Let’s talk learning styles!
Alright, so this isn’t your first rodeo when it comes to studying or learning. And maybe some of the techniques you used in your previous education are working for this program right now, great! Maybe you’re realizing that this new material and pace is going to take some adjustments.
Wherever you stand, it’s always smart to check in with yourself once in a while and make sure you’re doing everything you can to absorb this important experience.
I’m sure we’ve all done the online test at some point in our past and learned what kind of learner we are. And you are so convinced you are a visual learner and you shut yourself off to other learning styles because they don’t work for you. Well, guess what? The brain is plastic, so let’s try adopting a mindset that fosters positive change. How about, “I am not just a visual learner, I am not just a kinesthetic learner, but that you’re going to become a little of each.
Even if you’re not super receptive to all of them yet, the more you expose yourself to different types of learning styles, the faster you will master each of them. And I guarantee, you will start retaining information at such a quicker rate and will find you actually get more free time to yourself!
By the way, Nursing Student reading this and procrastinating whatever studying you should be doing, feel free to take the “What type of learner are you?” quiz and learn about your natural cognitive strengths. But take the results with a grain of salt, because in nursing. I think you need to be a little of everything.
Nursing will come at you a million different ways. You want to be ready to learn by reading a book, checking google, listening to a lecture, experiencing a hands-on immersion, observing a surgeon explaining how exactly they want this dressing precisely changed and why, etc.
My goal this week is to introduce the different ways we learn and maybe even convince you to dip your toes beyond your comfort zone!
Visual learner
By nature, so many of us are visual learners. We like to sit and read, look through graphs, follow along to PowerPoints, and retain information by comparing graphs and charts. This is pretty straight-forward and you will learn most of your information this way in nursing school.
I wanted to share a technique that I used repeatedly to help form study guides from the PowerPoint lectures that were used in class.
From PowerPoint → Word Document
I’m a solid visual learner, and I love to see points organized and flowing nicely down a page. While I could get the gist of a topic in class by following along with the PowerPoints, they didn’t quite do the trick when I needed to sit down and really make sense of the material.
Sure, I could recommend that you strap yourself to a chair and type up all your notes from scratch because that will help you to become more familiar with the info, but I will also tell you that that method takes about 500 hours. And since there are only 168 hours in the week, I needed to find a faster and more efficient way to get the job done. Maybe you somehow have 500 hours in a week. Maybe you bent spacetime. Maybe there are better career options for you than nursing if that’s the case…
You may already know this, but there is an outline format on powerpoint that I’m suggesting you take full advantage of. That’s how we get around the 500 hours dilemma (except for you, space nerd, get out of here).
Now if you are a powerpoint person 4Lyfe and this is cake for you, go head and skip this part of the post. However, if the day comes and you need to revamp how you study or how you organize your notes, you know where to find it!
Making PPT your B
Let’s start from the beginning and say it’s Saturday and you’re planning a new week. You’ve got your laptop, some coffee, maybe your cat’s sucking on your earlobe because he thinks it’s a teat, who knows? Anyway, you head over to the class site where all the PowerPoints live. You find your current week and the lectures you’ll be covering.
- Download the PowerPoints and save them to your super organized OneDrive folder for the class and exam it falls into.
- Open up Word and slide that into half the screen along with the Powerpoint.
- Click the “View” tab -> “Outline Format”
- Highlight the whole page (crtl+A), copy the whole page (ctrl+C)
- Return to Word Doc, paste the whole outline (ctrl+V)
Eek, now you are left with this massive outline that’s like 38 pages long. I know, stay with me! As scary as it looks, you literally have all the written words from the lecture. I don’t care how fast you are, that was definitely quicker than typing word for word! Now, let’s make it pretty! - Highlight the page (ctrl+A), change your font so everything matches (my fav was always Calibri light), change your font size to 11
- Click the paragraph icon, select “Line Spacing”, and make it single spaced and go head and remove any spaces before or after the paragraph.
Look! This document already looks WAY more manageable and neat! For some of you this may be just enough for you to add in your own notes or pictures or just hit print. For me, I still needed to tidy up the bullet points and the outline so it was organized the way I liked it. No toxic type-A tendencies here… Continue reading for the step-by-step to notes that will please any of you Neurotics. - Highlight the page (ctrl+A), click the “Bullet” icon a few times so everything is bulleted exactly the same down the whole page.
- Refer back to the start of the powerpoint and find all your headings in the word doc and delete the bullet in front of them and bold the titles.
- Now just match the outline from the PowerPoint and tidy up your word doc so it flows in a similar way by tabbing and indenting down the whole page.
- To spice it up, I would copy the pictures and add them up to my doc and maybe even search the web for other pictures that looked helpful and relevant!
- Lastly, ALWAYS save the document as the same file name as the PowerPoint (and also the voice recording as well if you were able)
And Voila! You’ve got a beautiful word document that contains every bit of information that you will be touching on in class.
Now, I definitely wasn’t always this organized prior to class, and sometimes I made the study guides after the lecture (which will happen and is totally fine.) However, when I looked on my 11-week calendar and knew I had a light week coming, I would try to do this for as many lectures as I could so they were ready when the time came. Sometimes I was too lazy to actually study, so I would just make word documents and tell myself that at least I did something.
Keep in mind, this method may not work for every class you have. I hardly ever did this with the theory-based classes, but always always always did this with my content-heavy courses (foundation, patho, adult, pharm, peds, maternity, etc.)
