Optimizing Your Learning (OYL)

Introduction

📺 Watch the following video to get an introduction to the course from your instructor, Tolu Agunbiade.

Note: All the materials for the entire course are going to be released at the start of the course as opposed to weekly, as mentioned in the above video. This is being done to give you more flexibility to work ahead of the weekly pace if needed in order to better manage your time.

Course Description

Kibo’s mission is to educate collaborative innovators who use technology to solve pressing problems.

For you to become a "collaborative innovator", you will need to be able to direct your learning, reflect critically, and course correct when needed so that you can effectively deepen your expertise in the subject matter of focus.

Optimizing Your Learning aims to give you the tools to do this successfully. You will learn why self-directed learning and learning how to learn can drive long-term success. You will also learn about how to understand and harness your identities, beliefs, and interests to develop learning habits grounded in ownership, motivation, and persistence. Finally, you will be introduced to a variety of learning strategies and approaches that will help shape the development of powerful and effective learning mindsets and skills.

We hope that all these will allow you to gain a mastery of, and confidence in, your ability to achieve your goals at Kibo and beyond. As a result, we hope that you will see challenges that you encounter in a new light: as hurdles that can be overcome. While also seeing yourself in a new light: as an individual who can uncover what it takes to solve even the most complex problems.

Since the goal of this course is to help you improve your learning skills, there will be lots of opportunities to test out some of the techniques shared in the lessons in our weekly live classes, weekly assignments, and the practice activities and discussions that are embedded throughout the lessons.

📺 Watch the following video from the founding students to learn why optimizing your learning is a valuable course at Kibo

Course Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, you will be able to:

• Explain how learning happens in the brain, and apply this knowledge to improve your learning process.
• Implement a structured self-directed learning process.
• Understand and improve your self-awareness, self-regulation, and motivation.
• Identify the internal and external factors that influence your learning and develop strategies to leverage them to increase the effectiveness of your learning.
• Develop a reflective practice to support deep learning.

Course and Instructor Information

The instructor for this course is: Tolu Agunbiade.

The teaching assistant for this course is: Keno Omu.

The course will run from July 10 to August 13, 2023. Note that this is a 5-week course.

Live classes will be held on Tuesdays 5:30 - 7:00 pm GMT. The live classes are mandatory.

Office hours will be held on Thursdays 3:00 - 4:00 pm GMT. This is an optional chance to get additional support from your instructor.

Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash

Course Topics

Estimated Time: 15 minutes

Week 1 - How to Get Anything You Want in Life

Learning is an activity that defines human development. The fact that you can walk, talk, read, etc. is all due to your ability to learn. And in a modern world that is changing at break neck speed, the ability to learn effectively and efficiently is one of the most important skills that will help you to achieve your goals. But most educational institutions are so focused on what we should learn, that they often forget to teach students how learning actually happens and how they can harness this process to become more effective learners. Therefore, to kickstart your journey to optimizing your learning, we will learn about what happens in your brain when you learn, then we will explore a set of critical cognitive skills that govern how affective you are when learning.

Week 2 - Understanding Your Mindsets and Emotions

In week 1, we explore the cognitive side of learning. However, effective learning isn't only driven by cognition. Therefore, during the 2nd week of the course, we will examine the impact that emotions and mindsets have on your learning. We will start our journey by delving into how your identities can impact (positively or negatively) what you think you are capable of, and how these identities can create beliefs that limit you from achieving your goals. We will then explore some other beliefs and behaviors that can sabotage your learning, before learning about a powerful mindset that can counteract these challenges and supercharge your abilities. Finally, we will dive into a framework for understanding emotional intelligence, and discuss ways to improve your self-awareness, self-regulation, and motivation.

Week 3 - Managing Your Learning Context

After spending the first two weeks of this course focused primarily on the brain, in week 3 we will move into discussing how your body and external learning context impact your learning. We will first learn how to manage your physical energy, by discussing the influence of stress, food, movement, and sleep on your ability to learn effectively. Then we will explore some tools that can be used to effectively manage your time. We will conclude by discussing how you can set up your external environment to help make your learning more successful, and how you can leverage other people to improve your learning.

Week 4 - Building Your Learning Toolkit

Finally, in week 4 we will get very tactical about ways to optimize your learning. We will start the week by learning how to set high quality goals, and utilize an approach to help you achieve those goals. Next we will discuss how you can use habits to make your learning process more automatic and effortless. Finally, you will be introduced to numerous strategies to improve your learning, before discussing how to use reflection to learn from past experiences.

Week 5 - Final Assessment

The final week of the course will be focused on completing the final assessments. There are two final assessments:

1. A final essay, which will require you to create a personal learning charter.
2. A final project, which will require you to carry out a self-directed learning project over the course of the entire 5 weeks, and submit a video presentation where you give a short lesson on your topic to your classmates.

More details on both of these assessments can be found on the Course Assessments page.

Course Expectations

Estimated Time: 15 minutes

Attendance and Engagement

Please make sure you have reviewed all the Kibo Academic Policies that are found in the Catalog.

The general Kibo attendance and engagement policy is as follows:

Students are expected to remain academically engaged in all classes. The requirement for satisfactory academic engagement is to submit all assigned work by the published due date.

You will be deemed academically disengaged in a class if you have an assignment that is 7 or more days late. Academic disengagement carries with it a number of possible penalties, including and up to dismissal from Kibo.

In addition to meeting the requirements for academic engagement, students are expected to actively participate in learning activities. Learning at Kibo involves a variety of experiences including:

• Attending scheduled sessions (e.g., live class or office hours) where there is opportunity for interaction with the instructor and/or peers

• Submitting academic assignments, quizzes, or projects

• Taking exams or engaging in online tutorials and instruction

• Attending a study group that is assigned by the instructor

• Participating in an online discussion about academic matters

• Initiating contact with an instructor to ask a question about the class

You should inform your instructor if personal emergencies arise that prevent satisfactory academic engagement. If you are ill for more than a week and/or expect to not remain academically engaged due to personal, family, or other emergency, you should also contact your advisor and the Dean.

For this course specifically, you are expected to engage in the online discussion and reflection questions and activities that are embedded throughout the online lessons. You are also expected to attend the weekly 90-minute live class. If you are unable to attend the live class, you are required to notify the instructor at least 24 hours in advance of the live class that you will be missing and watch the recording of the live class that you have missed, as it will contain information that will help you correctly tackle your assignments.

If you have any questions, please be sure to post them in the #help-oyl channel in Discord, and the instructor will be able to answer your question there.

Academic Integrity

This course is run in accordance with Kibo School's Academic Honesty and Integrity Policy, which can also be found in the Catalog. We have a zero-tolerance policy towards all forms of academic misconduct, including cheating, plagiarism, and fabrication. If you are found to be in breach of the Academic Honesty and Integrity Policy in any of the assignments that you submit, you will be subject to disciplinary action.

Note that assisting another student in the violation of this policy also constitutes a violation of academic integrity (e.g., letting someone copy your assignment counts as a violation for both the person that copied the work and the original owner of the copied work).

Assignment Deadlines

All weekly assignments have a stated assignment deadline on their assignment page by which the assignment must be submitted in order to get full marks. Late submissions will be subject to at least a 25% deduction in the marks available.

Communication Expectations

The most effective way to communicate with the instructor for this course is through posting a message in the #help-oyl channel in Discord. All questions posted there will receive a response within 24 hours.

Course announcements from the instructor will also be posted in the #help-oyl channel in Discord.

Tools Used in This Course

Padlet

To create a Padlet account:

• Go to https://padlet.com/auth/signup and Sign Up for a Padlet account using your Kibo School email address.
• Since you have already created a Kibo School Google Account, you can click "Sign Up with Google" and follow the instructions to link your Padlet account to your Google account. This will mean that you don't have to create a new username and password for the Padlet account.

Optional Tools

This course will require you to complete a lot of reading and writing. There are a number of Text-to-Speech tools that can support you with reading large amounts of text and a number of Speech-to-Text tools that can support you with transcribing your words into written format. Below is one recommendation for each of these categories. However, you are encouraged to do your own research to find additional tools that might better meet your specific needs.

Speech-to-Text: Google Docs Voice Typing

Text-to-Speech

Natural Reader

Read Aloud

Course Assessments

Estimated Time: 15 minutes

Weekly Assignments (50%)

During weeks 1, 2, 3, and 4. you will have a weekly assignment that will be due on the Monday of the following week. The weekly assignments are:

Week 1 - Letter to Future Self (Due date: July 17th, 2023, 10pm GMT)

Week 2 - Overcoming Limiting Beliefs (Due date: July 24th, 2023, 10pm GMT)

Week 3 - Learning Context Experiment (Due date: July 31st, 2023, 10pm GMT)

Week 4 - Habit Inventory and Change Plan (Due date: August 7th, 2023, 10pm GMT)

More information about each assignment can be found on the assignment page of each week’s lesson.

All four assignments will be worth 50% of your final grade, therefore each assignment is 12.5% of your final grade.

Final Essay (25%) - Personal Learning Charter

One of your final assessments for this course will be the creation of a personal learning charter. This learning charter will include the following information:

• Who You Are
• Your Learning Beliefs
• Your Learning Motivations and Interests
• Your Learning Goals
• Your Implementation Intentions
• Your Strengths and Weaknesses
• Your Learning Tool and Resource System
• Your Learning Metrics and Milestones System

The total word count for this essay is 1000-1500 words, and your grade on this assessment counts towards 25% of your final grade for this course.

Final Presentation (25%) - Self-Directed Learning (SDL)

For your second final assessment, you will carry out a self-directed learning project by yourself. Your goal is to select a topic that you will learn about, create a learning plan, implement your learning plan, and then submit a video lesson teaching the topic to the rest of your classmates.

You will be required to work on this project throughout the 5 weeks of the course, and there are some milestones that you will need to reach during weeks 2, 3, and 4.

• Week 2: Milestone 1 (Planning) - Pick your topic, set your specific learning goals, and create a plan and schedule for how you will achieve your learning goals.

• Week 3: Milestone 2 (Monitoring) - Carry out your learning plan and monitor your progress.

• Week 4: Milestone 3 (Evaluation 1) - Create your video lesson on your chosen topic.

• Week 5: Milestone 4 (Evaluation 2) - Evaluate the quality of your learning, and reflect on the learning experience.

At the end of the term you will need to submit:

• Your learning plan (Milestone 1)
• A video lesson on your SDL topic (Milestone 3)
• Your learning self-evaluation (Milestone 4)
• A written reflection on the learning experience (Milestone 4)

More details, as well as template documents for some of the Milestone deliverables will be provided in the Final Presentation Milestone sections in Lessons 2, 3, and 4, and the Week 5 Final Assessment lesson.

How to Submit Your Assignments

All written assignments will need to be submitted in Gradescope by their stated due date.

When you sign into Gradescope for Optimizing Your Learning, you will see all your pending assignments on your Dashboard. Click on the assignment that you would like to submit work for, and you will get the prompt to upload your work (See picture below). For Optimizing Your Learning, please submit your work as a PDF.

You will also need to submit a copy of your assignment in the Woolf platform, so that they have the academic record of your submission.

Live Classes

This page will be updated weekly with the slides and recordings from the live classes.

Below is the live class schedule.

How to Get Anything You Want in Life

Introduction

📺 Watch the following video from your instructor to learn about what you will be studying in week 1

Learning Outcomes

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

• Explain how learning happens in the brain, and apply this knowledge to improve your learning process.
• Implement methods to improve your executive functioning skills.
• Implement self-directed learning using simple steps and frameworks.

Getting Focused

Sections

1.1 Motivation

1.2 How Learning Happens

1.3 Skills You Need to Succeed

1.4 Direct Your Learning

Assignment 1: Letter to Future Self

Motivation

Estimated Time: 30 minutes

Discussion: What is Learning?

⚠️ Note: In order to see and interact with the padlets in this course, you will need to be logged in to your padlet account! If you have not created a padlet account yet, you can use your Kibo School account to sign up using this link (https://padlet.com/auth/signup). Then click on "Sign Up with Google". Remember that posting your responses to the padlet questions is an important part of this course.

Here are some ways in which education experts have defined learning:

When you read these definitions, a couple of words appear repeatedly:

• Change
• Experience
• Interactions
• Process
• Future…problems, opportunities

Learning is the skill that has made you into who you are today, and it is what will transform you into who you will be in the future.

What is Meta-learning, and Why is it Important?

Reflection: Your Experience of Learning

We are accustomed to learning about different subjects or developing new skills and interests, but we don’t often think about how we actually learn, or even plan our learning intentionally so that it is as effective as possible. Even in school, a lot of learning is focused on “what to learn”, but rarely “how to learn.” However, understanding how we learn can be really useful for optimizing our individual learning processes.

In the video, Kwik asserts that meta-learning (i.e. thinking about how to learn) is a vital skill because if you know how to learn, then you will be able to learn anything you want or need to learn. You will be able to decide what you want to accomplish in the future and have the ability to learn the skills, knowledge, and mindsets that are required to help you transform from your current state into that future state.

This ability is critical in a field like computer science that is in constant evolution. For example, new programming languages and frameworks are frequently developed. And as a technical professional, constant learning is critical for keeping up and continually delivering cutting-edge work.

Beyond computer science, the world at large is also on a rapid trajectory of change. The term VUCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity, Ambiguity) is often used to describe the state of the modern world. Many sectors and industries are evolving rapidly. In fact, according to ‘The Future of Economy’ Report published by the Institute for the Future (IFTF) and Dell technologies, a lot of jobs that will exist in 2030 do not exist today. Furthermore, Knowledge Obsolescence (defined as “the condition of knowledge becoming outdated or superseded due to the emergence of newer, more relevant knowledge or need for additional currency or relevance.” (IGI Global, 2022)) means that a significant amount of knowledge that you currently hold may be outdated and useless within the next 5 years. Therefore, the priority should be to focus on how to learn so that you can adapt beyond just knowing current skills and knowledge, and instead learn whatever you need to learn as it becomes relevant or required in the future.

