In the human experience, learning has a central place for growth in our life. As parents, we want to encourage good learning patterns for our kids to help them succeed. As professionals, we want to explore ways to enhance our skill set and competencies to grow our career. In this post, I’m especially reflecting on themes I want to improve in my home to support my kids on their learning pathway. I’m not perfect in coaching my kids through school, but my wife and I try to have regular reflection time on how we can improve our home learning culture.

In a recent conversation with my wife, Sarah reflected on the importance the vital role of learning how to learn. This is a topic she tries to explore with her students. This got me in the mode of thinking about the question with our children: What are some good ways to teach learning how to learn?

• Use active learning to apply new knowledge : As we have been blogging on InspiredToEducate.NET, we have done a lot of reflection on the power of project based learning and learning through “making, tinkering, and engineering.” When I was strongly demotivated by learning math, I would often push myself to relate math concepts to making video games. Yes, I played too many video games growing up. 🙂 I feel that the push to apply math to game programming and design strongly supported my motivation. Like many software engineers, I actively use personal programming projects to play with new technology and apply new things I just learned.
• Use active learning through regular practice: Growing up, my parents strongly encouraged our exploration of music. Why invest so much time into a creative art? I feel like the craft of music taught me one of the most powerful strategies for learning: the habit for regular practice. Let’s be honest. Did I always like to practice violin? (nope) I, however, feel like the habit continues to serve me in other domains of learning. As a dad, I do enjoy practicing or jamming with my kids.
• Make learning social: During some of my most challenging moments in school, I was thankful for the study groups I had discovered with friends. When study sessions or school projects became especially challenging, it really helped to have amigos emotionally supporting you doing practical things to learn together. This would often involve talking out hard concepts or quizzing each other before a test. If you’re looking for a cool group to learn to code, consider checking out the googledevscentralflorida.com .
• Incremental learning: In the book of Atomic Habits by James Clear, he talks about the power of growing yourself 1% every day. If you can encourage a small daily habit of improving learning, the time investment will compound. In my personal learning journey, I can validate that investing 20 minutes a day to some new coding pattern has helped me grow creative confidence. When I encounter song writers or book authors, I often hear them reflect on this habit.
• Create a great learning space: In the next few months, I think my family will be exploring ways to improve our learning spaces in our home. As a creative, I know I can become distracted very quickly. I can often find it helpful to get into a state of flow for learning when I create a space that minimizes distractions and encourages focus. We’re also experimenting with different types of focus music to encourage flow.
• Outlining or concept mapping: Utilize outlining or concept mapping to structure and visualize information, improving comprehension, retention, and the ability to identify connections between concepts. This is another form of active learning that helps you make connections in your mind while acquiring new knowledge.
• Personalized Learning Approach: Identify and cater to your individual learning style (visual, auditory, kinesthetic, reading/writing) by selecting appropriate resources and techniques that optimize your learning experience. Over time, I have learned that I learn well by listening to content like podcasts. I’m currently working on a podcast app to further explore this learning style for myself and my learning communities.
• Proactive Help-Seeking: Overcome the stigma of asking for help, recognize when assistance is needed, and effectively communicate questions to instructors, mentors, or peers to address learning challenges and accelerate understanding.
• Strategic Goal Setting and Task Management: Define learning goals, and break down large tasks into smaller, manageable steps to facilitate progress and prevent overwhelm. Let’s say you have a big school project and you’re having challenges with decomposing your work, I’ve found that ChatGPT or Google Gemini can be very helpful for drafting plans.