The 5Ps — the five phases of learning — and the 4 steps within each of the 5Ps guide your thought processes as you’re learning. Together, they provide a flexible, meaningful, and systematic approach to cultivating:

• Content organization, connection, and integration into a visual map by recognizing different levels within the text (i.e., key concepts and supporting details).
• Increased capacity to receive information, transform information into knowledge, learn, and be able to apply what you’ve learned to exams and to generate new ideas.
• Better memory by having breaks between phases, giving your brain time to sort, connect, process, and rehearse information. The phase breaks also serve to increase interest and level of concentration.
• Critical thinking by organizing and connecting the information in a clear and meaningful way.
• Inquiry and problem solving, driven by critical thinking.
• Learning through active, cognitive, and constructive processes.

CLM: How Well You Think Determines How Well You Learn

The foundation of CLM is based on the premise that you learn best when you think about what you’re learning. This sounds obvious, but many college students are still simply memorizing bits of information.

The quality of thinking, in turn, is determined by the quality of the key questions you ask and attempt to answer as you’re learning. When you’re not asking key questions, your mind wanders, your thoughts scatter, and you can’t identify key concepts essential to your understanding of the subject material.

CLM’s power lies in its ability to make large amounts of information manageable through the 5Ps process and in helping you visually map that information. Mapping allows for better organization and clearer connections so you can think better and probe more. With time, CLM becomes intuitive and second nature, fostering your lifelong thinking and learning.

CLM: The Visual Maps

Visual maps are an integral part of CLM. They help you consolidate the most important information (key concepts) from numerous class-related materials into one place and reflect your understanding of the information in the class materials. You’ll no longer need to sort through various notebooks, textbooks, handouts, and loose pieces of paper to find that lost piece of information.

More importantly, visual maps take advantage of the hierarchical levels of information both in your brain and within course material texts. This allows you to form an initial outline of the main ideas of the subject you’re learning, followed by a subsequent addition of key concepts and supporting details to further structure the information as you advance through the 5Ps.

With CLM, you don’t have to “get it all” at once. Rather, you’re gradually learning the material through an iterative and constructive process, which is also helping you identify what’s important, why it’s important, and what else is missing.

Visual maps are so powerful and work so well because they are based on memory principles that help you learn and retain new information. They are effective because they:

• Force you to be active, focus, concentrate, and think.
• Contain visual cues that strengthen memory.
• Provide connections and structure to organize information logically and meaningfully.
• Provide a way to personalize information according to your interests and what makes sense to you.

As you’ll see in Chapter 2, drawing visual maps is very easy and even fun. In fact, you don’t even have to draw; the computer does the drawing. There are many free programs you can download and start using immediately. Visual maps can be used in a variety of settings and by everyone from children in kindergarten to college students to business professionals. Don’t worry; everyone has visual thinking ability, including you. The problem is that most of us have never been encouraged to develop our intrinsic ability to think visually.

CLM: The 5Ps Process

The 5 phases of CLM are:

1. Preview (preview the lecture material): Before class starts, preview the lecture material (textbook, lecture notes, etc.) to become familiar with the lecture topic and unfamiliar terms and concepts. This phase results in a high-level visual map (outline) that serves as the initial framework to organize and connect key concepts and make them relevant to your mind. The preview phase also prepares your mind for the information to be discussed in the lecture, resulting in increased interest, participation, and comprehension during the lecture.
   
   
2. Participate (participate actively in lectures): Active engagement in the lecture results in a revised key concepts framework (visual map) and further solidifies meaningful learning.
   
   
3. Process (process all lecture-related information into your visual map): Process the information from lecture, textbook, and other resources immediately or shortly after the lecture by organizing and connecting key concepts into a further refined and more detailed visual map. In this phase, you’re essentially processing all information in a very personal way so that it is meaningful to you. This helps transfer information from short-term memory to long-term memory.
   
   
4. Practice (practice by solving new problems): Don’t simply read through practice examples where the solution has been worked out for you. Also, don’t stick with repetitive practice examples. The key here is to apply what you’ve learned to situations you haven’t encountered before. Use your existing knowledge to tackle new problems of all sorts – concrete, abstract, factual, conceptual, and procedural. Approach practicing problems as though you were taking an exam by working examples you’ve never seen before. This phase gives you “handson” experience, helps you review, and further solidifies what you’ve learned.
   
   
5. Produce (produce results and new ideas): As you critically think about new information, questions, and problems, your fresh perspective will result in a unique product of your understanding, concepts, experiences, ideas, and reasoning. Your mind will, in effect, produce new knowledge that is already well integrated with your existing knowledge.
   