This lifelong learning becomes more effective when you understand the principles behind learning, how you learn, and the strategies that help you learn more efficiently and effectively.

How Learning Happens

Estimated Time: 1 hour

What happens in your brain when you learn?

Have you ever considered how learning happens? And specifically, how your own learning happens? What actually occurs in your brain when you learn how to correctly write a for loop in Python or differentiate between boolean operators?

As mentioned in the Motivation section, learning is about growth and change. So let’s start by exploring how your brain changes over time.

Note: The detailed neuroscience of how the brain works is beyond the scope of this course, so in this section, we will only be doing a shallow dive into how the brain learns. If you are interested in going deeper and learning more, Grasp by Sanjay Sharma and Luke Yoquinto is a great introduction into the topic.

Reflection: Neuroplasticity in Action

With use, our brains have the ability to improve, expand and grow. The concept of neural pathways in the brain explains how we can learn something and get better at it. When you are doing something for the first time, it is usually harder compared to when you have done it several times (i.e. practiced it) because you don’t have strong neural pathways in place yet. With each repetition of the activity, your brain creates a stronger pathway that makes it even easier to do the task with reduced effort compared to the initial attempts.

Most people describe learning to code as a difficult process. This is because there might not have been prior neural pathways developed for coding. Even when you have learned to code using a different programming language, learning a new one might sometimes have some level of difficulty. However, it will be less difficult because you have built some neural pathways for programming in general.

So what does this mean for you as you embark on your computer science journey?

When you are struggling to learn a new skill or understand a new piece of knowledge, remember that this is how the brain works in the process of learning anything. Everything is hard until it becomes easy. So be confident in your learning, trust your brain, practice the skill to develop your neural pathways, and be patient with yourself as your neural pathways develop. Furthermore, when you are learning something new, being able to connect it to knowledge or skills that you already have will allow you to leverage already existing neural pathways.

This also means that it is important to learn consistently. So, instead of practising your coding skills in a single 4 hour block one day per week, it is better for you to practice in four 1-hour blocks spread throughout the week. This consistent and routine firing of your neural pathways will make them stronger, which will ultimately make it feel less effortful.

Another important thing to remember is that you should be practicing the skill that you want to get better at, as opposed to just taking in knowledge about that skill. You don't strengthen neural pathways for riding a bicycle by reading a book on how to ride a bicycle. You do so by actually going out and trying to ride a bicycle, over and over again. This principle is true when learning any new skill, including coding.

One mistake students often make when studying is to just read through the material, and assume that this passive studying is helping them develop their skills. Instead, you should be practicing the actual skill, and getting feedback on what you can do correctly and what you can't yet do correctly. For example, this means that when studying for your Programming 1, focus your energy on completing the practice questions and projects, don't just read the lesson materials.

Remember, it might be difficult at the start, but with the strengthening of the neural pathways in your brain through practice, you will increase your comfort and mastery of the subject.

Everything is hard until it becomes easy.

Discussion: Advising a Classmate

Skills You Need to Succeed

Estimated Time: 2 hours

So far in Lesson 1, we have discussed why learning is important and what actually occurs when you learn. In the remaining sections of this week’s lesson, we will discuss some skills that are useful for learning. We will start with Executive Functioning Skills, which govern our cognitive ability to focus our attention and learn.

What are Executive Functioning Skills?

Brain functions that support executive functioning

• Flexible Attention (Mental Flexibility): "Helps us to sustain or shift attention in response to different demands or to apply different rules in different settings."

• Working Memory: "Governs our ability to retain and manipulate distinct pieces of information over short periods of time."

• Inhibitory Control (Impulse Inhibition): "Enables us to set priorities and resist impulsive actions or responses."

Source

Summary of the tips from the videos

Tip 1: Learn to look closely.

Tip 2: Stop and think.

Tip 3: Exercise.

Tip 4: Challenge yourself.

Tip 5: Try another way.

Reflection: Executive Functioning Skills

Helping Alex, Akua, and Juma

💬 In the padlet below, suggest some actions Alex, Akua, or Juma could take to improve their ability to succeed, in spite of the challenges that they currently have with their executive functioning skills.

Executive Functioning Skills for Learning

Below are some more Executive Functioning skills that influence your ability to learn effectively. With each skill listed, in addition to the definition, you will find a description of what it looks like when a student is strong in this skill or poor in this skill.

Improving Executive Function Skills for Learning

Reflection: Executive Functioning Skills for Learning

Direct Your Learning

Estimated Time: 2 hours

Reflection: SDL in Real Life

I will assume that you unpacked the device, read the user manual (or not 🤷🏿‍♀️), watched some YouTube videos about your new device, or maybe even asked people who owned this model before you about some of the steps and hacks that could help you to get the best out of your new device. Then you played around with the device, testing if you could get certain features to work, and learned from your explorations. If this describes what you did, then you demonstrated self-directed learning. One of the reasons this was effective was because you had a clear goal, you wanted to be able to get the best out of this new device.

Self-directed learning is a learning process where you take responsibility to initiate and perform your own learning around a subject matter. This has numerous benefits, including strengthening your confidence as a learner and improving engagement with, and retention of, what you are learning.

What is Self-Directed Learning?

Here is a summary of how the two most extreme types of learners (the dependent learner and the self-directed learner) compare:

• Dependent Learner

  • Relies on an instructor to set learning goals, monitor learning progress, and evaluate learning outcomes.
  • Is able to complete a list of instructor-created tasks
  • Has little awareness that there is an option for them to take some control over their learning
  • This type of learner is common place in traditional primary and secondary school environments, and many university environments with the "chew & pour" mentality

• Self-Directed Learner

  • Is able to set their learning goals, monitor learning progress, and evaluate their learning outcomes.
  • Can identify their desires and knows what they need to do to pursue them.
  • Sees the instructor as a learning consultant who can provide advice and feedback.
  • Can identify and source the resources needed to complete their learning.
  • This type of learner is commonplace in professional environments.

Self-directed learning allows you to take responsibility for your own learning, which results in greater ownership and autonomy. In self-directed learning, the teacher acts as a guide/facilitator/consultant to support you and give you feedback during your learning journey. At Kibo, you will learn using a combination of all four levels mentioned in the video during different parts of your formal academic courses and any additional side projects that you choose to take on.

One of the most challenging transitions young professionals have to make is going from being a Dependent Learner in formal school environments, sometimes through university, into being a Self-Directed Learner in the workplace. A key reason we are teaching you self-directed learning is that this is how the majority of your learning will be once you are in a professional setting. So, it is important for you to get comfortable with taking more ownership of your learning now.

You will notice that a lot of the characteristics discussed in the video are similar to the executive functioning skills discussed in the earlier section. Therefore, people with strong executive functioning skills are well set up to be effective self-directed learners.

Summary of the characteristics mentioned in the video:

• Disciplined, Methodical
• Logical, Analytical
• Reflective and Self-Aware
• Curious and Open
• Flexible
• Interdependently Competent
• Persistent and Responsible
• Creative
• Confident
• Self-Sufficient
• Information Seeker
• Learning Process Savvy
• Critical Evaluation Skills

Activity: Day in the Life of a Self-Directed CS Student

Why Embrace Self-Directed Learning?

Are You Ready For Self-Directed Learning?

Source: Independent Studies: Readiness to Learn. Centre for Teaching Excellence, University of Waterloo.

Readiness to Learn v. Willingness to Learn

Source

To be an effective self-directed learner you need to have both the will to learn, as well as the skills required for learning!

How can you become a more self-directed learner?

The Self-Directed Learning Process

There are three main stages to the self-directed learning process:

1. Planning = Things you do BEFORE learning takes place.
2. Monitoring = Things you do DURING the learning activity.
3. Evaluating = Things you do AFTER the learning activity.

The table below outlines behaviors that effective self-directed learners exhibit in each of these three stages.

Here are some useful expansions on some of the key terms in the table:

• Diagnosing Learning needs: It all starts with questions like: What do I not know? What do I need to learn? Why do I want to learn this?
• Goal Setting: Taking the learning needs one step further, you should formulate clear goals by asking questions like: What will I be able to do once I have completed my learning?
• Strategic Planning and Determining a Learning Strategy: In order to build upon existing knowledge and ideas, you have to determine an appropriate approach to and resources for learning.
• Help Seeking: While self-directed learning is about being in control of your own learning, it doesn't mean that you need to learn alone. An important practice to use when learning is knowing when to ask for help, where you can find help, and who you can approach for help.
• Testing: When you are learning, it is critical to have an accurate signal of the gap between your current competency and your target competency. One way to get an accurate estimate of that gap is by frequently testing yourself and getting feedback. You can test yourself by carrying out your goal task and seeing how well you do. E.g., if you are learning how to use loops in Python, test yourself by building a python program using loops; if you are learning for an exam, test yourself by completing practice exam questions under exam conditions.
• Self-Evaluation: After learning strategies are implemented, you can evaluate your learning to see how effective the process was. You can also do this periodically while you are learning. Using your learning goals as a benchmark, you can determine how effective your learning process was and can subsequently improve on it.

Here is a summary of the 20 tips from the article:

SDL Skill Reflection

Assignment 1 - Letter to Future Self

Due date: July 17th, 2023, 10pm GMT

Instructions

• Review the assignment brief below.
• Complete your assignment in a Google doc.
• Download your finished assignment as a pdf and submit on Gradescope and Woolf.

Brief

Word count: 500 - 750 words.

Write a letter to yourself in five weeks' time (at the end of the OYL course) and discuss:

• Your feelings about your current learning skills.
• Your current learning strengths.
• Your current learning weaknesses.
• Three goals you would like to focus on during the course to improve your learning skills.
• One topic that you would like to learn more about at the end of the course using your improved learning skills.

Be sure to mention some of the material presented in the week 1 lessons in your letter.

Submission

Please submit your letter on Gradescope, and then also upload a copy to the Woolf platform.

Understanding Your Mindsets and Emotions

Introduction

📺 Watch the following video from your instructor, Tolu, to learn about what you will be studying in week 2.

Learning Outcomes

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

• Describe the different identities that make up how you see yourself.
• Identify and manage beliefs that hinder your learning.
• Utilize a growth mindset to support your learning.
• Identify the influence that emotional intelligence has on your learning.
• Use practices to be more aware of yourself and your emotions.
• Use practices to regulate and manage your emotions so that you can focus on your learning goals
• Use practices to stay motivated while learning.

Getting Focused

Sections

2.1 Motivation

2.2 Know Thyself

2.3 Beliefs That Hinder Learning

2.4 A Powerful Mindset that Supports Learning

2.5 Introduction to Emotional Intelligence

2.6 Understanding and Enhancing Your Self Awareness

2.7 Developing Self-Regulation Skills

2.8 Managing and Sustaining Motivation

Assignment 2: Overcoming Limiting Beliefs

Final Presentation - Milestone 1

Motivation

Estimated Time: 1 hour

In last week’s lesson, we explored the importance of self-directed learning. We emphasized the need for you to be at the center of the learning process and to be able to set learning goals, monitor learning progress, and evaluate learning outcomes. This week, we will dive into how your mind influences your ability to successfully accomplish these tasks.

It may be obvious that thinking and logic play an important role in self-directed learning, but how about emotions? What role do they have to play in your ability to learn? How do your emotions help you get the most out of your learning or how might they hold you back? The goal of this week’s lesson is to help you find answers to these questions and many more!

Discuss: Emotions When Learning

When you hit roadblocks like this (and there will be plenty of roadblocks in your learning!), you are likely to feel emotions like anger and frustration. These sorts of situations will possibly also affect your mood, your ability to concentrate, and how you interact with people around you. However, being able to understand and regulate your emotions will prevent you from wasting your time and energy and taking out your frustration in unproductive ways, and will instead help you to pause and think calmly so that you can resolve the issues with your code and achieve your ultimate goal. To help us unravel how to do this, let’s start by learning what emotions are, and how they influence our brains.

But how do emotions influence learning?

From this video, we learned that the quality of our learning is dependent on both our cognitive skills (how we think) and our emotional state (how we feel). In fact, our emotional state impacts our ability to leverage our cognitive skills to achieve learning goals. For example, emotions can have a positive or negative impact on our attention, motivation, effective employment of learning strategies, and ability to self-regulate.

Discuss: Impact of Emotions When Learning

From the video, we learned that negative emotions (e.g. anxiety, fear) tend to narrow our focus onto the threat. However, positive emotions (e.g. curiosity, joy, pride) broaden our thoughts and ideas, helping us to be more creative, improving our capacity to learn, and helping us bounce back from failure. Negative memories can lead to negative emotional responses like anxiety and frustration, which hinder our ability to learn when we are put in situations that elicit memories of the past experiences. As such, it is important that we learn how to recognize when these emotions occur (through self-awareness), and effectively manage them (through self-regulation). One thing to note is that sometimes negative emotions can be useful in learning, a small amount of anxiety can help us focus, which can be good for learning. However, if the anxiety is significant and frequent, it can distract us when we are trying to learn.

We used to think that if people did well, then they feel good…we now know that that was the wrong way around. Actually, if people feel good then that provides the fuel for them to do well.

Curiosity is regarded as a strong positive emotion that drives learning. When there is a genuine curiosity to grow, improve and discover, learning is much more fun than when learning is driven by the need to perform for other people, or just get a passing grade. Learners who possess curiosity are driven by an intrinsic motivation that often makes them go further and put in more effort than learners who just want to put in the bare minimum. A useful approach to developing curiosity is identifying how a given topic that you are learning is personally meaningful to you, and how it could help you achieve goals that are important to you.

