Expect my popular course Rapid Learner’s new course, I will share a four-part course series on how to create successful learning projects. In my first lesson, I distinguished the key differences between project completion and project starter.
Today, I want to discuss how to make the project you are working on effective. How do you make sure that the projects you are working on can actually help you get better at what you are trying to get better?
To successfully improve, we need two types of knowledge:
- Understand the field. In Spanish, this includes the differences between “agua” and “estar” and “ser.” In programming, the difference between variables and constants. In calculus, how to use derivatives.
- Understand how domains are organized. Learning Spanish requires learning vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Learning to program requires remembering syntax and having a psychological model of what each piece of code does. Learning calculus requires remembering the rules of transformation and developing spatial intuition about the rate of change.
Meta-learning is the second type of knowledge. It is the “map” you use to plan the domain you intend to learn. And, like in actual navigation, when you have a good map, you are unlikely to stroll aimlessly to your destination.
In order to successfully create this map, there are three main issues to keep in mind:
Question 1: How do others draw maps?
There is a bootstrap problem when learning anything by yourself. Learning and meta-learning are intertwined, so the less we know about a topic, the less we know about how to organize it. This leads to our first principle: before any new learning project, Try to find out how others organize their efforts to learn it. What do these people think in skills, knowledge and practice?
Are skills taught in school? If so, how do people organize courses? Is it taught in books, courses, or apprenticeship programs? How do these usually happen?
Fortunately, research here has become much easier. Google and recent LLM tools such as ChatGpt can provide a starting point for understanding new topics. Now you can browse how experts break down a topic with just a few clicks.
Question 2: What facts, concepts and procedures must be obtained?
Once you have a rough map, it’s time to fill in the details. All learning consists of basic “atoms” of some knowledge Among the three main types:
- fact– Things to remember. Words, terms, formulas, dates, terms.
- concept– What to understand. Principles, thoughts, narratives, explanations.
- program– Tasks to be performed. Methods, steps, actions, techniques.
This applies to cross fields. Learn Spanish to break down into facts (vocabulary), concepts (e.g. differences between Estar/Ser) and procedures (e.g. grammar and pronunciation). Learning programming is divided into facts (such as grammar), concepts (design patterns) and programs (such as how to write loops). Learning calculus has facts (e.g., cosine is a derivative of sine), concepts (e.g., what are restrictions) and procedures (e.g., chain rules).
The framework translates an otherwise undecided process of improvement into a to-do list. To learn a skill, you just need to perform techniques for learning each knowledge, such as memory of facts, explanation of concepts, and procedural practice.
Question 3: What fine-tuning and feedback are needed?
It is powerful, but rarely enough, to draw a map and identify the “atoms” of the skills you want to learn. The map never fully reflects the territory – the straightforward road may have been unexpectedly dead ends. It seems like a simple concept or process that may obscure huge implicit knowledge and intuition.
If the way you learn these “atoms” doesn’t match the way they combine in actual skills and situations, it’s counterproductive to just check the items on the to-do list. Therefore, the process of successful learning requires constant rewriting of the map and resetting the to-do list. You will learn a little, see what works and what doesn’t work, and then adjust your approach accordingly.
This means that a good learning project requires two activities in parallel:
- exercise Work with your determined learning “atoms”. This means reading books, remembering terms, practicing procedures and understanding basic concepts.
- Practice directly Both test the distance your learning efforts match reality and integrate and combine “atoms” in a useful way. This includes solving problems, writing code, or communicating in language. Direct practice means applying the skills you learn to real life.
Put all of this together
The end result is a practical and flexible learning project.
Practical because it is based on an expert understanding of how to organize skills or topics, and because it has been broken down from the vague concept of “improvement” into specific facts, concepts, and procedures.
Flexible, because by combining drill bits to master atoms with doing direct practice to test the map, you can make sure you can make any necessary changes to the project so that these atoms successfully combine them into real skills.
Of course, this process is more than I can explain in one lesson. This is the main motivation for developing my complete six-week course to learners. Teaching the arts and science of meta-learning, this course will guide you in designing projects on how to master any skill or topic you care about. I will send a registration message on Monday. In the next lesson, I want to go from meta-learning to productivity. After all, the plan is just paper. Effective learning means execution – How do you move from someone with great plans to someone who always gets the job done?
