Planning to Learn
Retention while learning absolutely relies on a learner’s effort in engaging with content, however, what happens before is arguably more important.
When we find something new that we want to learn, we get so excited and motivated. The book looks amazing, or we can just picture how good the tools will look on our desk. The allure of the skill is amplified by excellent marketing and the perceived social promises of taking up the skill makes.
I am embarrassed to admit that I have many books, tools, and courses that I have purchased, but never saw the whole way through, and in some cases, never even started. In recent years, however, there has been a much more structured approach to how I look at going about acquiring new talents and skills.
While not exactly exciting, creating learning plans is something that really transcends just the business of education. Done right, learning something new can be incredibly rewarding in our personal lives. In the professional world, new skills can become newly minted money into our bank accounts. But crafting learning plans is not something that is taught in school and certainly not something that all educators do well. Most of us are able to identify that something ‘did not stick’, but can’t really put our finger on why that is.
Let’s take a moment to discuss the three most important components of structuring a learning plan that will ensure your growth — Curriculum, Accountability, and Mentorship. Then let’s wrap up by talking about the great multiplier, Passion.
Curriculum
When you are looking at taking up a new skill, curriculum often is the thing we seek first. You want to learn karate? Awesome. You go find a karate class. Want to learn how to cook. Cool. You buy a cookbook.
Curriculum is content hypothetically organized in a way that allows you to scaffold your understanding of a topic. Good curriculum talks about where you might be starting, and where their curriculum will take you. Great curriculum meets you where you are, is cognizant of what you are feeling and thinking each step of the way, and lifts you up to ensure that you achieve your results you are looking for.
Not all curriculum is the same. I find that particularly important to point out, as there seem to be more and more people getting into the education game. Platforms like Udemy.com for example, allow ‘anyone’ to be a teacher. Keep in mind that there are people who obsess about crafting learning experiences for others. Then there are others who are in it for a quick buck. Also, understand that there are many wolves wrapped in angel clothing in this space.
When you buy a book, look up the author first. When you are looking at an online course, do some quick Google searches to see who crafted the course. Are they credible? Can they point to positive outcomes from their sessions?
One scenario that I recently ran into, was a New York Times Best Selling Author who was hosting a class on writing and independent publishing. Since writing is something I am trying to do more and more of, my curiosity was piqued. The free tickets were ‘sold out’ for the event, so I thought I would try my luck and send the author an email to see if I could sneak in. They let me know how popular their course was, that they were unable to get me into the course, but that they would be happy to sell me a ticket for their 3-hour session. I took pause, researched them, and could not find anyone that they actually helped accomplish the goals that they said they would. Pretty steep ask considering they had no experience in teaching, no outcomes that they could point to. It was obvious that they were trying to grow their platform (understandable), but were not necessarily interested in my personal development. Which would be fine if I was not concerned about my own growth.
Success in a field does not equal success in teaching for that field. Just because someone is good at something, does not mean they are good at teaching or mentoring that something.
When shopping for the material that is meant to teach you new skills, wear a critical lens on who is actually teaching the content. I have learned the most from people who were not experts in their field, still good, but not excellent, but who were empathetic and cared about my results.
While authorship is not exactly curriculum, it certainly informs how well done the content will be. Note that this may significantly dwindle a list of potential resources down, but that is kind of my point. There are a LOT of books and courses out there in the wild, taught by people who may love the subject, but have yet to achieve proven success in that subject. There is a reason the phrase “Those who can’t do, teach.” exists. It is difficult, but if you are excited about the prospect of learning something new, you certainly do not want that passion and excitement snuffed out by someone who is quickly trying to grab your money, justifying that they should be able to, simply because they threw together a course. Or worse, teaching because it strokes their ego. Great educators love the topic they teach and are passionate about getting others up to speed.
There is also a case to be made from learning from experts who are unseasoned in teaching, and because of that, I am not writing off the importance of that. My suggestion is simply to ask the questions, ‘What are you promising me?’, ‘What specific results can you point to?’, and ‘What expertise can you show?’.
“You’ve helped so many people?”, “Who? And how?”.