This became the perfect study guide that I printed, stapled, numbered at the top corner, and proceeded to flip through a million times before the test, adding new notes each and every time! My friends and I eventually learned to split the lectures up and share our study guides to each other to cut the work-load down. We made a routine, set our deadlines, and stuck to it (or else you got kicked out of the group.)
Following this pattern provided a solid, confident foundation for studying. It became a simple step-by-step routine that left me feeling comfortable with the material and ready for tests.
“Success doesn’t come from what you do occasionally, it comes from what you do consistently.” -Marie Forleo
What you do consistently becomes your lifestyle, and let me tell you that nursing school is a lifestyle. Find what works for you and start making that a habit. Make confidence a habit. Make success a habit.
Follow NRSNG’s Friday Freebee Cheatsheets
NRSNG is a huge platform out there helping nursing students by providing educational material and podcasts. I learned that they did this weekly cheat sheet that came out on Friday mornings that laid out material in a simple, digestible format. I still follow them to this day and browse through their weekly topic every Friday morning!
Tactile learner
Nursing is a tactile profession. While you’ll learn a lot of hands-on work when you hit the floors in the hospital, you still can find ways to use tactile learning even throughout school!
Rewrite your notes.
Now that we learned how to neatly organize your notes into nice, pretty study guides, my next suggestion to you is to actually hand-write your notes. But the secret that will not only save you so much time, but also prevent misshapen claw-hand, is that as you rewrite, only write the stuff you don’t already know!
Use color!
Add color to everything you do! I don’t care if you whip out some crayons, markers, colored pencils, highlighters, or colorful pens, add color so things stand out. By the end of nursing school, every single one of my notes was practically written in some color other than black.
Kinesthetic learner
Kinesthetic learners like to learn through whole-body movement. Maybe you’re not one for the gym, but even just going for a walk or moving around in general can help the material to sink in just a bit more!
Move around while you learn
Clean your apartment or your room. Clean your sloppy-ass friend’s room. (Editor’s note: this friend is me. I’m the slob and Duda has cleaned my room while teaching me about C. diff). Make dinner while you talk through the notes or relisten to a lecture. Go for a walk or exercise at the gym while listening to youtube videos. Go to the library and use a whiteboard to write out the notes. Practice like you are talking to a patient that knows nothing about nursing, and stand at your bed as if you’re educating them on your test! Whatever you need to do!
Auditory learner
Of all the styles of learning, I think auditory learning is the most essential.
Auditory learners naturally learn through hearing or talking. They are the people that can just go to class and remember everything. They enjoy audiobooks, podcasts, or talking out the lecture. And now just because you don’t think this sounds like you, does not mean you should write it off.
Becoming an auditory learner saved me so much time and I felt like I was learning nursing without having to take the time to fully sit down and solely focus on my notes. I learned I was able to “study” all while cleaning my apartment, cooking meals, exercising, while I was driving or taking public transportation, etc. I could do regular life with the information flowing into my ears simultaneously. I’m an easily distracted person, so this took some time and practice, but I was so thankful I started these techniques early on in my first semester.
Relisten to lectures
My usual routine was to record the lectures in class (if allowed). And then before sitting down with my printed-out study guide, I would force myself to relisten to the lecture at least once through. From there I had now heard the material twice around before I even sat down to really study. You’d be surprised how much would stick just by listening a second time.
Then as I went through my study guide, I could easily reference the recording if I needed to hear something a third or fourth or tenth time. Sometimes I would even relisten to the whole lecture as I went through the study guide to make sure I didn’t miss anything important.
Listen to YouTube videos
After I went through my study guide, relistened to what I needed to, I dove into YouTube, and searched the topic and listened to multiple videos to confirm what I was learning. You could hear something a hundred times, but then you may have that one person who explains something a little differently and all of a sudden *snap* it all suddenly clicks, let YouTube help with that!
I found myself not only on nursing channels, but I found myself checking out the medical channels as well. Now granted, they may go a little more in-depth on things that you don’t need to know, so bummer, you might get smarter than your friends!
Record yourself
After I understood my study guide inside and out, I then went on to actually record myself reading over the notes out loud. Some of my friends thought this was a little weird, but later in the program, I found other people doing the same thing! By doing this, I was able to take a 1:15 lecture and cut it down to 20 or 30 minutes, and only touching on the super vital information and cutting out the fluff.
Then as the test approached, I was able to relisten to my own recording while I was on the subway or walking around the city. Yes, you may HATE the way you sound on a recording and cringe listening to yourself be the teacher, but laugh it off and do it anyway! I promise if you make it past that step, you can really save a lot of time and really lock that information down in your head.
*this technique really worked for pathophysiology as well as the adult classes that came up in later semesters!
Find a study group
I recommend doing this only if you think you will truly benefit from a study group. I was very wary about those when I first started because I tend to study and work best when I’m alone and can stay focused. However, as I got more comfortable with the people in my program, I found a group that fit my study style.
We would all do our own studying and then the day before the test or the morning of, we would meet at the library (usually at like 6am) and do a quick run-through of the things we thought were definitely going to be on the test. We didn’t sit there and reread notes or try to learn the material initially, it was literally just a rapid last-minute study sesh.
Don’t be afraid to try a group and then ditch them for the next test if you find it didn’t help. Your nursing school experience isn’t going to look the same as everyone else’s. It is about you and what is going to help YOU to succeed. If you choose to dabble in the study groups, choose now to surround yourself with positive people who think and learn like you. People that aren’t going to make you feel dumb for asking a question. People who truly want you to do well too.
Now go get your studying in and have a great week! Try out some new studying techniques and remember there are so many ways to get the info to stick. Don’t be afraid to try something new. Stay positive my friends!