Discover your unique Learning Style
When I was four years old my mum went to teachers' college. She had worked many different jobs before having kids. Her natural inclination to teach led her to the classroom and gave me the gift of learning from her example.
One of the things she'd often say in the context of her work was that she didn't need to know everything, she only needed to know how to learn.
If she knew how to learn, she could stay a few steps ahead in the curriculum and share that knowledge with her students as they were ready.
Sometimes it feels like we need to know everything about the technology we are working with to add value, when in fact it's more important that we can formulate questions like:
Why is this important? What purpose does it serve?
What benefits does it offer? What risks should we be aware of?
How does this impact the people who will use it?
The goal is to use this context to work out the next best thing you can learn: what knowledge, skill, or certification do you need to gain?
Then you can start focusing on how you personally learn best. What modality makes learning feel effortless for you?
Maybe you're a visual learner, concepts come to life when you are watching videos or reading resources with charts. If reading walls of text sends you to sleep, try a screen reader or turn the text into an audio summary with Google's NotebookLM or Copilot's Notebooks feature.
A great way to check your understanding is to talk through what you've learned with a friend. There are many effective ways to learn, experiment until you find what works best for you.
Once you identify how you learn best, look for opportunities to incorporate learning moments throughout your week.
Our capacity and ability to learn adapts to our lifestyle. You might be able to dedicate an hour to deep learning each week. Or maybe it's more realistic to catch 15 minutes of a podcast while you're commuting or tidying up.
Regularity is more important than duration.
Try this Prompt
If you're working towards a particular certification, try this prompt to get AI to help you make a personalized learning plan:
Create a learning plan to help me achieve [specific goal/certification].
I have [X hours/minutes] available to learn each week, typically during [time of day/days of week].
My circumstances include [any constraints: work schedule, family commitments, travel, etc.].
I learn best through [visual/auditory/kinesthetic/reading-writing methods, or indicate "help me identify this"].
My preferred learning modality is [self-paced online/live instruction/hands-on practice/peer learning, or indicate "help me identify this"].
Please structure the plan as [weekly schedule/monthly milestones/daily tasks/other format].
Account for weeks when my availability may vary due to [specific circumstances].
If you have any questions or feedback, hit reply. I read and reply to every message.
Next we'll look at why to focus on developing skills rather than only gaining knowledge.