Identity: Know Thyself

Estimated Time: 30 minutes

Identity

An identity is a person's formulation and expression of their individuality and group affiliations. It may be defined as the distinctive characteristics belonging to an individual or shared by all members of a specific social category or group.

Some examples of identity groups include:

• Each person has a set of identities (We all have multiple identities)
• Each person chooses at least some identities, while other identities are given.
• People feel differently about different identities.
• Some identities are more important than others.
• Some identities are visible, while others are less apparent.
• Some identities change over time, while others are constant.

Identity Mapping

Given, Chosen, or Core Identities

Given Identities - These are the attributes or conditions that you have no choice about. They may be characteristics you were born with or they may have been given to you in childhood or later in life. Elements of your given identity include your birthplace, age, gender, birth order, physical characteristics, certain family roles, and possibly religion.

Chosen Identities - These are the characteristics that you choose. They may describe your status as well as attributes and skills. Your occupation, hobbies, political affiliation, place of residence, family roles, and religion may all be chosen.

Core Identities - The attributes that you think make you unique as an individual. Some will change over the course of your lifetime, others may remain constant. Elements of your core identity may include behaviors, beliefs, values, and skills.

Source: Hannum, K. (2008). Leadership in Action: Branching out: Social Identity Comes to the Forefront. Center for Creative Leadership.

Reflection: Reflecting on Your Identities

Adapted from Social Identity Wheel. (n.d). Inclusive Teaching at U-M. Retrieved May 15, 2022, from https://sites.lsa.umich.edu/inclusive-teaching/social-identity-wheel/

Reflection: Identities and Beliefs

Beliefs That Hinder Learning

Estimated Time: 4 hours

In this section we will explore some belief systems and behaviors that can hinder learning including:

• Limiting Beliefs
• Learned Helplessness
• Automatic Negative Thoughts

Limiting Beliefs

In the previous section of this week’s lesson, you reflected on your different identities. While it is great to have a strong set of identities, as you saw in the final reflection, your identities can shape your beliefs about yourself. As a consequence, they can shape what you believe you are capable, or deserving, of, leading to something called limiting beliefs.

Beliefs describe what we think we can and cannot do in life, what we think we deserve and don’t deserve in life, and what we believe to be true about the world and others. When beliefs restrict us in some way (e.g. stopping us from reaching our goals or pursuing things that would make us happy), they can be described as limiting beliefs.

Here are some examples of limiting beliefs:

• I am not talented enough to ...
• I don’t have enough experience to ...
• I can’t do this because I will fail.
• I shouldn't speak up because ...
• I’m not a leader.
• I’ll never be successful.
• It’s too late for me to ...
• I’m too young to ...
• I'm too old to ...
• I don’t have enough money to ...
• They will reject me because ...
• I don’t have time to ...
• I need ... before I can ...
• I don’t need help from anyone to ...

Limiting beliefs are usually not grounded in facts or evidence, and are often just stories that we tell ourselves based on our past negative experiences (negative emotional memories) or strongly held identities.

How to Identify Your Limiting Beliefs 🔎

Identifying a limiting belief can sometimes be challenging, as they can be deeply ingrained and automatic. However, here are some signs that can help you recognize when something may be a limiting belief:

Reflection: Limiting Beliefs

Becoming aware of your limiting beliefs requires introspection and self-reflection. Here are some techniques that you can integrate into your life to become more aware of when they might be guiding your behavior:

1. Mindfulness: Practice mindfulness to observe your thoughts and emotions without judgment. Pay attention to recurring patterns or negative self-talk that may indicate underlying limiting beliefs.

2. Journaling: Keep a journal and write down your thoughts, beliefs, and any self-limiting statements that come to mind. Regularly review your journal entries to identify common themes and beliefs that may be holding you back.

3. Self-inquiry: Ask yourself probing questions to explore your beliefs and thought patterns. For example, ask yourself, "What do I believe about my abilities in this area?" or "What fears or doubts come up when I think about pursuing my goals?"

4. Triggers and reactions: Pay attention to situations or circumstances that trigger strong emotional reactions in you. These emotional responses can often uncover underlying beliefs or insecurities that you may not be consciously aware of.

5. Feedback from others: Seek feedback from trusted friends, family, or mentors who can provide an outside perspective. Sometimes, others can spot limiting beliefs that you may not see in yourself.

6. Reflection: Reflect on past experiences where you may have felt stuck or held back. Consider the beliefs that were present during those times and how they may have influenced your actions or decisions.

7. Comparison traps: Be mindful of comparing yourself to others and the beliefs that arise from such comparisons. Notice if you have thoughts like "I'll never be as successful as them" or "I'm not good enough compared to them," as these can indicate limiting beliefs.

8. Pay attention to self-talk: Observe the language and tone of your inner dialogue. Notice if you frequently use negative or self-critical language, as this can provide clues about your limiting beliefs.

How to Overcome Limiting Beliefs

• Step 1 (Awareness): Recognize that you have a belief and that it is limiting

  • Identify your limiting beliefs using the methods mentioned above.

• Step 2 (Question): Separate "the stories" from "the facts"

  • Analyze the accuracy of the limiting belief by determining its source:
    • Is it informed by assumptions, external expectations, or stereotypes?
    • Are there any facts or evidence to support that the belief is true?
  • Question what you know about the situation until you are left with answers that are supported by concrete facts.
  • Look for evidence that proves or disproves your belief. Often, limiting beliefs lack solid evidence and are based on misconceptions or fear.
  • Seek examples of people who have overcome similar challenges or have achieved what you desire, despite any perceived limitations.

• Step 3 (Reframe) Develop an alternate belief

  • One powerful way to develop an alternate belief is to reverse the "Limiting Belief" into an "Empowering Belief", and see what it feels like to live with this new reality. For example:
    • Limiting Belief: "I shouldn't speak up in class because my answer is probably wrong and people will think I am dumb."
    • Empowering Belief: "I should speak up in class because my answer is probably correct and people will think I am smart."

• Step 4: (Take Action) Put the empowering belief into practice

  • When a situation triggers the old limiting belief, think of the empowering belief instead, and let it guide your behavior.
  • You can also use quotes and visualisation to help you disrupt your "limiting belief" and replace it with your "empowering belief".
  • Some additional ways to overcome your limiting belief include:
    • Visualize success: Use the power of visualization to imagine yourself successfully overcoming your limiting beliefs. Picture yourself achieving your goals, breaking through barriers, and living your life without those self-imposed limitations. This visualization can help reinforce your new empowering beliefs.
    • Take small steps: Break down your goals into smaller, manageable steps. By taking action towards your goals, you'll build evidence that disproves your limiting beliefs. Celebrate each small victory along the way, as it will further strengthen your belief in your abilities.
    • Surround yourself with support: Seek out positive and supportive individuals who can help you challenge your limiting beliefs. Surrounding yourself with people who believe in you and your potential can be immensely helpful in overcoming self-doubt and building confidence.
    • Practice self-compassion: Be kind to yourself throughout this process. Recognize that challenging and changing deep-seated beliefs takes time and effort. Treat yourself with compassion and understanding if you face setbacks or encounter resistance along the way.
    • Repeat the process: Overcoming limiting beliefs is an ongoing process. As you grow and face new challenges, new beliefs may arise. Continually practice self-awareness and question any beliefs that hold you back, applying the steps outlined above to overcome them.

Learned Helplessness

The concept of learned helplessness is very similar to limiting beliefs. It is based on the idea that previous experiences can limit what you think you are capable of, even when those limitations are removed.

Discussion: Utilizing Learned Optimism when Learning

Counteracting Learned Helplessness

Remember Chinedu? Let's talk about some tactics that he could use to overcome his learned helplessness. If you ever feel caught in a similar situation, these might be helpful for you as well!

1 - Recognize and challenge negative beliefs: Chinedu needs to become aware of his negative self-talk and challenge the limiting beliefs that contribute to his learned helplessness. He can start by questioning the validity of his thoughts and replacing them with more positive and empowering statements. For example, instead of thinking, "I'm not smart enough," he can reframe it as, "I have the capacity to learn and improve."

2 - Seek support and guidance: It's essential for Chinedu to seek support from instructors and teaching assistants. By reaching out for help, he can gain a deeper understanding of challenging concepts and receive guidance on effective study strategies. Building relationships with classmates who share similar struggles can also provide a supportive network for learning and growth.

3 - Break tasks into smaller, manageable steps: Large projects or assignments may feel overwhelming to Chinedu, leading to procrastination or avoidance. By breaking them down into smaller, more achievable tasks, he can make progress incrementally. Celebrating each completed step can boost motivation and instill a sense of accomplishment.

4 - Embrace a growth mindset: Chinedu should cultivate a growth mindset, which emphasizes the belief that abilities and intelligence can be developed through effort and practice. Embracing challenges as opportunities for growth and viewing failures as learning experiences will help him bounce back from setbacks and persist in the face of difficulties. We will learn more about this in the next section of this week's lesson.

5 - Set realistic goals and track progress: Chinedu can set specific, attainable goals that align with his academic aspirations. Breaking these goals into smaller milestones and regularly tracking his progress will provide a sense of achievement and help him stay motivated. Celebrating even small victories can reinforce positive beliefs about his abilities.

6 - Learn how to learn: Chinedu can enhance his learning experience by adopting effective learning habits. This includes creating a structured study schedule, finding a conducive study environment, utilizing active learning techniques, and seeking opportunities for hands-on practice.

7 - Embrace mistakes and learn from them: Chinedu should view mistakes and failures as natural parts of the learning process. Instead of allowing them to reinforce his helplessness, he can analyze what went wrong, identify areas for improvement, and adjust his strategies accordingly. Using mistakes as fuel for learning will enable him to see setbacks as valuable learning opportunities.

Automatic Negative Thoughts (ANTS)

To close out this section, we are going to explore the driver that creates the thoughts that prop up our limiting beliefs and feelings of helplessness. These negative thoughts are often so automatic that we don't realize how much they shape how we view or interact with the world around us.

Here are some of the most common ANTs (these were all mentioned in the video):

• All-or-nothing Thinking: "You see things in black-and-white categories. If your performance falls short of perfect, you see yourself as a total failure."
• Overgenerlization: "You see a single negative event as a never-ending pattern of defeat."
• Mental Filter: "You pick out a single negative detail and dwell on it exclusively so that your vision of all reality becomes darkened, like the drop of ink that discolors the entire beaker of water."
• Disqualifying the Positive: "You reject positive experiences by insisting they “don’t count” for some reason or other. In this way you can maintain a negative belief that is contradicted by your everyday experiences."
• Jumping to Conclusions: "You make a negative interpretation even though there are no definite facts that convincingly support your conclusion."
• Mind Reading: "You arbitrarily conclude that someone is reacting negatively to you, and you don’t bother to check this out."
• Fortune Telling: "You anticipate that things will turn out badly, and you feel convinced that your prediction is an already-established fact."
• Magnification (Catastrophizing) or Minimization: "You exaggerate the importance of things (such as your goof-up or someone else’s achievement), or you inappropriately shrink things until they appear tiny (your own desirable qualities or other fellow’s imperfections). This is also called the “binocular trick.”"
• Emotional Reasoning: "You assume that your negative emotions necessarily reflect the way things really are: “I feel it, therefore it must be true.”"
• Should Statements: "You try to motivate yourself with should and shouldn’t, as if you had to be whipped and punished before you could be expected to do anything. “Musts” and “oughts” are also offenders. The emotional consequences are guilt. When you direct should statements toward others, you feel anger, frustration, and resentment."
• Labeling and Mislabeling: "This is an extreme form of overgeneralization. Instead of describing your error, you attach a negative label to yourself. “I’m a loser.” When someone else’s behavior rubs you the wrong way, you attach a negative label to him” “He’s a louse.” Mislabeling involves describing an event with language that is highly colored and emotionally loaded."
• Personalization: "You see yourself as the cause of some negative external event, which in fact you were not primarily responsible for.”

Source

Reflection: ANTs

A Powerful Mindset That Supports Learning

Estimated Time: 2 hours

Mindset Self-Assessment

Reflection: Experience with Fixed and Growth Mindsets

A growth mindset is about believing in your ability to grow and improve. It is a belief that intelligence can be developed and that through effort, persistence, and practice, you can develop your skills and talents. This aligns well with what we learned in Week 1 about the neuroplasticity of the brain.

Additionally, as discussed in the video, another connection between a growth mindset and the lessons from week 1 is the emphasis on process over outcome. In Section 1.4 Direct Your Learning, we talked about the importance of planning in the service of becoming more self-directed. Going through the planning steps means that when you are then monitoring or evaluating your performance against your goal, you have a clearly defined process that you can tweak to further improve your performance.

If we think about the learnings from the previous section on Learned Helplessness, this means that planning, evaluating, and monitoring (i.e., self-directed learning) gives you the power to control your learning in times when you are successful, as well as times when you are not yet successful. This is extremely valuable for avoiding falling into the trap of learned helplessness.

When studying challenging technical subjects, the intentional planning and implementation of a learning process allows you to focus on process and incremental improvements and helps you avoid giving up too early while you are developing necessary neural pathways. In times when you may not see success at first, having a learning process or plan to tweak means that you shouldn't feel helpless or have limiting beliefs about your ability to succeed. Instead, you can focus on trying to figure out what you need to do, how you need to learn, who you need to get help from, in order to achieve your goals.

Advise Adebayo

In the padlet below, give Adebayo some advice to help him overcome his fixed mindset regarding his programming skills.

Embracing Failure

In the field of computer science, problem-solving, innovation, and continuous learning are crucial. Therefore, failure serves as a stepping stone to success. Embracing failure as an opportunity for growth and learning can lead to greater mastery and achievement. It is through failure that you can develop the skills, resilience, and mindset necessary for success in your computer science journey.

