Exercise For Skill I: Conceptual Integration

1. Ask: “Of what do I want a more cohesive conception?” Maybe it’s the Early National Era in the US. Maybe it’s the Union of European Football Associations. You pick.

2. Make sure you know about this thing. Hit the books. Watch a film. Take a class. Already know a lot about this thing? Good. You can skip this step.

3. Make note cards with key terms (events, ideas, people, etc.). No need to define them if you already know about them. You just need a deck of concepts.

4. Shuffle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shuffle) your deck. Riffle, Hindu, Pile or Weave and Faro, it doesn’t matter. Just randomize.

5. Pick two cards and ask yourself what relationship(s) exists between the terms. Answer yourself.

6. Keep doing that until you can rapidly identify the relationship(s) between any two concepts in the field.

Note: You may want to throw a third card in the mix. Generate a set of cards that deal with overarching themes and concepts within the subject matter and state a relation in the context of that theme.

Exercise for Skill II: Analogy.

See Steps 1-5 Above

1. Set a number of paired cards down on a big table.

2. Identify sets of pairs with analogous relationships.

Exercise for Skill III: Creative Thinking

1. Get your handy note cards.

2. Do the above-mentioned conceptual integration and analogy exercises with cards from unrelated fields/ schema.