   

After every phase and before the start of the next phase, you should be able to mentally recreate, accurately and completely, the entire visual map up to the point where you left off. This serves as a review of what you did, improves your memory and recall, and prepares you for the next phase.

You may place different emphasis on the different phases, but you’ll benefit most when you fully engage in all five phases of CLM.

CLM: The 4 Repeating Steps Within Each P

Within each phase, the 4 following steps encourage active interaction and dialogue between the course materials, your visual map, and your thinking.

1. Identify key concepts: You decide what’s important and what you want to learn. You are not a passive recipient of information. Rather, you are an active agent in your learning and must determine what information you want to receive in order to learn best. Key concepts could be simple facts and ideas but most commonly represent a set of facts, ideas, attributes, or characteristics.
   
   
2. Meaningfully organize and connect key concepts using a visual map: You decide how you want to learn. You are not a passive recorder of information who simply memorizes key concepts. Rather, you construct your own meaning by organizing and connecting the key concepts in a meaningful framework (visual map). The visual map you compose reveals your understanding and deepens and extends your thinking. Notice that the information has now been accurately captured, reduced to key concepts, connected to other key concepts, and meaningfully organized.
   
   
3. Think critically: By organizing and connecting key concepts, you clear your thoughts and sharpen your understanding so you can think critically about what you’re learning. Critical thinking is a cognitive process that appears in several categories of the cognitive process dimension (see section 1.4) and involves reasoning things out on the basis of evidence and valid conclusions. To think critically means you understand and reconstruct what you hear and read into your own thinking and experience. The end result is a new creation, where someone else’s thinking now exists in your mind within your own framework.
   
   
4. Ask key questions: Critical thinking, in turn, allows you to develop and ask key questions that guide and propel your inquiry and problem solving throughout the 5Ps process. Key questions are questions that investigate information and experience, probe reasons and evidence, and examine interpretations and conclusions.
   
   

1.3 CLM: The Benefits

CLM Is Self-Directed

Nobody can teach you better than you can teach yourself because only you know what works best for you. Once you realize that you’re in charge of your learning, you’re liberated, empowered, and engaged. When you no longer blame your teachers and parents for your failures, you have no choice but to take matters into your own hands. With self-control and self-direction, you start to think for yourself and the learning process becomes entirely yours, fed by information from everywhere. Seeing the results you’ve achieved under your own leadership is both rewarding and motivating.

CLM Is Engaging and Fun

Now that you realize that you’re the driver in your learning process, you must figure out how you want to drive. If there’s one characteristic that separates the leaders from the followers and the successful from the unsuccessful, it is curiosity. It’s curiosity that made Albert Einstein the creative genius we all admire. It’s the curious thinker who will ask the right questions and find new solutions. If you’re not curious, then you’re not asking yourself questions. If you’re not asking yourself questions, then you’re satisfied with just getting by. If you want to be an outstanding learner, you must develop a curious mind. Curiosity and problem solving are an integral part of CLM, because CLM requires you to constantly ask new questions in an attempt to get the missing details (concepts) and connections needed to grasp the big picture. By becoming engaged, rather than simply reading and listening, you’re actively learning.

CLM Is Sustainable

A very important quality of any learning method is that it be sustainable. The method must be simple enough and effective enough to be used throughout your college education and even after college. A simple study method such as cramming is not sustainable because you’re just memorizing information for an exam and that information will “disappear” within a few days. A complicated and cumbersome method will be abandoned a week into the semester. That’s why CLM was trimmed to include only the essential elements — the 5Ps and 4 steps — that add real value to your learning and your grades. With CLM, you’re assured of a consistent approach and sustainable results.

CLM Is Dynamic and Customizable

We’re living in an age where the known and established constantly gets replaced by the new. Pen-and-paper note taking in this environment is too slow and outdated.

For a learning method to be worth anything, it must be dynamic and able to accommodate changes in information and changes in your thinking. The flexibility inherent in CLM makes changes possible within seconds, without getting in the way of your thinking. CLM’s dynamic framework can easily accommodate individual preferences and encourages fine-tuning to make it personal and meaningful.