Keep in mind that as popular as the freelance education industry is becoming, the publishing industry is also huge. There is no shortage of interest in putting books in front of you with catchy names, full of hollow content. I have a sneaking suspicion if I wrote a book called “How to learn shit”, that it would sell well, not because of the quality content, but because it had a swear word on it.
Note that I am not ruling this out, as I’m qualified to help you learn shit.
Takeaway: Look for content that is clear about where you should be going into it, and also clear about where you will be after you are complete it. Additionally, consider the source from which you are learning. The education and training industry is massive and full of people who have little or no empathy for your outcomes. Seek passionate educators who love the topic they are teaching, as well as clearly stated objectives and results for what they are teaching.
Accountability
After you figure out where you are going to learn from, there has to be something that actually makes you carry out the curriculum. What is the thing that is going to make you self select to engage in that content?
When we were kids, we got sort of a messed up view on this topic. Why turn in assignments? To get good grades. Why should I get good grades? So you can get into a good college. Why should I get into a good college? So you can get a good job. *Record scratch*
Can I be point blank with you? There are so many people I know who believed this. I think you and I could both point to many cases of people who were excellent in school who ended up with some pretty awful jobs. We are taught from a young age that grades equal results. Unfortunately, the problem is that grades become the focus, not the learning.
Getting high marks in everything became the norm, and we equated that with actual learning. The trick here of course, is that memorization became the focus, not mastery of skill. The Read state, not the Write state. Additionally, the way we assess that memorization is through poor testing. Learn it the night before, then forget it the night after.
“The greatest service we can do to education today is to teach fewer subjects. No one has time to do more than a few things very well before [they are] twenty, and when we force a [person] to be a mediocrity in a dozen subjects we destroy [their] standards, perhaps for life.” — C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy
From grade school, our accountability mechanisms have been poorly established when it comes to learning. So what are we to do?
The truth is, is that this is the trickiest of the three components to get under control. It is often the one that passion can contribute to the most, which we will cover in a moment. What has proven to be successful in self-directed learning in myself and the alumni of Prime I interface with, is that of a socially-focused accountability system. We leverage daily check-ins and conversation to continue our learning, often organizing challenges such as the GitHub or Blink Challenge. I find that when we are accountable to each other, simply by making a commitment and holding each other accountable through encouragement, we succeed together. However, I do notice when we are out of cycle on our challenges, we all often fumble and eventually taper off our daily commitments.
Having at least one other partner seems to be the trick when it comes to learning, exercising, and otherwise doing things we would not do when left to our own devices. This is one of the reasons that social-based learning greatly contributes to growth and development. We are given different kinds of opportunities to understand the content by engaging in conversation and demonstrating what we learned. Social learning also allows for critique, correction, and ultimately mastery, so long as we can get our humility in check.
In more professional settings, obviously we have deadlines and structured plans that operate as pseudo-accountability, but the reality is that engagement and retention come from those plans which we choose to engage in. Certainly, do not mistake that forcing a plan on another will yield retention on the part of the learner. The learner has to choose the learning plan and accountability in order to actually gain traction.
Takeaway: When picking something new to learn, seek out others who are learning the same thing as you. Work to establish check-ins and planned conversations. You will begin to feel a responsibility to the group. Most days, it will feel great to be a part of a community of like-learners. Other days, it may feel like a chore. But in the end, social accountability allows for retention to occur by giving others visibility into our growth and encouraging conversation — simple mechanisms like those can make us want to engage more.
Mentorship
We all probably have a person who comes to mind that was a great mentor in our life. But when it comes to the task of learning, we all are unable to say, “every teacher I’ve ever had, has been an excellent mentor”. A mentor is someone who has been through the steps you are trying to accomplish. They know and understand what it’s like to be new to a topic. They have seen the missteps first hand that new learners make in their given topic. They can predict where you will experience struggle. Finally, they let their experience flow to you, without concern that you may struggle less than they did.