Don't believe this? Here are some ways that failure can be the road to your computer science success:

1. Helping you identify areas for improvement: Failure exposes areas where improvement is needed. It highlights the gaps in knowledge or skills and serves as a clear indicator of what needs to be addressed. By experiencing failure, you can identify specific areas where you need to focus your efforts to enhance your understanding and competence.

2. Building problem-solving skills: Computer science often involves complex problem-solving. Failure provides an opportunity to engage in critical thinking and analyze what went wrong. It challenges you to identify alternative approaches, debug errors, and develop creative solutions. Through this process, you refine your problem-solving skills and become more adept at overcoming challenges.

3. Developing resilience and perseverance: Failure in computer science can be frustrating and disheartening. However, it also cultivates resilience and perseverance. When you encounter failures and setbacks, you have the chance to build resilience by bouncing back, regrouping, and trying again. This resilience is crucial in the face of complex programming tasks or technical hurdles commonly encountered in computer science.

4. Learning from mistakes: Failure provides valuable learning opportunities. By examining what went wrong, you gain insights into your mistakes and can learn valuable lessons. These lessons can be applied to future projects and assignments, allowing you to avoid making similar errors in the future. Failure fosters a growth mindset, where you see mistakes as stepping stones to improvement rather than as indicators of incompetence.

5. Encouraging experimentation and innovation: Failure encourages you to take risks and think outside the box. When you are unafraid of failure, you are more likely to experiment with new approaches and explore innovative solutions. This mindset of experimentation and innovation is fundamental in computer science, where groundbreaking advancements often arise from trial and error.

6. Building self-confidence: Surprisingly, failure can actually build self-confidence. When you experience failure and then work through it to find success, you develop a stronger belief in your abilities. Each failure overcome becomes a testament to your resilience and capacity for growth. This newfound confidence can propel you to tackle more significant challenges and push the boundaries of your abilities.

Reflection: Learning from Failure

Introduction to Emotional Intelligence

Estimated Time: 1 hour

This week, we started out discussing the importance of emotions in the learning process, and how emotions (and the beliefs and mindsets that they create) can support or hurt your cognitive performance. Let’s continue by reflecting on your experience with managing your emotions and the emotions of others, before diving into the topic of emotional intelligence in a bit more depth.

Reflection: Emotional Intelligence

Goleman’s Mixed Model of Emotional Intelligence

According to Goleman, who has researched and written extensively on the subject, emotional intelligence is made up of the following components or skills:

• Self-Awareness

  This is the ability to recognize our own emotions and state of mind and understand the impact it has on us and other people around us. It is the ability to understand how our emotions drive our behavior and actions. More broadly, self-awareness also involves knowing our identity, personality, preferences, and strengths and weaknesses among other things which are in many ways connected to how we feel and how we act. Being able to know how we feel and how that drives us in the moment can help us appreciate and channel those feelings and emotions appropriately.

• Self-Regulation (or Self-Management)

  This is the ability to control, manage or regulate our emotions to serve our goals. It also helps us to respond appropriately in our relationships and interactions with others. We might not always be able to trace the source of our emotions, or control when and how they come, but the good news is that with learning and practice, we can control how those emotions affect or drive our actions.

• Motivation

  Motivation is the quality of being driven by something whether it is internal or external. As a quality of emotional intelligence, motivation helps us sustain appropriate or preferred actions even in the face of conflicting or contrary emotions. Motivation is the drive to improve ourselves, learn, grow and achieve our goals. Motivation helps us to be resilient, persevere, and forge ahead in the face of difficulty. Learning new and difficult subjects can be daunting and many people give up midway. But with a good understanding of what motivates us and knowing how to channel and sustain our motivation, we can push through to accomplish our goals.

• Social Awareness (or Empathy)

  Empathy is the ability to put ourselves in the shoes of others. With empathy, we can imagine what others are feeling and experiencing, and we can choose to understand and react to them based on the perceived feelings of their situation. Empathy can be practiced by listening to others and observing them and the situations they are in.

• Social Skills (or Relationship Management)

  Social skills help us to bring all the skills of emotional intelligence into effective relationships with other people, whether at work, school, or in our personal lives. Social skills are the ability to interact well with people and build relationships with them. Without the previously introduced emotional intelligence skills, it is hard to practice social skills. Therefore, our ability to be successful in relationships with other people starts with our ability to understand ourselves and manage our own emotions.

Some Signs of Low Emotional Intelligence

• Having emotional outbursts that are often out of proportion to the situation at hand.
• Difficulty listening to others.
• Becoming argumentative when interacting with someone that has a differing opinion.
• Regularly blaming others.
• Inability to understand other people’s feelings, and therefore believing that others are overly sensitive.
• Difficulty maintaining friendships and other relationships.
• Unable, or refusing, to see other people’s points of view.

Source

Improving Emotional Intelligence

In the next two sections of this lesson, we will go deeper into developing self-awareness and self-regulation, before ending this week’s lesson content with a discussion on motivation.

Understanding and Enhancing Your Self-Awareness

Estimated Time: 1 hour

Self-awareness is the foundation of being an emotionally intelligent learner. Without self-awareness, you will not understand your own emotions, inclinations, and preferences when learning. However, with self-awareness, you know better about how you learn, why you learn, and the emotions that enhance or restrict your ability to learn effectively.

What is Self-Awareness?

Here are the benefits of self-awareness as summarized in the video:

• Helps us understand who we are and what we need and expect from other people
• Helps us understand our strengths and weaknesses
• Informs how we present ourselves to others
• Shapes our decision-making
• Helps us stay grounded
• Helps us to set boundaries
• Helps us to be more empathetic

Self-Awareness vs. Self-Consciousness

Let’s be clear that self-awareness is different from self-consciousness. As described above, when you are self-aware, you know more and understand more about yourself, your qualities, and your emotions. Whereas with self-consciousness, you have a heightened sense of self-awareness that results in continued strong perceptions of yourself and sometimes undue estimation of how others perceive you. Self-consciousness can become extreme especially when there is a fixation on your flaws and inabilities. Your goal should be to increase your self-awareness, without increasing your self-consciousness.

Self-Awareness and Learning

As mentioned earlier, self-awareness can help you become a better self-directed learner. Here are a number of areas in which you need to be more self-aware in other to accomplish more effective learning:

• Emotions

  As we have already demonstrated, being aware of your emotions is important to how you understand, interpret, and act in situations. Learning happens in a variety of contexts, so the ability to understand your emotions in different situations can determine if you are able to learn in those situations or not.

• Strengths and Weaknesses

  Our strengths are the things that we do well, while our weaknesses are the things we are not so good at. Having an understanding of your strengths and weaknesses during learning and at work will help you prioritize and concentrate on more effective methods for achieving your goals.

• Learning preferences, needs, and priorities

  Similar to the point above and in line with our discussion last week on learning preferences, being aware of your learning preferences and approaches can help you to be a more effective learner, regardless of the subject matter.

How to Improve Your Self-Awareness

Here are activities you can practice to improve your self-awareness:

• Look at yourself objectively
• Keep a Journal (Reflection by writing)
• Practice meditation and other mindfulness habits
• Take personality and psychometric tests
• Ask for feedback

Discuss: Developing Self-Awareness

Developing Self-Regulation Skills

Estimated Time: 30 minutes

In the last section, we explored the importance of being self-aware. In this section, we will take that further by asking: Now that we can identify how we are feeling or know certain things about ourselves, how do we use that to drive towards desired outcomes in life and work?

Like in the quote above, we might not be able to influence what happens to us, but we can choose how we react to it. This ability to choose or change our reactions and emotions is the foundation of Self-Regulation.

Self-Regulation in Learning

As self-directed learners who understand the role that emotions play in our ability to learn and accomplish our learning goals, we understand that self-regulation is a critical practice we must have if we are going to accomplish challenging outcomes. Also, with the foundation of a growth mindset, we can apply ourselves to practices that help us gain mastery over what we are learning in the long run. Mastering technical subjects such as mathematics and programming can be daunting. Sometimes, we might be tempted to give up or do less than required. However, remembering that our neural pathways only develop with more action and practice can help us maintain self-regulation practices to master tough topics and subjects.

Here are some of the ways self-regulation manifests in our learning process:

• Setting Goals

  The beginning of all attainment is goal setting. If we will accomplish mastery in a course or subject, then, we must be clear about the specific outcomes that we want to achieve. These learning goals help us to check our own progress, stay accountable to the learning process and determine the strategies and resources required to achieve that goal.

• Exercising Control and Staying Focused

  As a self-directed learner and one who takes ownership of their learning journey, you will encounter unfamiliar concepts and ideas which sometimes might feel daunting. You will also encounter multiple distractions, especially when learning online. In order to make progress towards your learning, you will need to exercise control and restraint. Control in the learning process also involves applying the approppriate learning strategies for a given situation.

• Monitoring Progress

  Monitoring progress includes monitoring yourself as well as monitoring the effectiveness of your learning strategies and actions. With this, you can evaluate how you are carrying on in the learning process, how well you have mastered and understood the concepts, and what you still need to do to close the learning gaps.

• Improvement

  Being able to reflect on your progress and outcomes in order to make improvements is powerful as we saw in the practice of reflective learning. Self-regulation can help you adopt and implement better learning strategies to get the results that you desire.

Developing Self-Regulation Skills

In responding to any situation or emotional stimulus, the first action in self-regulation is to pause and think calmly before responding. Self-Regulation is a proactive action that allows you to choose how to respond in any situation. Here are some practices for improving your self-regulation:

• Mindfulness: Being mindful is being aware of our feelings, circumstances and state in the moment. Practicing mindfulness allows us to observe things including the state of our own thoughts and bodies which previously we might not have been tuned in to.
• Cognitive Reframing: Thoughts create feelings. And we sometimes have thoughts that do not serve us. Some thoughts might be doubtful thoughts about our own capabilities that hinder our ability to achieve our goals (e.g. limiting beliefs). However, we do not have to accept those thoughts. We can reframe them and replace them with empowering thoughts, which in turn bring about positive feelings.
• Identifying Triggers: We all have triggers which are situations, conditions, and actions that might destabilize us emotionally, cause difficult feelings and make us act in unintended ways. Knowing what these triggers are, and knowing how to handle them, is important.
• Pausing Before Acting: As mentioned earlier, delaying your response or reaction to any emotional triggers and contemplating the consequences of your action is a practice that helps to develop stronger self-regulation skills.
• Setting Goals: Having clear goals and a focus on what you want to achieve and letting that guide your efforts will help you to develop strong self-regulation skills. This is because accomplishing goals in themselves requires your commitment and resilience

Discuss: Self-Regulation Skills

Managing and Sustaining Motivation

Estimated Time: 30 minutes

Reflection: What Motivates You?

If you have thought about these questions before, the answers might come easily. But there is also a possibility that you do not have answers to some of the questions, or perhaps that you are not sure of your answers. What is the impact of not having answers to these questions? As you think about this, let’s learn more about motivation.

As mentioned in the video, motivation can be extrinsic or intrinsic:

• Extrinsic Motivation

  Motivation that is initiated by external forces. For example, you might be motivated to study and get good grades because it is the expectation of your parents and family. This could further be connected to positive or negative consequences. A negative consequence as motivation might be that your educational fees stop being sponsored if you perform poorly, while a positive motivation might be that you win a cash award for exemplary performance.

• Intrinsic Motivation

  Motivation that comes from within ourselves. This could be other interests or factors that influence feelings of self-fulfillment and self-realization. With intrinsic motivation, you perform a task because you enjoy doing it and are committed to it without the need for an external award or punishment.

According to Daniel Pink, the components of intrinsic motivation can be described as:

• Autonomy: The urge to direct our own lives
• Mastery: The desire to get better at something that matters
• Purpose: The yearning to do what we do in the service of something larger than ourselves

How to Maintain Motivation When Learning

Self-motivation is the ability to find and maintain a cause that drives you toward action. In learning, motivation enables us to take charge of our own learning and to sustain our attention and performance. Here are some more ways to maintain motivation in learning which revolve around the 3 factors mentioned by Daniel Pink above (i.e., autonomy, mastery, and purpose):

• Set and work towards clear goals: Goals motivate us. They give us something to reach for. When your goals are clear and SMART, they are even more motivating because you can see them ahead. We are goal-driven as humans, so setting goals for your learning helps you to tap into that part of your humanity that is goal-seeking.
• Connect your learning goals to long-term purpose: Learning is always for a purpose. The purpose for which we learn might differ from one person to another. However, if you are able to identify a longer-term purpose, such as a career (e.g., your goal might be to work in the world’s biggest technology company in the next 5 years), then aligning your current learning goals to this purpose will help you sustain your motivation even when the learning gets difficult.
• Go beyond just meeting expectations: Striving only to meet expectations is not enough. Striving for excellence is much more worthwhile because the expectations set by someone else have limits, but striving for excellence allows you the freedom to do the very best that you can.
• Take ownership of your learning: We have emphasized the importance of taking responsibility for your learning and owning your learning journey. We tend to be more motivated when we can function independently and learn according to our interests, passions, and desires.
• Adopt a Growth Mindset: A growth mindset says, “I am not there ‘yet’”. This kind of mindset shows you there is space for growth, and the possibility of growth and improvement in itself is a motivating factor.

Some Final Tips for Increasing Motivation

Discuss: Advising a Classmate

Assignment 2 - Overcoming Limiting Beliefs

Due date: July 24th, 2023, 10pm GMT

Instructions

• Review the assignment brief below.
• Complete your assignment using Google Slides.
• Download your finished assignment as a pdf and submit on Gradescope and Woolf.

