Learning How to Learn
1. Metacognition
The ability to reflect on your own thinking and learning processes, identify your strength and weaknesses, and adjust your learning strategies accordingly.
Metacognition is the ability to reflect on and monitor one’s own thinking and learning processes. It involved. being aware of your own thoughts, knowledge, and beliefs about how you learn, and being able to use that awareness to plan, track and evaluate your learning progress.
Metacognition includes several components such as:
1. Knowing what you know and what you don’t know.
2. Setting goals and strategies for learning.
3. Monitoring your progress towards those goals.
4. Identifying and correcting errors in your thinking or understanding.
5. Evaluating the effectiveness of your learning strategies and making adjustments as needed.
In short, metacognition is about understanding and managing your own cognitive processes in order to learn more effectively. By developing metacognitive skills, learners can become more self-directed, motivated, and successful in their learning endeavours.
2. Attention and Focus
The ability to focus your attention on the task at hand and avoid
distractions.
How to Stay Focus:
1. Minimise distractions by turning off your notifications.
2. Breaking tasks into smaller chunks
3. Set a specific timeframe to work and take break, repeat.
4. Practice mindfulness : directing your attention to your work.
5. Take break
3. Memory Techniques:
Learning different techniques to enhance your memory, such as visualisation, repetition, and association.
4. Note-taking skills:
The ability to make effective notes during lectures, meetings, or while reading to help you retain information.
Be present in all meetings, capture all information, synthesize and integrate information, this will help you to be able to look at the bigger picture.
5. Time Management:
Learning to manage your time effectively to ensure you have enough time to study, practice, and review.
6. Critical thinking
The ability to analyze information, evaluate arguments, and make informed decisions.
Ways to improve critical thinking:
1. Practice the experimenting mindset
2. Clarify your thinking
3. Ask Questions
4. Evaluate evidence
5. Identify biases
6. Consider multiple perspectives
7. Avoid jumping to conclusions
8. Practice reflection — reflect on your own decision-making processes and evalute are you on the right track that staying true to the objective
9. Engage in challenging activities — engage in activities that challenge your thinking and problem-solving skills.
7. Motivation
Developing the motivation to learn, setting goals, and stay committed to the learning process.
8. Growth mindset
Developing a growth mindset that focuses on learning from mistakes, embracing challenges, and persisting through difficulties.
9. Learn something that you are not familiar or out of your field
This will push you out of your own comfort-learning zone. You will gain new and fresh perspectives while looking at the same set of problems in the future. You will have different tools and frameworks in your mental toolkit that you will be able to apply in the future. This is where creativity flows to you!
10. Have Fun and Play while you learn!
Deep Reflection & Celebrating Milestones
Most importantly is play to learn, have fun while you learn! Engage yourself with deeper questions, especially the deeper why questions. Take sometimes to ponder and wonder throughout the learning process.
Stay true to yourself and aligning your purpose and values in your learning journey. Engage yourself with emotion while you learn.
Feel the excitement when you get it! when you understand, pat yourself at the back and said well done to yourself
11. LAST BUT NOT LEAST,
Practice new knowledge or skills that you have learned, share with someone, teach someone, be bold to make mistakes, because we learned the most from our mistakes, once we developed the ability to learn!
By developing these skills, you can become a more effective learner and achieve your learning goals more efficiently.
Happy Learning!
Your Learning Buddy
Penny Leong.
