How to Create a Self-Guided Learning Plan for Any Learning Goal
Learning can be a complex and confusing process without a pre-defined curriculum.
In a traditional educational setting, the learning goals, curriculum, learning activities, and outcomes are all predefined. That makes it easy to “go with the flow.” There’s no need to figure anything out for yourself.
But what if you knew how to create a self-guided learning plan for any learning goal?
A well-defined learning plan can help you:
- Level up in your career
- Start a new project or launch a business
- Rapidly improve your performance at a skill or hobby
- Overcome personal challenges and stressful problems
- Increase your awareness and understanding of the world around you
In my two previous posts, I explained how to create effective learning goals and deconstruct those learning goals into core knowledge and skills. In this post, you’ll learn how to take those insights and create a complete learning plan for any learning goal.
What Is a Learning Plan?
A learning plan is a structured, goal-oriented roadmap that outlines the steps, resources, and timeline required to acquire new knowledge or skills.
A well-designed learning plan can guide you to systematically progress toward any learning goal you choose while ensuring you make the most of your limited time. It can also be an excellent tool for helping you stay organized, focused, and objective as you progress.
If you’re a content creator, a learning plan can also be a great way to capture your personal process of evolution, which you can later package and make available for others who want to learn what you learned.
Step 1: Generate Subgoals
One of the most important benefits of a learning plan is that it turns your learning goal into actionable outcomes that represent your learning.
For example, if you want to “learn art history,” that could include a few different subjects and topics of knowledge, such as:
- Renaissance art
- Medieval painting
- Baroque architecture
- The influence of religion on art
But when it comes to broad topics like the examples above, how would you determine if you learned them?
The key is to turn them into actionable subgoals.
Since terms like subject, topic, and knowledge describe non-tangible aspects of learning (the stuff you need to know), the key to subgoals is to turn them into actionable, observable outcomes that demonstrate or represent your learning.
To create subgoals for your learning goal, start at the top of your list of required subjects and topics, and for each one, ask yourself: “What should I be able to do after I’ve learned this?”
The resulting answer should be a list of actionable outcomes representing successful learning.
As an example, here are the topics above re-written as actionable subgoals that represent successful learning:
- Renaissance art → Classify 100 pieces of Renaissance art by time period, style, and region using a visual chart
- Medieval painting → Identify the potential artist for 50 Medieval paintings through short blog posts
- Baroque architecture → Describe the key characteristics of 25 examples of Baroque architecture by writing 500 words or more on each
- The influence of religion on art → Write a 3,000 essay that explains at least five ways religion has influenced art throughout history
The above examples include a specific action (classify, identify, describe, write, etc.). Each also represents something you should be able to do if you are successful in your learning.
All learning goals can be broken into specific, actionable subgoals like the ones above.
One great tool that can help you determine these subgoals is Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Bloom’s Taxonomy is a hierarchical classification system for learning objectives. It can help you determine the most appropriate learning objectives to use to demonstrate your mastery over a subject, topic, or skill:
The activities at the bottom of the pyramid represent lower levels of understanding, while the activities at the top represent higher levels of understanding. The deeper and more robust your knowledge of a subject or topic, the higher in the pyramid you’ll be able to climb.
Step 2: Organize Your Learning Plan
Now that you’ve defined your learning goal and have determined your required subgoals, you next need to organize your learning plan.
As mentioned above, your learning plan should serve you like a roadmap that shows you three things:
- What you’re currently learning
- What you’ve already learned
- What you need to learn next
One of the simplest ways to do this is to use a Kanban board with each subgoal added as an individual card.
Here’s an example of what this looks like from the Learning Plan Management System:
Start by putting your subgoals in the order you’ll need to learn them. This will differ depending on your specific learning goal and what you learned during your deconstruction.
It’s important not to overthink this initial ordering of your subgoals. As you progress with your learning activities, you’ll likely make small changes and adjustments, and that’s okay. What’s most important here is an initial ordering that’s enough to help you figure out what to focus on first.
Next, you should organize your learning resources to make them each easily accessible when you need them.
As discussed in the previous post on deconstructing, your resources can include the following:
- College course syllabi
- Books or textbooks
- How-to blog posts
- Research papers
- Online courses
- Tutorial videos
In the Learning Plan Management System for Notion, you can use the All Resources view to curate and organize your selected resources.
Step 3: Start with the First Subgoal
By this point, you have everything you need to start working on your subgoals.
Mark the first subgoal as “in progress,” create a time block in your schedule, and get started on your learning plan.
Three Ways to Apply What You Just Learned
- Download the LearnChangeDo Learning Plan Management System for Notion (you can use this option if you’re also interested in getting one-on-one help from me)
- Read this post to learn how to create an effective learning goal
- Read this post to learn how to deconstruct your learning goal
Have a question or need some help? Send me an email here — I’d love to hear from you!