Brief

This week's assignment will require you to create a Google Slides presentation about your limiting beliefs.

Task 1 - Identify Your Limiting Beliefs

Use the information in Section 2.3 to help identify 3-5 limiting beliefs you want to overcome.

Here are some examples of limiting beliefs:

• I’ll never be successful because I come from a poor background.
• It’s too late for me to become better at managing my time.
• I’m too young to create real change in the world.
• I don’t have enough money to be in control of my life.
• They will reject me because I’m not talented enough.
• I don’t have time to pursue my dreams.
• I don’t want to ask anyone for help because they will think I’m not skilled enough to succeed on my own.

Task 2 - Limiting Belief Reflection

Pick one of the limiting beliefs that you identified in task 1 and reflect on when it was formed and how it currently impacts your life by answering the following questions:

• When do you think this belief was formed? And what was its source (e.g., family, society, a specific past experience)?
• How does holding this limiting belief currently benefit you?
• How does this limiting belief impact your actions?
• What evidence is there that makes this belief true? How might it be informed by assumptions, external expectations, or stereotypes?

Task 3 - Changing Your Limiting Belief

Work on developing an alternate belief that reverses your initial limiting belief. First, answer the following question:

• What would you predict for yourself if you no longer held this belief?

Now Reverse your belief to create an empowering belief: (e.g., I’ll probably just fail at it —> I will probably succeed.), and answer the following questions:

• How does this empowering belief make you feel?
• How true is this empowering belief? What evidence is there to support it?
• If you lived this empowering belief instead of the limiting belief, what concrete actions would you take?
• What actions could you take to help you think of your new empowering belief whenever a situation triggers the original limiting belief?

Task 4 - Presenting Your Belief Plan

You should have now gone through a process of identifying, reflecting on, and changing your limiting belief. Your final task is to put all this into an 8-10 slide presentation.

This slide presentation is what you will submit for this assignment. Your presentation should include the following information:

• 3-5 limiting beliefs that you currently hold
• Reflection on a chosen limiting belief (answer to the questions in task 2)
• Prediction of how your life would be without this limiting belief
• Your new empowering belief
• Description of how the new empowering belief makes you feel
• Description of what your life would look like if you lived in accordance with this new empowering belief
• Your action plan for reminding yourself of your new empowering belief

Make sure your slides include both text and visuals.

Submission

Please save your Google Slides as a pdf file and submit your assignment on Gradescope, and then upload a copy to the Woolf platform.

Final Presentation Milestone 1

Milestone 1 (Planning)

For one of your final assessments in this course, you will carry out a self-directed learning project by yourself. Your goal is to select a topic to learn, create a learning plan, implement the learning plan, and then submit a video lesson teaching the topic to the rest of your classmates.

For the first milestone of this project, you should complete the following activities by the end of week 2 of the course:

• Pick your learning topic and set your specific learning goals. You can pick any topic that interests you, but note that you will only have 1-2 weeks to learn the topic well enough to be able to create your lesson video, so pick a topic and learning goals that are feasible in that timeframe.
• Answer the SDL Planning questions listed below.
• Create a learning plan for how you will achieve your learning goals.

SDL Planning Questions

• What do I want to learn?
• Why is this topic important to me?
• How do I intend to use this knowledge?
• What are my current capabilities and limitations in relation to learning this topic?
• What do I already know about this topic and what do I need to find out?
• Where can I find the information that I need? (e.g. resources, data sources, people)
• How will my learning take place? (Note: you will be focused on your learning during weeks 3 and 4 of the course)
• How will I know that my learning was successful?

You don’t need to submit this milestone now, you will submit it in week 5 when you finish the project and submit the rest of the milestones.

Managing Your Learning Context

Introduction

📺 Watch the following video from your instructor, Tolu, to learn about what you will be studying in week 3.

Learning Outcomes

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

• Identify the internal and external factors that influence your learning context.
• Implement consistent practices to manage your energy for more effective learning.
• Implement time management strategies to improve the efficacy and effectiveness of your learning.
• Define your optimal physical learning environment and implement steps to create it.
• Engage others (e.g. peers, instructors, mentors) to improve the quality of your learning.

Getting Focused

Sections

3.1 Motivation

3.2 Manage Your Stress

3.3 You Are What You Eat

3.4 Boost Your Brain Through Movement

3.5 Sleep is Essential

3.6 Make Time Work For You

3.7 Control Your Space

3.8 Build Your Tribe

Assignment 3: Learning Context Experiment

Final Presentation - Milestone 2

Motivation

Estimated Time: 30 minutes

In last week’s lesson, we focused on understanding the impact that your mind (i.e. emotions and mindsets) can have on your learning. This week, we will discuss how the state of your body impacts your mind and your ability to learn effectively. And then we will expand our attention to consider other factors that influence your learning context (e.g. how you manage your time, the state of your physical environment, and the people around you).

Morning Routine: Jump Start Your Brain

Taking care of both your physical and mental health are important if you want to live a healthy life where you are able to learn effectively and achieve your goals. One way to help you do this every day is by having a set routine that you use to begin your day.

Discuss

Manage Your Stress

Estimated Time: 1.5 hours

In this section, we will explore the impact that stress has on your brain, and then we will discuss how to use breathing, mindfulness, and other techniques to manage your stress and improve your learning outcomes.

Impact of Stress

Managing Stress

There are a number of things that you can do to counteract the impact that stress has on your brain and body. The first steps are being aware of your stress levels and understanding the sources of stress in your life, then you can work on introducing behaviours into your life that help you reduce your stress levels.

The keys to managing stress that are explained in the above workbook include:

• Tracking your stress levels
• Identifying your sources of stress
• Practicing mindfulness regularly
• Being physically active
• Practicing deep breathing
• Doing pleasant activities

Reflection: Managing Stress

Breathing

As mentioned in the previous section, there are a number of ways to manage stress so that it doesn't negatively impact your mind and body. In the rest of this section we will discuss two of the methods, breathing and mindfulness, and then we will learn about some of the other methods in the next few sections of this lesson, i.e. Section 3.3 Food and Movement and Section 3.4 Sleep.

There are numerous breathing techniques that you can use to manage stress. In this section you will be introduced to three:

• Altrnate nostril breathing
• 4-7-8 technique
• Box breathing

You can watch the videos below and practice each technique to see if it helps you feel less stressed and more calm.

Mindfulness and Meditation

Finally, mindfulness and meditation are two of the most powerful tools that you can use to manage stress.

You can practice meditation by yourself with no tools or guidance, all you need to do is sit. However, if you want some additional guidance as you are learning to meditate there are lots of meditation videos and apps that you can use. I personally like the apps Calm and Headspace for a easy introduction into mindfulness and meditation. Headspace also has a fantastic Youtube channel with lots of different free meditations and breathing exercises. You will also notice that at the start of each of your weekly lessons, I have embedded a meditation video to help you focus before you start the lesson.

Practicing Mindful Meditation

In the stress management workbook you were introduced to a number of meditation practices that can be powerful tools for managing stress. Below is a list of these practices. You can refer to the stress management workbook for details on how to carry out each technique:

• Mindfulness Meditation
• Compassion Meditation
• Body Scan Meditation
• Mindful Eating
• Progressive Muscle Relaxation
• Mindfulness Circle

You Are What You Eat: The Impact of Food And Hydration

Estimated Time: 1 hour

In this section, we will discuss the impact the food and drink you consume has on your ability to learn effectively.

Food

The majority of the publically available information about brain-beneficial nutrition is from American or European sources. Therefore, a lot of the foods that they recommend are native to those countries and cuisines. However, it's imporant to acknowledge that there are plently of traditional African foods that are also beneficial to your brain and body. Therefore, we've tried to find some readings that discuss these as well.

Hydration

Boost Your Brain Through Movement

Estimated Time: 1 hour

In this section, we will discuss how the amount that you move your body impacts your ability to learn effectively.

Sleep is Essential

Estimated Time: 1 hour

In this section we will discuss why sleep is so important for learning and living, explore the consequences of sleep deprivation, and learn how to get better sleep.

Introduction to Sleep

Sleep and the Brain

What Happens When You Don't Get Enough Sleep

Discuss: Advise a Classmate

How to Improve Your Sleep

Sleep Hygiene Checklist

Reflection: Sleep Hygiene

Make Time Work For You

Estimated Time: 2 hours

Time Management is one of the executive functioning skills that is important for effective learning. It can be defined as "the ability to use time efficiently and effectively in the accomplishment of set tasks and goals." This is a skill that a lot of people struggle with, and it can have a significant impact on your ability to learn well. Therefore, in this section we will explore some common time management challenges, as well as some tips and tools that can help you improve your ability to manage your time.

Introduction to Time Management

Common Time Management Challenges

Reflection: Time Management

Beating Procrastination

Improving Your Time Management

Now that we've learned more about time management, and some common challenges. Let's explore some tools and techniques that you can implement to improve how you use your time. We will look at:

• Time Auditing
• The Eisenhower Matrix
• Calendaring and Planning Your Time
• Time Blocking
• The Not To Do List

Time Auditing

Summary of questions from the video:

• How am I actually spending my time?
• How important are the things I am doing?
• Are there distractions that I can minimize or avoid?
• Am I making time for what's really important?

You can find a good template for a time audit here.

Here is what you can do with the information that you get from your completed time audit:

• Compare your perception of time versus reality
• Analyze the priority of task categories
• Identify time drains
• Improve your ability to estimate how long certain tasks actually take
• Identify the non-negotiables in your life, and prioritize them
• Make small, manageable changes over time

Eisenhower Matrix for Prioritization

The second sheet in the time audit template shared above also contains a template for the Eisenhower matrix.

The Art of Calendaring

Read the following chapters on how to create a:

1. Termly schedule

2. Weekly schedule

Time Blocking

The Not To Do List

Some Final Tips and Insights About Effective Time Management

Control Your Space

Estimated Time: 1 hour

Reflection: Physical Learning Environment

One of the things that has long been attributed to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of one’s learning is the physical environment in which we learn. We interact with different physical environments daily (home, school, market, religious places, etc.). In our minds, we associate such places with certain functions and some places are more ideal for certain purposes compared to others. When it comes to learning, there are environments that favour our ability to concentrate, assimilate and demonstrate our learning. To some extent, such environments will depend on our personalities and learning preferences as we will highlight shortly. However, you will find that more and more in the 21st Century, even schools are careful about how they build their structures to enhance learning performance.

The good news is that we are not concerned with school structures today (you happen to be taking a borderless degree program), which means you are not constrained to any particular physical structure but that you have the opportunity to choose and shape where you best perform as a learner. As an online learner, there are several spaces open to you for studying which may include: your room at home, a space in a hub or co-working space, a library, an office location, etc. One thing to note though is that you might choose different locations depending on what aspect of studying you are embarking on, e.g. your personal study space might be different from the space where you take classes, and that could be different as well from where you meet with peers to learn together.

However, according to this article by UCAS, here are a number of factors to consider when choosing a place of study:

• Comfort: Your comfort level in the space you choose to study will determine how well and how long you are able to study. Inconvenient study surroundings can lead to discomfort and distraction. If your study furniture is damaged or uncomfortable, it can stress your body, making you to lose focus. You should therefor ensure that regardless of where you choose to study, you feel comfortable when studying.
• Lighting: Lighting has been shown to affect one’s ability to concentrate and to study effectively. Too bright or too dark lighting can affect how well your eyes can focus, as well as how quickly they become tired.
• Colour: Colour has long been known to impact mood. Certain colours can inspire energy while others can demotivate you and make you lose energy,
• Noise: Clearly, noise is a form of distraction and can hinder you from concentrating on what you are studying. However, some people might prefer some type of sound or music when they are studying. But it is important to remember that too much noise can cause a strain and be quite a distraction when studying.
• Clutter: If your space is disorganized, it can affect the quality of your study and learning. A disorganized space makes it hard for you to find things easily and can also cause stress and anxiety which negatively impact your learning.

Here’s a recap of useful tips from the video:

• Carve out an exclusive study space: You should have a study/learning space that is dedicated for that purpose so that whenever you go to that space, you are more likely to observe and perform your learning tasks
• Pay attention to lighting that works well: We spoke about lighting earlier- it is important to ensure that the lighting is proper and allows you to focus on your study
• Have all the study materials in the same space: Not having all the materials you need for your learning and study session results in you having to leave the study space and will be distracting for you
• Ensure your space is comfortable
• Have a notebbok for recording notes and distractions: Your notes are not only important to help you keep track of what you are learning. They are equally important to help you ‘park’ away distractions. When a distraction comes to mind, you can capture it in writing so that you can remember to deal with it later.
• Determine what can derail you: You should also know what items and things might distract or derail you and then, keep them away from your learning and study space.
• Switch locations when you can: Finally, you can change locations from time to time as needed or even re-design your study space. We tend to be energized and motivated by new spaces.

Additional tips for staying focused when studying online:

• Put your phone away or on airplane mode.
• Avoid opening many tabs and shut down tabs that are not relevant to your immediate learning or study process. This is a form of "digital clutter" reduction.
• Use apps that help you concentrate or stay on track with your learning.
• If you do not need the internet while studying, you can make your study resources available offline, and only connect to the internet when you need to.

Build Your Tribe

Estimated Time: 1 hour

Learning does not happen in a vacuum, nor is it a solo endeavor. In regular in-person classrooms, we are used to attending classes with fellow students. This happens to be the same in online classrooms as well. However, being in the same classroom with others does not mean one is learning effectively ‘with’ others. So, how do you ensure you have the right people in your learning space and maximize the presence and contribution of classmates to your learning journey?

In this lesson, we will explore how you can effectively learn with other members of the Kibo community, specifically:

• Your Peers
• Your Instructors
• Your Mentors

Peer Learning

Let us start off with an understanding of what Peer Learning is or what is sometimes called: peer-to-peer learning.