CLM Leads to Efficient and Effective Learning

Let’s start first with the obvious benefit of CLM: efficiency. It’s not the effort you put in that you get graded on; rather, it’s what you know and your ability to apply and communicate what you know. Therefore, an effective learning method should deliver the same or better results but cut down on the effort and time required to deliver those results. Two independent studies showed that utilizing visual mapping software can help you increase your productivity by up to 20 percent, the equivalent of gaining back an extra day to invest in other college activities.4 With CLM, you only do things once (never repeating a task) because everything you do in CLM has a learning purpose. Furthermore, with CLM you don’t have to read or write everything; rather, you’re only distilling and integrating important concepts. This, in turn, saves you lots of time and effort, while still delivering outstanding learning results.

With CLM, not only are you doing things right, saving you time and effort, but you’re also doing the right thing: effectively learning. Simple memorization might work in high school for some subjects, but it will hardly ever work in college. Meaningful learning is required to do well on college exams. Your old study methods, including memorization, won’t help you with the testing tasks commonly employed by college instructors:

• Summarize in your own words.
• Explain relationships to other concepts.
• Give new examples.
• Solve new problems.

With CLM, those testing tasks are not a problem, because you’ll be doing those exact tasks and more during your learning process.

As a result of CLM:

• You’re benefiting from a consistent method that takes the guesswork out of learning, reduces wasted time spent passively studying, and eliminates the need for cramming.
• You can evaluate your performance and, based on that evaluation, refine your learning process. With CLM, you can measure and improve your inputs (time and effort), not just your results (learning and grades). You should aim to achieve maximum results from your input.
• You’re fully engaged in a very personal and relevant learning process.
• Your conceptual framework (visual map) constantly grows in scope and depth with the addition of new key concepts and the resulting shift in their organization and connections.
• Your thinking thrives as the result of more relevant content and improved organization and connections.
• Your key questions prepare and engage you for the next phase of learning.
• You’re meaningfully learning through the use of an active, cognitive, and constructive process.

As you can see, CLM is easy and can be applied immediately. CLM is discussed in more detail in Chapter 3.

1.4 Does CLM Work?

YES! Here’s the evidence from my personal experience.

CLM evolved over many years. I started with the basic framework of this method during my MBA studies at Zicklin School of Business from 2001–2003. Having a chemistry background, rather than the business background of my classmates, I had to find a way to synthesize and learn vast amounts of graduate material while still learning the background material on which these graduate courses were based. The tool that proved tremendously valuable was visual mapping, which I still use today in everything that I do (including writing this book).

For me, visual mapping was an amazing improvement over plain text and linear thinking; it vastly improved my ability to learn, think, and communicate important concepts and ideas. Suddenly, I was able to visualize multiple connections and pathways. Once you try it, you’ll recognize the amazing power visual maps have to facilitate and enhance understanding and learning.

While attending the business school, I also taught chemistry as an adjunct professor at a local community college in New York, where I took the visual mapping tool and applied it to my chemistry classes. It worked wonderfully, but it wasn’t enough in itself to provide a complete learning method for students. That’s when I developed an early version of the 5Ps learning process and eventually merged it with visual mapping to create the CLM.

I spent subsequent years putting CLM into practice and fine-tuning the method. I kept what worked and improved upon or discarded what didn’t. This didn’t happen in a vacuum. I had plenty of help from my students and their friends who tested CLM in real-life learning situations. Although CLM started intuitively, it’s been thoroughly validated over the years by the harshest critics — students themselves. These days, students everywhere are using CLM with much success.

YES! Here’s the evidence from cognitive psychology.

The remainder of this section discusses three aspects of cognitive psychology that support CLM. Skip to Section 1.5 if you’re not interested in the cognitive psychology of learning.

After I started fine-tuning CLM, I decided to research connections between CLM and cognitive psychology to discover why CLM worked so well. Connections quickly became obvious.

Information Processing Model5 (IPM)

In cognitive psychology, psychologists frequently use IPM to explain how we receive, process, and learn information. According to IPM, memory is divided into three storage systems (see diagram below):

• Sensory memory: Retains a copy of what you see, hear, smell, taste, and touch. It has unlimited capacity and lasts between a fraction of a second and a few seconds.
• Short-term memory: Has capacity to store seven or fewer items or sounds or images and functions as temporary storage before discarding or transferring to long-term memory. It lasts for 15–20 seconds and up to 20 minutes if the information is repeated. Chunking (i.e., grouping of information), repetition, and organization of information have been shown to significantly enhance the short-term memory transfer to long-term memory.
• Long-term memory: Compared to other memories, this is relatively permanent storage. Transfer of new information from short-term memory to long-term memory involves organization and consolidation of information. Long-term memory provides a framework to which we attach new knowledge.