themselves you're also thinking about how they make sense with relation to each other what the wider purpose is why this concept exists and where it is leading towards and so that clear this causes this create a logical framework and a logical scaffold which provides much deeper levels of learning than just learning the superficial facts and concepts that are actually built on the logic in the first place so flow is one of those things and directionality when i look at someone else's mind map i can pretty much immediately tell how good their level of deep processing and critical thinking is and how much time they spent trying to organize the information in their head because a clean well-organized mind produces a well-flowing mind map and this is probably the area that a lot of intermediate levels learners are getting stuck on and the final point is there's something that enhances our ability to use those other aspects of our brain that aren't normally used it reduces the cognitive load of the technique without reducing the cognitive load of the learning itself which that is necessary for good learning so by making the technique itself easier but still making our brain work hard to figure it out we strike the perfect balance where our energy is directed towards high quality learning that's a cognitive load on that side but at the same time we have a low cognitive load on executing the technique so if you imagine driving a car you want to have a challenging race track that forces you to use your skills but you don't want to have difficulty learning how to drive and turn the wheel we want those techniques to be habitual very easy for us and we want to be able to focus on the challenging task that is providing the good learning opportunity and learning experience so emphasizing elements of the mind map means that the technique becomes easier while the learning remains high quality and the way that we do this is very simply we make the main points more distinctive just by using something like thicker lines for the central point making sort of word art or larger font size and then if we have let's say the first point we're talking about is aqueous or water or something we might make a blue line with a little a water wave arrow going to something that says h2 oh that looks very watery and so this is a way that we can just make our mind maps look visually more distinct and when we've got a big huge mind map of maybe multiple lectures at a time and we look at it it's going to be easy to figure out where the main connections are and it's going to allow us to pick out the flow of information much more quickly so that when we're revising the information we're not trying to troll through bodies of information to figure out what the hell is going on we can look at it at a glance see what's going on and then focus our attention on the learning that actually matters it's kind of like if you read a book and then you know that there was this really useful memorable part in that book and you want to read it again but you don't exactly know where it is you now have to go reading through maybe hundreds of pages to figure out where it was now imagine if this entire book was laid out in a single sprawling mind map where all the main points were visually very distinct you can imagine how much faster it would be to find the point that you were looking for in something like that compared to trawling through pages and pages of linear comprehensive overbearing notes so the emphasis point is something that a lot of students neglect because it seems kind of artsy and airy fairy but it does actually improve the overall technique and it kind of lubricates it in a way that overall brings all the techniques together and just a more cohesive kind of way so for me i always make sure that i emphasize all of my main points and all of my main connections and the other aspect of benefit which is probably even more important than that is that emphasizing your main points forces you to be very clear and explicit about what are the elements and what are the connections that are the most important you have to create a very distinct set of priorities and this again is a higher level of knowledge mastery rather than just learning each concept in itself more so even than figuring out how they relate to each other but creating even a hierarchy of information that you are having to justify is a higher level of mastery even still so emphasizing your points is important enough to be part of the grind mnemonic so grouped reflective interconnected non-verbal directional and emphasized this combined with good level of deep processing and all the other things that produce good quality learning this is going to allow you to really save a lot of time on writing notes as well as achieving a higher level of depth with your learning itself now i cover this topic in a lot more depth as well as critiquing different mind maps to show what's good and what's not more fully in my course so if you're interested in that check the links below and you can sign up for that but as we all know notes should be a reflection of the learning process that's happened inside our own heads and that's always going to be different for everyone so i would really love to know how is your experience being with writing notes or experimenting with different note-taking styles have you used mind maps before and if so did it work well for you and if it didn't did you apply all the things in the grind map let me know what your thoughts are on this topic leave a comment down below if you like this video and if it's helped you in a certain way then hit that thumbs up button like the video it really helps with the algorithm allowing my videos to reach more people and help more people and if you like this type of video then consider subscribing because i try to upload videos like this around once a week going over areas of concern that i find are really common with the students that i coach but otherwise thanks for watching stay efficient and i'll see you in the next one [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Justin Sung

Views: 184,684

Rating: 4.8764076 out of 5

Keywords: justin sung, mindmap

Id: 5zT_2aBP6vM

Length: 18min 33sec (1113 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 06 2020