Peer Learning is important because among other things when you learn with your peers:

• You engage in active learning.
• You reinforce your understanding of the subject matter.
• The learning is more personalized, especially in one-on-one scenarios.
• You are able to build skills for working with and collaborating with others.
• You are better able to understand the topic as you and your classmates can explain things in a common language.

Peer Teaching

While peer learning shows us the learning that can happen between students without the involvement of a teacher, another similar strategy, peer teaching places emphasis on the teaching role of peers.

Putting Peer Learning and Teaching to Work

You might be used to a teacher or instructor as the one who assigns peer work or peer groups but as self-directed learners, peer learning and teaching are useful learning strategies that you can initiate among yourselves for your own benefit. Here are some of the scenarios in which you can implement peer teaching and learning to improve your learning experience:

• Collaborative Projects: With this, you and other classmates are either assigned a project to complete by your instructor, or you identify a project or task and work towards solving it as a group. This involves each member of the group contributing something to the overall success and progress of the task.

• Peer Feedback and Assessments: Feedback is important for self-awareness and self-improvement. However, we cannot truly give ourselves all the feedback we need to improve. It is for that reason that receiving peer feedback helps to reveal our blind spots and allows us to pursue more holistic growth. In peer assessment specifically, this involves ‘grading’ each others’ work. In many cases, there is a rubric to ensure that the process is objective. With peer grading, you can learn a lot from each other’s approaches to completing a task.

• Study Groups: These are intentionally created groups of learners who engage in regular collaborative learning, many times, performing learning tasks together. Learning tasks might include study, research, discussions, and more. Study groups can last as long as they are needed and are based on the ability of everyone to commit to the group and help to make the experience rewarding for others.

• Proctoring Approach: Proctoring is a peer teaching approach where one learner, who is more advanced either in understanding or in accomplishments than another becomes responsible to help the other student learn the skills that they need to learn. In this approach, you can either be the individual who is learning or the one who is responsible for teaching. Either way, you would be accelerating your learning.

Reflection: Peer Teaching and Learning Experience

Learning from Instructors

At Kibo, instructors serve as guides on your journey through the learning experiences. You can expect that your instructor will encourage you to take ownership of your learning, and challenge you to ask questions and explore new ideas.

Teacher Roles in 21st Century Online Learning

In online classrooms, your instructor takes on the following roles:

In addition to the above, your instructors are on hand to provide you with support as you navigate the world of online, self-directed learning.

Learning From Mentors

In today’s hyper-connected world, you do not need to wait until you get into the workplace or get a boss for you to enjoy professional support from a mentor. In addition to your instructors, who act as a source of guidance and support, industry mentors play an important role in your learning, professional development, and readiness for the workplace.

As a computer science student and future tech professional, the tech ecosystem is full of many potential mentors who can not only help you accelerate your practical learning, but can help you grow your career. These experts can provide you with much needed feedback on your abilities and goals, as well as sharing lessons that they have learned from their professional experiences. Here are more reasons why you should have a mentor in the tech industry:

The Importance of Having a Mentor

• To provide clarity as you make career choices

  As you learn, the purpose of your study and other forms of practice is for you to become an expert in the field who uses his/her skills to solve problems. Experienced industry mentors can help you understand what professional path the skills you are developing are best suited for.

• To provide you with practical insights from the field

  As you go through your learning as a student and work on projects, it is important to ensure that the skills you are developing are relevant for the current job market. Mentors can provide insider insights on how to navigate the industry.

• To help you grow your professional network

  There is a common saying that ‘your network equals your net worth’. Needless to say, your career progress depends largely on your network. Whether you choose to become an entrepreneur or an intrapreneur within an organization, your network will be critical to your impact and success. This is where your mentors in the industry help by lending you the credibility and introducing you to other people who are critical for your career.

• To challenge you towards growth and improvement

  Some of the most successful people today attribute their success to having a mentor that helped them see what they could not see in themselves and discover and express their greatness. If you read through the stories of founders of Apple, Google and other companies, they talk about the importance of these mentors.

• To develop lifelong skills and skills for the workplace

  Your mentors will bring a professional perspective in their interactions with you. These will help you appreciate the non-technical skills that it takes to thrive and to work towards acquiring the same.

In general, mentora do not only help you learn about the subject matter, they also have a longer-term impact on your career. Studies have shown that having a mentor increases your chances of earning more and getting promoted.

As part of your experience at Kibo, you have been matched with a mentor. Note that asking for someone to help you in your learning journey is a meaningful ask and therefore, you should be ready to make the best of the relationship and make the mentor’s engagement with you worthwhile. Here are some tips for getting the most out of a mentorship relationship:

• You should show a willingness to learn and a willingness to put into practice the ideas shared with you by the mentor.
• Be prepared for each meeting with your mentor.
• Be clear about your expectations in the mentorship relationship and make them known to the mentor.
• But also be sure to keep your expectations reasonable. Remember that your mentors are working professionals, who are managing a number of other personal and professional commmitments.
• Schedule your regular meeting time with your mentor in advance (i.e. get on their calendar)
• Listen actively to your mentor, be curious, and ask questions.
• Engage respectfully and show gratitude to your mentor.
• Help your mentor help you. Try to clearly articulate the ways that your mentor can support you.

Assignment 3 - Learning Context Experiment

Due date: July 31st, 2023, 10pm GMT

Instructions

• Review the assignment brief below.
• Complete your assignment in a Google doc.
• Download your finished assignment as a pdf and submit on Gradescope and Woolf.

Brief

This week's assignment will require you to select one of the options listed below (all of them are from this week’s lesson), test it out for 3 days, and submit a reflection on your experience.

Options:

• Breathing: When you feel stressed, try out one or more of the breathing techniques introduced in section 3.2 (i.e. Alternate Nostril Breathing, 4-7-8 Technique, Box breathing).
• Meditation: Meditate for at least 5 minutes per day. You can use one of the meditation techniques from the stress management workbook.
• Movement: Carry out at least 30 minutes of moderate exercise per day.
• Sleep: Practice at least 3 items on the sleep hygiene checklist, and attempt to sleep at least 7 hours per night.
• Time Management: Try out one of the techniques in the "Improving Your Time Management" section (e.g. Time Auditing, The Eisenhower Matrix, Time Blocking, Calendaring, Planning Your Time, The Not To Do List).

Guidance

• Describe your experience during each of the 3 days of the experiment.
• After completing the 3 days, write a reflection that includes details of: 1) what went well, 2) what was challenging, 3) what you learned, 4) whether you will incorporate the practice into your life in the future (and if so, how you will incorporate it).
• You will need to submit a written document that contains both the daily description of your experience and the reflection.

Submission

Please save your document as a pdf file and submit your assignment on Gradescope, and then upload a copy to the Woolf platform.

Final Presentation Milestone 2

Use the learning plan that you created for Milestone 1 to carry out your learning and monitor your progress.

Some things to remember

• You should allocate 1 - 2 weeks to focus on learning your topic.
• After you have completed your learning, you will need to create a video lesson that teaches the lesson content to your classmates. (This will be the next milestone that you should work on during week 4 of the course).

You don’t need to submit this milestone now, you will submit it in week 5 when you finish the project and submit the rest of the milestones.

Building Your Learning Toolkit

Introduction

📺 Watch the following video from your instructor, Tolu, to learn about what you will be studying in week 4.

Learning Outcomes

After completing this lesson, you will be able to:

• Utilize habits to increase the effectiveness of your learning.
• Create a plan for developing good learning habits and breaking bad learning habits.
• Set and implement goals effectively.
• Identify and implement a variety of strategies to increase the effectiveness of your self-directed learning.
• Use reflection to learn from past experiences.

Getting Focused

Sections

4.1 Motivation

4.2 Set Goals You Can Achieve

4.3 Build Good Habits

4.4 Strategies for Learning

4.5 Grow Through Reflection

Assignment 4: Habit Inventory and Change Plan

Final Presentation - Milestone 3

Motivation

Estimated Time: 30 minutes

You may already be familiar with the concept of ‘bad habits’; things that we do automatically that are negative or which do not lead us to our desired end goal. In fact, we probably all have bad habits we are trying to get rid of. However, have you ever considered that you might have some ‘bad learning habits’? Some behaviours that might look helpful in the short term but hinder your ability to be a powerful learner in the long term? Learning should be fun and should have long-term value to us. However, some of these ‘bad habits’ can make learning tedious and ineffective.

As we kick off this lesson on utilizing specific strategies to improve our learning, we will start by exploring habits that support or prevent us from getting the best out of the learning process.

Good Study Habits

Reflection: Getting Real About "Studying"

List of the "secrets" from the article:

• Pursue passion, not A’s.
• Get comfortable with failure.
• Make a personal connection to your studies.
• Read and think actively.
• Ask big questions.
• Cultivate empathy for others.
• Set goals and make them real.
• Find a way to contribute.

Here are some key takeaways from the video:

• Remember that IQ is not the most important factor to doing well in school.
• Some critical skills for success are: Self-discipline, Self-motivation, Resilience.
• Hard work is neccessary, but not sufficient. You have to work hard doing the right things.
• When creating a study timetable, first block out the times when you have other commitments, then fill in your study time around it. This will create a more realistic schedule that you will be likely to stick with for longer.

Bad Study Habits

These points speak to studying but are clearly relevant to the way you think of your learning journey as a whole. Let's talk about some of the "bad habits" in more detail:

• Cramming

  This is when you try to memorize a great amount of information in a short period of time. Cramming defeats the purpose of learning, which is to understand. While memorization is important and useful, cramming typically does not add much long-term retention. If you have ever crammed anything before, ask yourself how much of it you still remember.

• Passive learning

  Passive learning as explained in the video is just going through the motions of learning without real engagement, reflection, and practice on what you are learning. You might be forced or you might force yourself to engage in passive learning due to the pressure of knowing you should study and just tick that box. However, such learning ends up without any real impact despite the amount of time that might have gone into it.

• Studying without a proper plan

  Without a proper plan, studying might take longer, be more difficult, and might be ineffective. When you plan out your study/learning, it is easier to identify what you want to learn, how you will learn, how much time you will require, and more in order to have a meaningful study/learning experience.

• Procrastination and distraction

  With all the multiple channels of information, social connection, and more online, we are more distracted than ever, especially when studying online. We are trying to study/engage in learning while watching Instagram reels or random YouTube videos. These not only lengthen the time we spend learning, but also affect our brain’s ability to focus.

• Not sleeping enough

  Sleep is essential to the functioning of the brain and to our energy. When you do not get enough sleep, you have low energy. as well as an inability to focus, or consolidate your learning. This will negatively impact the quality of your learning.

These are just a few of the several bad learning and study habits you might have picked up at some point that makes the learning process less effective for you than it should be. The good news is you can learn new and more effective learning approaches and strategies. We will explore these more in the coming sections of this week's lesson.

Reflection: Bad Learning Habits

Set Goals You Can Achieve

Estimated Time: 1 hour

Goal Setting

To get started with the learning process, you have to set learning goals or desired outcomes for yourself so that you know wear your learning journey is trying to take you, and have a clear pciture of what success looks like. We have talked a little bit about goal setting before in this course (in section 1.5 Self-Directed Learning), but in this section we will look at how to set goals using the S.M.A.R.T framework so that they can be as useful as possible.

Here are some typical goals that a computer science student might set. For each goal, you will see a non-SMART version and a SMART version.

How to Set SMART Goals

Setting SMART goals is an effective way to plan and achieve your desired outcomes. Here's a step-by-step process you can use to set these goals:

1. Identify Your Long-Term Vision: Consider your aspirations and long-term objectives in the field of computer science. Determine where you see yourself in the future and what accomplishments you hope to achieve. This will provide a broader context for setting your SMART goals.

2. Reflect on Your Short-Term Goals: Break down your long-term vision into smaller, manageable goals that can be achieved within a reasonable time frame. These short-term goals will serve as milestones on your journey towards your larger objectives.

3. Make Your Goals Specific: Ensure your goals are clear and well-defined. Instead of setting a generic goal like "improve programming skills," make it more specific, such as "build a basic web application using Python"

4. Ensure Goals Are Measurable: Establish criteria or indicators to measure your progress. This allows you to track your advancements and stay motivated. For example, you can set a measurable goal by stating, "Complete three programming projects by the end of the semester."

5. Determine Achievability: Assess the feasibility of your goals. Ensure they are challenging yet realistic given your current skill level, resources, and time constraints. Setting unattainable goals can lead to frustration, while overly simple goals may not provide enough motivation.

6. Check for Relevance: Check that your goals are aligned with your long-term vision and current needs. Consider how each goal contributes to your overall development as a computer science student. Goals should be relevant to your personal and professional growth.

7. Set Time-bound Objectives: Establish deadlines or target dates for accomplishing your goals. This helps create a sense of urgency and prevents procrastination. For instance, you might set a goal like, "Complete an online course on data structures and algorithms within the next three months."

8. Regularly Review and Revise: Revisit your SMART goals periodically, such as weekly or monthly, to evaluate your progress. Adjust them as needed based on new insights, changes in priorities, or unforeseen circumstances. Regularly reviewing and refining your goals will help keep you on track and motivated.

Discussion: Your Goals

Implementation Intentions

One of the ways to improve your ability to achieve your goals, is to couple well set goals with something called "implementation intentions". These are "if-then" plans that specify when and how you will achieve your goals. They can also be used to state what you will do if certain things happen during your learning journey. When they are used in this way, why are sometimes called "Coping Plans".

Here is an examples of an implementation intention: "If I have finished eating breaktfast, I will spend 15 minutes working on my Mathematical Thinking problem set."

