Learning to Learn
What does it mean to be a good learner?
This question fascinates me deeply. I’m a professor, so I’ve had my fair share of education and personal learning experience. My work is now entirely digital even though I’m a biologist by training, so I know what it means to re-skill. I’ve taught at high school. I’ve taught at University. I’ve taught continued education courses for adults. I’ve tried to teach toddlers (OMG). I’ve created online courses that have been taken by more than 100,000 students. I’ve helped build and launch a new online school for digital up-skilling, the EPFL Extension School, which is growing rapidly. I’ve given lectures around the world. So you would think I’d know what it takes to be a good learner.
Well, I don’t.
But I do know what learning can feel like. And I’ve noticed, over many years of learning and teaching, and reading some of the scientific literature on this topic, that many people — probably even most — are interpreting these feelings in the wrong way.
This can be problematic — because interpreting these feelings the wrong way almost always stands in the way of effective learning. Oftentimes, it just stands in the way of learning, period. And that’s a huge missed opportunity. In fact, I can’t think of a bigger missed opportunity than entire populations not learning — not because they’re lazy, not because they’re stupid, not because they’re bad learners — but simply because they are interpreting perfectly normal reactions to learning the wrong way.
What’s more, misunderstanding what learning can feel like will inhibit people not only in traditional, intellectual education. I’m increasingly finding that the same applies to fields such as the arts, or sports. Much of my understanding about my own learning has indeed come from my attempts at becoming a reasonable piano player, and maintaining a healthy body, mostly through weight lifting and running. There are surprising parallels between learning to play a Ballade by Chopin, trying to run 5km in less than 25 minutes, and learning to code.
For example, perhaps the biggest misconception about learning anything new is that it should be all fun, all the time. So many people think, “I’m not enjoying this, so I’m doing it wrong, or I am not good at it.” Nothing could be further from the truth. As any professional sports trainer would tell you, if you want to build strength, you need to exhaust your muscles — that’s how the body knows it needs to do something about it (i.e. build more muscle). But exhausting muscles doesn’t feel all that great. Any professional musician will tell you that you need to train the techniques you don’t master well, and repeat the pieces you cannot already play easily over and over again — that’s how you improve. But trying to make your fingers move in a certain way while they just refuse to do so feels incredibly frustrating. And when you learn something new intellectually, like coding for example — well, if your brain doesn’t hurt a little bit from being exhausted at regular intervals, you’re really not learning all that much.
Simply understanding this can already mean big changes for your learning progress. Yes, it is tempting to just sit down at the piano and play that one piece you know so well — your brain’s reward center will fire on all cylinders, and congratulate you on a job well done! But, spoiler alert: you have not learned anything new. Your piano playing skills have not improved one bit.
As always, there can be too much of a good thing. It’s fine to exhaust your muscles, but when you massively overload them, you will get physically hurt. There is a certain perfect level to which you can push yourself without overstepping into the danger zone. This level is something that varies from person to person, so you’ll have to experiment with it until you find your own. But you will find it.
So next time you feel confused and frustrated when you’re learning something new, take a moment to reflect on what’s happening: even though in this moment it may not feel like it, you’re actually in the process of learning! This shift of mindset has done wonders for me: realizing that confusion is not a sign of my own inability, but a necessary ingredient of the learning process, has been incredibly empowering.
In my next post, I’ll reveal some of the science behind these ideas. I promise to make it just the right level of confusing.
