The C.R.E.A.M Strategy for learning By Mohammad Farran

- Creative - Reflective - Effective - Active - Motivated

1. CREATIVE Have the confidence to use your own individual strategies & styles that work best for you. Learn to be creative & apply your imagination to your learning. Learn to be curious. Question everything! Don’t be afraid of making mistakes. We learn most when we make mistakes.

2. REFLECTIVE Reflect & evaluate your own performance & draw lessons from it. Assess yourself & identify your strengths & weaknesses. Think about HOW you learn! What is blocking your learning? Where are your gaps in knowledge? Make use of the feedback you get from tutors. Reflect by writing things down to help clarify your thoughts & emotions.

3. EFFE CTIVE Be selective with information. Take only what is relevant & necessary. Challenge & question what you see and hear. Understand what you memorize. Relate your studies to real life. Make connections between what you learn in different subject areas. Effective study depends on having your state of mind, space, time & materials organized in the ways that best suit your learning.

Organize & manage your time properly. Create the right study environment and put yourself into a study mood. When are you most productive? Reward yourself! Make your study sessions as enjoyable as possible and take breaks in-between. Ask for help when you need it. Set realistic, measurable mini-goals and take things one step at a time.

4. ACTIVE Passive Learning Active Learning 1. You wait for information to be fed to you. Information is just delivered to you & you just follow & accept what is told to you. 2. Different pieces of info are treated as separate units. 3. Surface level processing. 4. What you study may seem irrelevant. 1. You look for ways of being more involved in what you’re learning. You’re engaged in the whole learning process & question the info given to you. 2. You look for links between different things. 3. Deeper understanding. 4. Learning is personalized & interesting.

Another example… A passive learner is one who seeks employment while sitting at home trying to find a job online.

An active learner is one who goes to the passive learner's house and uses his computer to start his own business!

5. MOTIVATED Your level of motivation will affect your success. Set short-term goals so that you are able to have lots of small successes. Later, these add up to greater achievements. When you meet your goals, reward yourself and set more challenging goals. Attitude is everything! See difficulties as challenges and opportunities. For every problem there is a solution. Nothing is impossible!

Turn Problems into Your Opportunities There was once a donkey that fell into his farmer's well. It started crying horribly and it cried so much that the farmer and the neighbors were having a hard time bearing it. Finally the farmer decided that the donkey was old, and the well needed to be covered up anyway. So it just wasn't worth it to try to save it. He asked all his neighbors to come over and help him. Each of them grabbed a shovel and began to shovel dirt into the well. At first, the donkey cried horribly. Then, to everyone's astonishment, he became quiet. Some time later, the farmer looked down the well and was astonished at what he saw. Every time a shovel of dirt hit the donkey's back, he shook it off and stepped on it. The bigger the pile of dirt, the higher it stepped up. Finally, to everyone's amazement, the donkey stepped up over the edge of the well and trotted off!

What did you learn?? “Whenever life shovels dirt at you, just shake it off and use it as a stepping stone. Your strongest obstacle can become your biggest opportunity, if you don’t surrender in your own mind. Because a person first loses in his own mind, then he loses in reality. The truth is, obstacles are necessary for your development. It is only in the face of an obstacle we discover how powerful we truly are. This is the process of success. So if you want to be successful stop making excuses. Take all these obstacle as challenges and learn from them.”

Don’t forget… “The C.R.E.A.M strategy is a general principle which encourages you to stop, think & reflect on ways of improving the way you learn constantly.”