Learn to learnSuccess follows
ARN guides children, teenagers, adults and professionals to the discovery of their own mental and intellectual strategies so they can reach their full creative potential in school, at work and in their lives. Basing our approach on a person’s successes rather than failures, we teach how to tap into the wealth of conscious thought, bringing pleasure to learning and turning a person’s originality into a valuable asset.
ARN takes a keen interest in all modern research leading to improved transmission of knowledge and the development of different kinds of intelligence. Our activities integrate the most recent pedagogic innovations and discoveries in neuroscience. Our objective is to form a new school of thought based on a new relationship between the generations where expression, meaning and pleasure coexist.
Who are we ?
- Alain Sotto, founding manager of ARN, is a trainer, psychologist and sociologist with a post-graduate degree in ethno-psychiatry and a degree from the Paris Institut Supérieur de Pédagogie.
- Varinia Oberto, a writer and creativity specialist, manages the creativity workshops and is responsible for methodology. She is author of the intelligence and thought games found on the CD-ROM Les Exploratoons.
- Destination Zénith. This CD-ROM teaches children from age 8 to 14 to explore and use their thought processes through fun and imaginative games.
- “How To…” Collection. Specially designed methods and exercises including How to be Attentive, How to Memorize, How to Understand, and many more.
- On-Line Training
- Invention Workshops
Spotlight on ARN Methods
Alain Sotto, founding manager of ARN, is a specialist in mental learning strategies. He analyses the learning profiles of children with learning difficulties and those who are excellent students, helping them unleash their full creative potential. He trains teaching professionals to use new methods for developing intelligence, particularly in the field known as “learning to learn.” He also works with adults in all areas that touch on training the intellect, becoming aware of one’s own potential, discovering problem resolution strategies and developing the creative imagination.
He bases his work on the possibility of educating intelligence. There exists for every individual an art to developing his or her own thought processes. This work begins with children, who should be taught how to explore and then use the brain’s immense capacity for learning and creation. Only when this condition is met will the transmission of knowledge to our children be possible and effective.
At a very young age, children are bombarded with messages like, “Be attentive,” “Concentrate,” “Try to understand,” “Be imaginative,” and by categorical judgements such as, “You don’t have any memory,” “You’re a dreamer,” “You don’t have a mathematical mind.”
In fact, children would love to know what they have to do in order to be attentive, to be imaginative or to understand. They are never given a manual; they are never told what they have to do in their minds in order to succeed in learning.
Now, children can be taught these essentials skills using methods to observe, describe and train basic “mental gestures” such as attention, memorization, comprehension and creative imagination. These methods involve learning to distinguish between what we perceive and the particular way each of us has in our own consciousness to encode and translate these sensorial messages.
Every individual is capable of reviewing what happens in his or her own mind when reading, listening to a teacher in class, looking at the blackboard, watching a film or preparing to perform some athletic feat. Using specific techniques of questioning and analysis, we can reconstitute the chain of mental representation (interior) and confront it to the resulting action (exterior). We work from the following schema:
During this mental exploration, an individual discovers his or her success profile, that is, how the mind works when it works well: how you stay attentive, how you memorize and reuse what you learn, how your imagination and mental mobility work. By learning to observe one’s different ways of thinking, an individual can build new mental procedures better adapted to successfully accomplishing a task or project.