If you want your plan to stick, you need to have a surefire way to get past your struggles. At some point in learning your new topic, you will have a question that the book or course cannot answer. Historically, teachers have been assigned this role. But more and more, expectations for teachers have become designed around delivering content, rather than working directly with students. Teaching assistants are now given this role as mentor but lack the expertise that the teacher has, so the purpose of the mentorship has been lost to create comfort for the teacher. Additionally, some that are attracted to the role of teacher, get into it for the wrong reasons, fantasizing how they look at the podium delivering a lecture — demonstrating their intelligence and imagining their importance.
Great mentors are the embodiment of empathy over ego.
I tell those who want to teach, that they need to imagine teaching more 1 on 1, or 1 on few. Listening more than talking, to understand the student position, then adjust the teaching context to accommodate the situation. And if that scenario seems appealing, then they have the basic foundation for becoming a great teacher because this approach demonstrates empathy, which is absolutely a critical part of being an educator.
The objective of crafting a learning plan is finding that person who has been through it and wants to help others through it. This also might not be one person, but multiple people, and may change over time. Seeking out those who are looking for opportunities to mentor is actually easier to spot than you may think. Those who are really into helping others often find opportunities to create free meet-ups and groups. This can be an excellent place to start to identify those who are invested in others.
Takeaway: Have a plan for getting your specific, individual questions answered by finding another person who is personally motivated to help others. In the beginning, self-organizing, free groups are an excellent place to begin spotting those who wish to mentor. Finally, understand that as you skill up, you may need to adjust who you seek mentorship from.
Passion
If we imagine the above as an equation,
Curriculum + Accountability + Mentorship = Learning Retention
Passion becomes a multiplier:
(Curriculum + Accountability + Mentorship) * Passion = Enhanced Learning Retention
Passion can make up for a lot of gaps and we see it all over the place, particularly in youth. When we are truly excited about something, we allocate our most precious resource to it, time. Time can modify and make up for deficiencies in a structured curriculum, extrinsic accountability, or guiding mentorship. We simply give something more time when it does not yield an expected outcome. We may get discouraged, but we use the time to continue to iterate through the challenges we face when learning that new thing.
Passion is also a pride killer. We don’t care how we look or how hard we fail. We excitingly cast aside the worries that pride creates, measure our results, and make adjustments.
As we grow older, we are shaped more and more by our responsibilities of everyday life. Left to our own devices, we can fall into a trap of selecting activities that maintain the status quo or have a null growth result. When we disrupt what others expect of us, this can cause unrest from those who hold those expectations, which can cause responses from them that may or may not rattle your pride. If you are excited and passionate about your new learning path, this may have no effect. What we are passionate about can and should fill the few hours we have away from work.
In our youth, (hopefully) none of those expectations existed for us, and we (hopefully) had the ability to explore our world. Watching how children engage with self-directed learning is an eye-opening experience. Reflecting back into our own youth, we discover that how we chose to learn was much different than sitting in a classroom and listening to a teacher lecture. I remember nothing of those moments sitting at a wooden desk, but can distinctly remember playing with legos and trying new combinations. I remember science experiments at home and building rockets with my dad and more of the self-directed projects I engaged in. Specifically, I remember doing a project on castles and having to do all of my own research, organization, and visualizations to use in a presentation. I remember how exciting it was to go to the library and ‘be free’ to learn how I wanted, I was passionate and enthralled with the opportunity. But absolutely no memories of assignments or lectures that were forced upon me.
Takeaway: Passion can certainly make up for lack of planning in other areas, but with planning, passion can cause your growth to explode. Similarly, the opposite is true, lack of passion can be a hindrance, and even in the best-laid plans, drain the effectiveness of what you are trying to accomplish. This is important to consider in mandated learning, sometimes planning more can compensate for a lack of passion by having more systems in place to ensure the lesson is retained.
Conclusion
Passion is the multiplier. It can make up for missing elements in other areas. But when we lack passion, the best way to make sure the learning sticks, is to be systematic about it. All three areas of curriculum, accountability, and mentorship need to be covered. Without them, we are setting ourselves up to have a less than an ideal learning experience. Ultimately we are looking for that new learning to soak in, so it’s best to go into it with a plan.
