'Tools for Learning Are Tools for Life' - Our Four Keys to Success

As the nature of learning changes and evolves, schools and classrooms are gradually becoming less teacher-focused and more student-centred. This means that students need to expand their educational tool boxes to include skills that help them to independently gather, consolidate and evaluate information as well as learn to make informed decisions about the best ways to use all the resources available to them.

As educators, we must not make the mistake of nurturing the next generation of humans who believe that knowledge, reason and intellect are merely things you access from a device and that the success of advancement and innovation is measured by how 'little' we need to use our human brains. On the contrary, as the scope of our world expands, our goal should be to create more intelligent and more highly-functioning humans than ever before; able to maximise the capabilities of the human brain in ways we cannot even imagine in the present. In order to do this we need to focus on learning skills that double as life skills, to not only benefit students in the present but take them into the future with logic, acumen, a solid grounding in all we have learned from the past, and the formula for achieving anything they put their minds to in the future.

Learnatic® products, therefore, are designed to promote and maximise the benefits of what we believe to be the Four Essential Components of Learning, both at school and in life.

Learnatic®'s Four Keys to Success (or COSM - from the Greek root meaning world, universe and order) provides us with four basic concepts that can help individuals of all ages unlock success in their current learning environment as well as provide them with access to the infinite possibilities of future learning.

Learnatic®'s Four Keys to Success (COSM)

• Consolidation
• Organisation
• Simplification
• Motivation

Consolidation – With so much information at our fingertips, it is necessary to be able to research independently and thoroughly, using a wide variety of available resources and then extract and collate the necessary information for a particular task.

Organisation – This requires the ability to select and use systems and tools effectively and efficiently to achieve a particular purpose. It involves planning, sorting, structuring and remaining goal oriented. It requires excellent time management, spatial organisation, the management of equipment and belongings as well as a mindset that reflects clarity and precision.

Simplification – Once information has been collected from various sources and organised into manageable structures, the process of extracting relevant information and disregarding less important information begins. This process of simplification requires a critical level of understanding that allows the foresight to eliminate anything that does not contribute to achieving the goal at hand, resulting in a clear and simple pathway to learning and discovery.

Motivation – A willingness and internal driving force is required in order to learn anything effectively or achieve any goal. Motivation often requires some level of enjoyment in the task or at least feelings of reward and personal satisfaction as a result of hard work. Without this engagement in the learning process, little will be achieved in the long term.

This is the reason why all Leanatic® products are designed with these concepts in mind, guiding students through their learning with the use of tools and scaffolds that help to consolidate, organise and simplify activities such as analysing a text or writing an essay. By providing clarity about what is expected within each task and taking students through the processes step by step, Learnatic® products empower students with a sense of control and independence that engages them and provides added motivation to learn.