Learning How to Learn

Learning how to learn effectively, how to ‘discover’ what your type is, what your strengths are is one of the most powerful overall skills any human can learn. Cultivating this valuable skill of learning fast and well serves as a force multiplier on almost everything you’ll do. As a proudly curious lifelong learner, I’m always interested in ways to improve my learning process. This post is an attempt to outline different techniques and approaches which have worked best for me. I’d highly recommend the course Learning How to Learn as a profoundly insightful course (from which I unashamedly stole the title for this post)

Emotional Engagement in Learning

Emotions, Intuitions, and Introspection are the foundations of learning. Dismissing those as “irrational” is a significant miscalculation. There is literally no aspect of learning that doesn’t involve emotions. In fact, Emotional component is the largest constituent of any type of learning.

To break this further, We can broadly categorise emotions as Positive and Negative. Recent studies have found that negative emotions such as anxiety, stress, and fear pin down our focus onto the threat. They merely narrow our focus on a particular aspect. However, Positive emotions are one of the most indispensable components of learning. The “Broaden and build theory” by Barbara Fredrickson is worth mentioning, as positive emotions allow us to see the holistic big picture. Positive emotions play a role in building connections, thinking out of the box, and developing resilience. This defies the statement,“If people do well, they feel good.” A better way to say this is, “If people feel good, they do well.” Creating a positive environment acts as a fuel to the process of learning. One of the most important positive emotion which must be fostered to engage with learning is curiosity. 

The 80/20 Rule

The 80/20 rule, or the Pareto Principle simply says that 20% of your effort gives you 80% of results. Learning is a process of information compression. When there’s so much to learn and so little time, One needs to prioritise visually. Put the most important thing at the top. When you’re done with that, the next thing on the list becomes the next most important thing. That way you’ll only have a single next most important thing to do at a time. And that’s enough. A very valuable skill which is often underrated is learning when to give up on certain things and when to move on. The core ideas of this principle is simplifying and compressing.

As a student, How can we implement this? The idea is to write the main points of the lesson in less than 10 minutes. Often under immense pressure and time constraint, one automatically identifies the most important concepts. A Pareto approach is to truly understand the high-level picture, what will help you understand other things, what set of ideas matter to you, and which goals would have the greatest impact on your life. When you excel in 20 percent of the tasks that contribute to 80 percent of your results, You never stop learning and growing. 

Asking Questions

Asking questions is a skill, most people don’t even conceive as a skill worth cultivating. Asking questions is about bringing curiosity into action. Curiosity begins with a thought, typically followed by a question and the ultimate result is a lot of learning. Questions are a powerful tool, a key which can unlock many doors, a key to yourself and the world. A pro tip would be to volunteer your own examples and ask whether they’re suitable. 

Learning is a personal process and I’d further recommend, start by asking questions to your own self. It can help you identify who you are, what excites you, what activities bring you the most joy. Learning involves a significant cognitive labour and it’s always easier to learn stuff that genuinely intrigues you. 

Another incredibly valuable learning technique is paraphrasing. It contributes to a much more active learning process by creating a feedback cycle that highlights errors and clarifies confusions immediately.

Constructionism and Instructionism 

?Constructionism and Instructionism are names for two approaches to educational innovation. The approach of “instructionism” is inclined towards how we instruct students. It sees people as “empty vessels” to be filled with knowledge, given the right instruction, by the right teacher, at the right time. “Constructionism” on the other hand implies learning by doing. According to Seymour Papert, the best way for children to learn is through constructing their own mental models of the world around them. And the key to helping them do this is by making learning an active and engaging process — learning isn’t something that happens to us, it’s something we actively do. It’s a process of reconstruction rather than mere transmission.

Active Recall and Spaced Repetition

Active Recall is an amazing learning strategy. Research has shown that, rather than repetitiously trying to ‘top-up’ our longterm memory with the same information, we remember more when we try to actively recall information out of our longterm memory. The psychology literature suggests that the harder that your brain has to work to retrieve information, the more likely that that information will be encoded.

Spaced repetition involves spacing your revision and reviewing topics, ideally by active recall, at specific intervals over a period of time. The way that our memory works is that if we do a little bit of something everyday over a very long period of time, that’s far more likely to end up in our long term memory. However, if you do a burst of work, that’s not going to stick to your long term memory. That’s how spaced repetition works.

Inculcating these techniques of active recall and spaced repetition can significantly impact our learning process positively.

Hopefully the ideas I’ve outlined in this post can serve as some useful starting points and prompts. I’d love to hear anybody else’s perspective on effective learning, if your methods and philosophy differ from mine!