Day 4: How to Create a Learning Plan

Today we discuss the importance of having a plan for your learning which lays out the why, what, how, when and where you will be actively learning. We will cover the elements of a learning plan, why it matters, how to create one, and how to execute one.

Resources for this lesson:

• Transcripts
• Worksheet
• List of Scientific Resources
• Learning Plan Template

Summary

What is a Learning Plan?

To become a pro learner you're going to have to create a learning plan which lays out the why, what, how, when and where you will be actively learning.

Creating a plan can also be known as metacognition [1], which is thinking about your thinking, considering how you should best approach problems and what strategies you should use.

Why it matters: This will take time and effort, but the rewards are worth the effort. Being able to learn hard things quickly is a powerful skill, leading to success of numerous projects.

Why Create a Learning Plan?

Peter Gollwitzer discovered [2] that having a strong desire to reach a goal isn't enough, what's necessary is a plan for when, where, and how you will reach your goal and for how you will respond to obstacles when they come up.

The benefits of creating a learning plan are:

• A solid well-researched, well executed plan can give you the confidence to face harder challenges in the future.
• You can tailor your project to your exact needs and abilities, avoiding The one size fits all approach that's often taken in school.
• You also avoid choosing learning resources unwisely, avoiding the problem of wasted learning time and effort.
• Improves your ability to create learning plans, increasing your ability to learn harder skills.
• You'll know what your capacity is for learning how you can best schedule your time and manage your motivation.
• You'll have well-tested strategies for dealing with common problems.
• As you learn more things you'll acquire more and more confidence, which will allow you to enjoy the process with much less frustration, even ejoying learning!

How to Create a Learning Plan?

Creating a learning plan is one step in our learning cycle of:

1. Create a plan
2. Execute that plan
3. Monitor and adjust
4. Review your results

The items we need in our learning plan are:

• Why: internal motivation, external motivation, goals
• What: topic and scope of project
• How: learning resources, models, and techniques we will use
• When: scheduling time to engage in learning
• Where: creating the optimal learning environment free from distractions and priming our body and brain for learning.

You should invest approximately 10% of your total expected learning time into research and developing a plan before you start learning.

How to Execute a Learning Plan?

When executing a learning plan you will go through 3 phases:

• Explore: learning the foundations, the underlying principles, the grammar of the subject, the words, what things are called, and the nuts and bolts of how it works.
• Engage: putting relationships between subjects together, practicing skills, creating webs of knowledge from the foundational material.
• Execute: using skills in new situations, demonstrating full mastery of the subject by creating new things and new applications from the foundational material.

While executing a learning plan, you're going to want her monitor and adjust how you're learning to ensure that you're learning in the best way possible.

When you feel like you're reaching mastery of the skill, review the results of your learning plan and decide if you want to do further learning through maintenance, relearning, or lifelong mastery.

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Activity

Download the learning plan template and familiarize yourself with the different parts that we will cover in the next section.

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Skill Lesson Mastered

Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have mastered the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.