The power of implementation intentions is that you are creating concrete plans of action for how you will achieve your goals, as well as "get out of jail" plans for how to overcome obstacles. By creating these while your mind is still fresh, you are able to utilize them to reduce the cognitive burden of decision making later on. As we saw in the previous section, these can be a powerful way to create habits that support you in achieving your goals.

Implementation intensions are usually in the form of: If [situation A occurs], then I will [behavior X]. Here are some examples:

• If I wake up tomorrow morning, then I will put on my shoes and go on a 20 minute walk.
• If I am feeling tempted to eat a cookie, then I will eat an apple instead.
• If I finish brushing my teeth, then I will journal for 15 minutes.
• If there are stairs, then I will take them.

And here are examples of implementation intentions that help you manage obstacles that could get in the way of you achieving your goals (i.e. coping plans):

• If I don't understand the Mathematical Thinking material, I will go to offfice hours.
• If my code isn't running, I will share a screenshot with my squad mates and ask for help.
• If I don't understand the OYL assignment instructions, I will post a queston in the help channel on Discord.

How to Create Implementation Intentions

Here's a step-by-step process for writing implementation intentions:

1. Identify Your SMART Goal: Start by revisiting your SMART goal and ensuring that it is specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This will serve as the foundation for creating your implementation intentions.

2. Break Down Your Goal into Actionable Steps: Identify the key steps or actions required to achieve your SMART goal. Break them down into smaller, manageable tasks that you can work on consistently.

3. Define the "When" and "Where" for Each Step: For each action step, determine the specific time and location where you will carry out the task. This adds clarity and makes it easier to follow through. For example, instead of saying "I will study algorithms," specify "I will study algorithms for one hour at the library from 7 PM to 8 PM every Monday and Wednesday."

4. Use If-Then Statements: Formulate if-then statements that link specific triggers or situations to the corresponding action steps. This mental cue will help you remember and initiate the intended action. For instance, "If it's Monday evening at 7 PM, then I will go to the library and study algorithms."

Discussion: Your Implementation Intentions

Habits

Estimated Time: 1 hour

Why Habits Matter

One of the key messages from this video is that habits can help your brain become more efficient!

As this quote suggests, being able to be consistent in your actions, especially when you don't feel like it, is one of the keys to success. But always being disciplined can be really challenging and mentally draining. Habits can help you put important actions on autopilot, so that you keep doing them without having to constantly summon up the motivation and discipline.

Goals, Habits, and Systems

Habits and Learning

Atomic Habits by James Clear

If you want to use habits to improve the way you live and learn, I would recommend reading James Clear's book, Atomic Habits. Below is a detailed video summary of the main ideas from the book.

• Cue: The cue is a trigger or a signal that prompts your brain to initiate a specific habit. It can be an external cue, such as a specific time of day, a location, or a visual reminder, or it can be an internal cue, like an emotion or a certain thought. The cue serves as a reminder to perform the habit.
• Craving: The craving is the motivational force or the desire that arises in response to the cue. It's the anticipation of the reward that the habit will bring. The craving creates a sense of longing or anticipation, which pushes you to act on the habit.
• Response: The response is the actual behavior or action that you perform in response to the cue and the craving. It's the habit itself. The response can be a specific action, a series of actions, or a routine that you engage in.
• Reward: The reward is the positive reinforcement or the benefit that you gain from completing the habit. It satisfies the craving and provides a sense of satisfaction or pleasure. The reward can be intrinsic, such as a feeling of accomplishment or relief, or extrinsic, like a tangible reward or recognition.

Building a Good Habit

Here are the key steps of James Clear's habit-building process:

• Make it obvious: The first step is to make the habit obvious. This involves creating cues or triggers that remind you to perform the habit. You can use visual cues, set reminders, or place items in your environment that prompt the desired behavior. The idea is to make it easy to start the habit and remove any barriers or obstacles.
• Make it attractive: The second step is to make the habit attractive. Find ways to associate positive feelings or rewards with the habit. You can do this by linking the habit with something you enjoy or by creating a sense of immediate gratification. For example, if you want to develop a habit of reading, make sure you choose books that genuinely interest you.
• Make it easy: The third step is to make the habit easy to perform. Break the habit down into smaller, manageable actions that require minimal effort. Start with a small version of the habit and gradually increase the difficulty over time. The key is to reduce friction and make it as simple as possible to get started.
• Make it satisfying: The fourth step is to make the habit satisfying. Create a sense of immediate satisfaction or reward when you perform the habit. This can be done by tracking your progress, celebrating small wins, or creating a sense of accomplishment. The idea is to associate positive emotions with the habit to reinforce its repetition.

Here is an example of how you can use James Clear's approach to form a good habit around programming:

• Step 1 - Identify the habit

  • Determine the specific habit you want to build. e.g., Practicing programming consistently.

• Step 2 - Create a Cue [Make it obvious]

  • Set a specific time and place for your programming practice. For example, designate 7:00 PM as your programming time and choose a quiet spot in your room.
  • Place your programming resources, such as your laptop, coding materials, or textbooks, in your designated spot as visual cues.
  • Place a visible reminder or sticky note on your desk or computer screen to prompt you to start coding. Or set a reminder on your phone or calendar.

• Step 3 - Create a Craving [Make it attractive]

  • Reflect on the benefits and value of practicing programming consistently. Visualize how it will improve your coding skills, problem-solving abilities, and confidence.
  • Create a desire to learn and progress by reminding yourself of your long-term goals or projects you're passionate about.
  • Find coding exercises or projects that align with your interests or career goals.
  • Join coding communities or study groups to connect with like-minded peers and make the habit more enjoyable.

• Step 4 - Create a Response [Make it easy]

  • When the cue prompts you to start programming, sit down at your designated spot, open your coding environment, and prepare to work on programming exercises or projects.
  • Set a timer for your desired practice duration to ensure you stay focused and committed.
  • Break down the habit into smaller actions. Start with a specific coding exercise or a manageable portion of a project.
  • Use online platforms or coding websites that offer pre-designed coding challenges or exercises to save time in finding resources.

• Step 5 - Create a Reward [Make it satisfying]

  • After completing your programming practice, reward yourself with something enjoyable or satisfying. It could be a short break to relax, a treat, or a small personal reward.
  • Track your progress and celebrate milestones. Use a habit tracker or journal to record your daily coding sessions and mark off completed exercises. Give yourself rewards or small treats after completing a week or month of consistent coding practice.

• Additional Actions

  • Repeat and reinforce:
    • Commit to practicing programming consistently at the designated time every day. Consistency is key to building the habit.
    • Use a habit tracker or calendar to mark off each day you successfully complete your programming practice. Seeing your progress visually can reinforce your commitment.
  • Overcome obstacles:
    • Identify potential obstacles or distractions that may hinder your habit, such as social media, procrastination, or competing priorities.
    • Minimize distractions by turning off notifications, setting boundaries, or using productivity tools to stay focused during your programming practice.
  • Create an accountability system
    • Share your habit goal with a classmate or friend who is also interested in coding. Check-in with each other regularly to ensure you're both staying on track.
    • Consider participating in coding challenges or competitions with others to foster accountability and friendly competition.

Breaking a Bad Habit

The model for breaking a bad habit, as outlined by James Clear in his book "Atomic Habits," involves four key steps:

• Make it invisible: Remove or minimize the cues or triggers that prompt the bad habit. For example, if you have a habit of snacking on unhealthy foods while watching TV, make the snacks inaccessible or replace them with healthier options. Modify your environment to reduce the visibility or availability of cues associated with the bad habit. Rearrange your space or remove objects that remind you of the habit.
• Make it unattractive: Highlight the negative consequences or downsides of the bad habit. Educate yourself on the harmful effects it has on your health, productivity, or well-being. Associate the bad habit with negative emotions or outcomes. Visualize the negative consequences and create a mental aversion to the habit.
• Make it difficult: Introduce barriers or obstacles that make it harder to engage in the bad habit. For instance, if you have a habit of mindlessly scrolling social media, remove the apps from your phone or use website blockers to limit access. Increase the effort required to perform the habit. Create additional steps or processes that discourage you from engaging in the habit impulsively.
• Make it unsatisfying: Remove or minimize the rewards or positive outcomes associated with the bad habit. Identify the underlying needs or desires that the habit fulfills and find healthier alternatives to meet those needs. Reflect on the negative feelings or regrets that arise after engaging in the bad habit. Keep a journal to track how the habit makes you feel afterward, emphasizing the dissatisfaction it brings.

Here is an example of how you can use James Clear's approach to break a bad habit:

Phase 1: Awareness

• Step 1 - Identify the bad habit (i.e., the response)

  • Recognize the specific bad habit you want to break, e.g., Scrolling on social media instead of studying.

• Step 2 - Identify the Cue

  • Identify the cues that trigger your urge to carry out your response, such as certain times of the day, specific locations, or emotional states.

• Step 3 - Understand the Craving

  • Understand the underlying reasons or desires that drive your craving to carry out your response. For the scrolling social media example: It could be a need for distraction, entertainment, or social connection. Or it could be some underlying anxiety about the assignment you are avoiding.

• Step 4 - Understand the Reward

  • Determine and interrogate the perceived reward for your bad habit. E.g., relief from anxiety.

Phase 2: Change

• Step 5 - Modify the Cue [Make it invisible]

  • Modify your environment to minimize these cues. For the social media example: turn off notifications, keep your phone out of sight, or use apps that limit access to social media during study hours.

• Step 6 - Change the Impact of the Craving [Make it unattractive]

  • Create a negative association for the craving. For the social media example: You can decide that spending too much time on social media is a sign of laziness.
  • Find alternative ways to fulfill those needs or reach out to the community for help. For the social media example: You can check Discord instead and post a question about what you are studying in the help channel.

• Step 7 - Change Response [Make it difficult]

  • Make it more difficult to flow through with your usual response to the cue. For the social media example: You can put your phone in another room when you are studying.
  • Replace the habit of scrolling on social media with a positive response, which in this case, is studying.

• Step 8 - Change the Reward [Make it unsatisfying]

  • Create a negative consequence for carrying out the typical response. For the social media example: every time you stop studying to check social media, you need to do an activity that you dislike as a consequence.
  • Create a replacement reward for not engaging in the bad habit. For the social media example: If you are able to study for 30 minutes instead of scrolling on social media, you could reward yourself with a short break to engage in a preferred activity, a healthy snack, or a moment of relaxation.
  • Associate the new reward with the feeling of accomplishment.

Strategies for Learning

Estimated Time: 2 hours

In this section, we will focus on strategies for learning, including:

• Note Taking
• Learning Diary
• Focus and Diffuse Modes
• Pomodoro Technique
• Chunking
• Deliberate Practice
• Active Recall and Retrieval/Testing
• Spaced Repetition

Note-taking (Capture & Create Method)

Capture: The first step is to capture information as quickly and comprehensively as possible. This involves actively listening, observing, and gathering relevant data. Some techniques to aid in capturing information include:

• Abbreviations and symbols: Use abbreviations and symbols to quickly jot down key points or concepts.
• Mind mapping: Create visual diagrams to connect ideas and show relationships between different concepts.
• Dictation or voice recording: Use voice-to-text tools or recording devices to capture information verbatim, especially during lectures or meetings.
• Keyword highlighting: Identify important keywords or phrases and highlight or underline them for easy reference.

Create: Once the information has been captured, the next step is to create organized and meaningful notes. This involves reviewing and processing the captured information to transform it into a more coherent format. Here are some strategies for creating notes:

• Structured outlines: Organize the captured information into a logical and hierarchical structure, using headings, subheadings, and bullet points.
• Summarization: Condense the captured information into concise summaries, focusing on the main ideas and key supporting details.
• Visual aids: Utilize charts, graphs, diagrams, or tables to illustrate complex concepts or relationships between different pieces of information.
• Personalization: Add personal insights, reflections, or additional examples to enhance understanding and make the notes more relatable.

Keeping a Learning Diary

The process of keeping a learning diary is simple. On the first page, draw up a daily diary and record in summary form what days and times you were engaged in your learning. Then for each study session or activity, keep a record of:

• The practical details - what, when, where, and how you studied
• The study methods and the various skills you used
• Your feelings about the methods of studying you used
• A note on the effectiveness of each session
• Comment on how you might change your practice to be more effective next time.

Focused and Diffuse Modes

The concepts of focused and diffuse thinking are part of the broader framework known as the "learning mode" or "diffuse mode" of thinking, introduced by Dr. Barbara Oakley. These thinking modes play a crucial role in learning and problem-solving. Here's how a student can leverage focused and diffuse thinking to enhance their learning:

Focused thinking: This thinking mode involves concentrated and deliberate attention on a specific task or concept. Here's how to use it effectively:

• Set specific learning goals: Clearly define what you want to achieve or understand in a study session. This helps direct your focus and gives you a sense of purpose.
• Eliminate distractions: Create an environment free from distractions, such as turning off notifications on your devices or finding a quiet study space. This allows you to maintain sustained attention on the task at hand.
• Break down complex tasks: If you're tackling a complex subject or task, break it down into smaller, manageable parts. This helps you maintain focus on one aspect at a time and prevents overwhelm.
• Use active learning strategies: Engage actively with the material, such as by taking notes, asking questions, or summarizing key points in your own words. This encourages deeper processing and understanding.

Diffuse thinking: This thinking mode involves a more relaxed and unfocused state of mind that allows for broader connections and creativity. Here's how to incorporate diffuse thinking into your learning process:

• Take breaks and relax: After a focused study session, take breaks to relax and let your mind wander. Engage in activities that help you unwind, such as going for a walk, practicing mindfulness, or engaging in a hobby.
• Engage in spaced repetition: Instead of cramming information all at once, space out your study sessions and allow for intervals between them. This gives your brain time to consolidate and process the information in the diffuse mode.
• Engage in unrelated activities: While in the diffuse mode, engage in activities that are unrelated to your immediate study material. This can include listening to music, reading unrelated articles, or exploring different topics. This allows your mind to make broader connections and discover new perspectives.
• Use visualization techniques: Spend time visualizing the concepts you have learned and their connections. Create mental images, mind maps, or diagrams to explore relationships and foster creativity.

Alternating between modes: Both focused and diffuse thinking have their roles in the learning process. It's important to alternate between these modes strategically:

• Focused-to-diffuse transition: After a focused study session, transition into diffuse mode by engaging in relaxation techniques or unrelated activities. This allows your brain to make connections and strengthen memory consolidation.
• Diffuse-to-focused transition: When you feel refreshed and ready to resume focused thinking, transition back by setting specific goals and returning to the task at hand. This helps maintain productivity and deepen understanding.

More on the Pomodoro Technique

Chunking

Chunking is a cognitive technique that involves breaking down information into smaller, more manageable units or "chunks." By organizing information in this way, you can improve your learning and retention abilities. Here's how to use this approach to enhance your learning process using the example of loops in programming:

• Identify fundamental concepts and break down large topics
  • Identify the types of loops: Begin by identifying the different types of loops you need to learn, such as for loops and while loops. Each type of loop can be considered a separate chunk of information.
• Master one chunk at a time
  • Understand the syntax and structure: Focus on understanding the syntax and structure of each type of loop individually. Learn how to write the loop header, specify the loop condition, and control the loop flow.
  • Learn the purpose and use cases: Explore the purpose and various use cases for each type of loop. Understand when and why you would choose one type of loop over another. This will help you grasp the context and applicability of each loop.
• Practice active recall
  • Practice with simple examples: Start by practicing with simple examples of each loop type. Write code snippets that demonstrate the basic functionality and behavior of the loops. Experiment with different loop conditions and iterate through different data structures.
• Apply your knowledge
  • Apply loops to solve problems: Practice using loops to solve programming problems or exercises. Look for coding challenges that require the use of loops and apply your knowledge to devise solutions.
• Manage cognitive load: Be mindful of the amount of information you are trying to process at once. Chunking reduces cognitive load by breaking information into smaller, manageable parts. Avoid overwhelming yourself with too much information in one sitting.
• Connect chunks and extend your knowledge
  • Work on nested loops: Once you have a good understanding of each loop type, move on to understanding nested loops. Chunk this topic separately and focus on how to effectively use loops within loops. Practice writing nested loop examples to reinforce your understanding.
  • Analyze and debug loop-related issues: As you practice using loops, you may encounter errors or unexpected results. When this happens, analyze the code, identify the issues, and debug them. Use your knowledge of loops to understand why the error occurred and how to fix it.
  • Explore loop control statements: Expand your understanding by exploring loop control statements such as break and continue. Chunk this topic separately and learn how these statements can modify the flow of loops and optimize their behavior.
• Review and reinforce your knowledge: Regularly review the different loop types, their syntax, and use cases. Use spaced repetition techniques to reinforce your understanding and prevent forgetting.

Deliberate Practice

How do the very best become who they are? How do great writers, sports people, artists, scientists, creators, and other stars emerge?

It is easy to dismiss those whose talents stand out as being gifted or having better circumstances. However, while some people’s circumstances might contribute to their excellent results, there is more to it than just circumstances of privilege or advantage.

If you are familiar with basketball, you have probably heard about Steph Curry. He is a multiple Most Valuable Player (MVP) award winner, one of the very best shooters at the basketball game, and also one of the highest-paid athletes. Watching the way he performs, you might conclude that his talent is the reason for his outstanding performance. However, according to him, “There's one thing that all great shooters have in common, and that's complete control over their mechanics,” he says. “That's not something you're born with—you have to practice it.” (Source: Masterclass.com). Steph Curry and many others reveal to us how important practice is to learning and mastery.

The end goal of learning is not only to be informed but to improve our growth and mastery. To become not only a great learner but equally a highly valuable programmer or computer scientist, you have to develop the habit and skill of deliberate practice.

It is important to know that deliberate practice is not doing something repeatedly. It is a practice that is intentional and rooted in the goal of growth and progress. Deliberate practice helps you to move from being at a novice level in a skill to becoming an expert at that skill. Deliberate practice involves intentional practice, feedback, and improvement in other to correct mistakes and deepen mastery and proficiency. Here are some components of deliberate practice

• Practice should be done towards a clear goal or expert-level performance
• There should be time for reflection (metacognition) - thinking about the practice activity itself and the outcomes
• There should be feedback from someone who has better mastery, such as a coach or another expert

These components, among others, separate deliberate practice from regular practice.

One thought about deliberate practice is that there has to be a very specific skill that you are practicing in order to give it the necessary focus. For example, a basketball player might focus on practicing and developing his shooting skills. As a software developer, that might mean focusing on a particular programming language. To engage in deliberate practice:

• Find out your current skill/knowledge level and the gaps that you have. When you assess your current level with the perspective of becoming an expert, you can recognize the gaps and the areas for improvement.
• Set clear and SMART goals that stretch you. What do you want to be able to do in a set period of time that you are not currently able to do? Identify a specific area of practice.
• Focus on this area of practice over time and give regular, consistent attention to it
• Take time to reflect on your progress and your strategies and analyze the impact that your current approach is resulting in.
• Get regular feedback. As you work on your area of growth and practice, get feedback from a coach, your teacher, or someone who can show you the gaps in your performance in order to find ways to improve continuously.

Active Recall and Retrieval/Testing

When we learn something, either in class or by self-study, it can either get stored in our short-term or long-term memory. Ideally, we want what we learn to get stored in our long-term memory to be able to use that over time. Our short-term memory might make it easier to recognize something we have learned in the short term but not necessarily recall it over the long term. Going back to our previous study on the neuroplasticity of the brain, we will remember that learning new information and skills requires our brains to build new connections. Recall strategies help us to do just that.

Recall can either be passive or active with passive recall happening when what is learned is passively reviewed, such as reading something multiple times over. However, active recall involves more intentional activities that stimulate the brain and engage you in bringing up and encoding the information for longer-term storage and recall.

• List of the strategies from the video.
  • Pre-test
  • Stop and Recite
  • In-Class Questions
  • Immediate Review
  • Toggles
  • Mind Maps
  • Teaching
  • Flashcards
  • Enumeration
  • Occlusions
  • Problem Sets
  • Practice tests

Retrieval Practice

Retrieval practice, which is also called practice testing, similar to recall, is the act of bringing back information to mind. During study, we encounter new information, and because we learn by making connections, it is important to be able to retrieve prior learnings in order to make connections to new concepts and ideas.

Here are some techniques for retrieval of learning:

• Direct verbal questioning
• Self-questioning
• Writing notes from memory
• Using flashcards
• Writing essays
• Group discussion

Spaced Repetition

Discussion: Learning Strategies

Grow Through Reflection

Estimated Time: 1 hour

So far, we have explored learning strategies that you can implement to plan and guide your learning. But how can you evaluate if your learning has been effective?

In order for you to be able to gauge your learning, you can use self-reflection and self-evaluation.

Reflective Practice

Reflective Learning

Reflective learning is a practice that helps you to move from being a passive learner into being an active one. It is the practice of monitoring and evaluating your own learning process with the objective of finding ways to improve. If self-directed learning puts you in charge of your learning process, then the reflective learning practice is about being able to evaluate and improve that learning process.

Reflection completes the learning process because it allows you to step back and evaluate your learning.

Reflection in Learning can happen in 2 ways:

• Reflecting-in-action: This is the reflection that is done when the action or the learning is ongoing. It is sometimes referred to as thinking on your feet or evaluating as you go. In a learning experience, reflecting in action might involve thinking about what you are reading, watching, or doing and exploring the impact of those actions or deciding on potential ways to act or respond.
• Reflecting-on-action: This type of reflection is done after the action or learning has been completed. This, on the other hand, is thinking through the entire learning process that has occurred and evaluating the progress or impact.

If you recall from the previous section, the final stage of self-directed learning has to do with evaluating your learning and requires strong reflection skills. This has to do with reflecting on action, and for the rest of this section, we are going to explore 2 useful models for this type of reflection:

• What? So What? Now What? Model
• Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle

Source

What? So What? Now What? Model

Steps of What? So What? Now What? Model:

• What? - Describe the situation.
• So What? - Identify key takeaways from your experience.
• Now What? - Determine what you will do differently in the future based on what you learned from the experience.

Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle

Steps of Gibbs’ Reflective Cycle:

• Description
• Feelings
• Evaluation
• Analysis
• Conclusion 
• Action plan

Reflect: Reflecting on Mistakes and Failure

2) Self-Evaluation (or Self-Assessment)

Some other questions to ask yourself when evaluating the quality of your learning:

• How well did I achieve my learning goals?
• What did I do that worked well? What did I do that didn’t work well?
• What should I do differently next time? What should I do the same?
• What am I still confused about? Or what do I still not fully understand?

Putting it to work

Here are some steps to take to implement self-reflection and self-evaluation in measuring your learning progress

• Review your learning goals regularly and determine if any need to be updated
• Evaluate how you are progressing towards your goals and how much you have been able to learn
• Evaluate the effectiveness of your learning strategies in your learning achievement
• Evaluate how well you are able to apply the knowledge that you are learning
• Consider how you might adapt and adjust your learning strategies for more effective outcomes

Assignment 4 - Habit Inventory and Change Plan

Due date: August 7th, 2023, 10pm GMT

Instructions

• Review the assignment brief below.
• Complete your assignment in a Google doc.
• Download your finished assignment as a pdf and submit on Gradescope and Woolf.

Brief

This week's assignment will require you to write about your habits and develop a plan to break one bad habit and create one good habit.

Task 1 - Habit Identification

• Make a list of 10 - 15 habits you engage in regularly. Consider habits across various areas of your life, such as personal, professional, health, relationships, and leisure.
• Review each habit and determine how often you engage in it. Indicate whether it's daily, weekly, monthly, or once in a while.
• Now, categorize each habit as positive, negative, or neutral based on their impact on your well-being, productivity, or goals. You can ask yourself the following questions to determine this:
  • Does this habit align with my values and goals?
  • Does it contribute positively to my well-being, relationships, or personal growth?
  • Does it detract from my productivity, health, or overall happiness?
• Determine the size of the impact that each habit has on your life, either small, medium, or significant.
• Select the top three habits you want to change. Prioritize habits that have a significant negative impact on your life.
• Identify a potential replacement habit for each of the three negative habits that you want to break. Think about alternative behaviors or actions that can replace undesirable habits and move you closer to your desired outcomes.

You should create a habit inventory table that looks like this:

Task 2 - Breaking a Bad Habit

• Select one of the top three negative habits that you would like to break.
• Use the step-by-step process outlined in the lesson to create a plan for breaking this habit. Be sure to mention how you would address the cue, craving, reward, and response steps.

Submission

Save your responses to tasks 1 and 2 as a single pdf and submit on Gradescope, then upload to the Woolf platform.

Final Presentation Milestone 3

By now you should be completing the learning portion of your SDL project. The milestone for this week is to create a video lesson on your topic.

Video Lesson Specifications

• Your video lesson should be 5 - 10 minutes long.
• Your video should include the following information:
  • Learning outcomes - i.e. what you think the viewer will learn by watching your video lesson.
  • Content and/or activities related to your topic. This should teach your viewer the information that is listed in your learning outcomes.
  • An assessment that tests how well your viewer has achieved your learning outcomes.
  • Your video lesson should not just be a lecture, but should instead include visual elements that make the lesson engaging. Try to also include activities or questions that require the viewer to learn actively.

Final Assessments

Final Essay (25% of final grade) - Personal Learning Charter

Due date: August 13th, 2023, 10pm GMT

Your first final assessment for Optimizing Your Learning is to use all the lessons learned and reflections you have carried out throughout the course to create your personal learning charter. Your learning charter will contain seven sections, which are listed below. In each section, you will respond to the prompts given below.

Personal Learning Charter Prompts:

• 1 - Who Am I
  • Describe your core, chosen, and given identities, and discuss how they influence how you approach learning?
• 2 - My Learning Beliefs
  • What are your key beliefs about how learning happens?
  • What is one limiting or empowering belief that you have about how you learn?
• 3 - My Learning Motivations
  • What intrinsic and extrinsic factors motivate you to learn?
• 4 - My Learning Goals and Implementation Intentions
  • What are some knowledge/skills that you wish to acquire in the next 12 months? (Share between 3 - 5)
  • For each knowledge/skill, what is one associated S.M.A.R.T. goal that you would like to achieve?
  • For each S.M.A.R.T. goal, what is one implementation intention that you can use to achieve your goals?
• 5 - My Strengths and Weaknesses
  • What are your learning strengths?
  • What are your learning weaknesses?
• 6 - My Learning Tools and Resource System
  • What learning strategies will you use to achieve your learning goals? (select 2-4 strategies and describe how you will implement them).
• 7 - My Learning Metrics and Milestones System
  • Answer the following questions for one of your learning goals:
    • What does success in learning look like to you?
    • How will you measure your learning progress towards success? What are some intermediary milestones?

The total word count for this essay is 1000-2000 words, and your grade on this assessment counts towards 25% of your final grade for this course.

Please use the seven sections listed above as the subheadings of your personal learning charter. Under each subheading, you should include your written response to the relevant prompt.

Submission

Please save your learning charter as a pdf and submit it on Gradescope, then upload a copy to the Woolf platform.

Final Presentation (25% of final grade) - Self-Directed Learning

Due date: August 13th, 2023, 10pm GMT

Your second final assessment is your self-directed learning project. Note that you have been working on this project since week 2 by completing the "Final Presentation Milestones''. Your goal for the project was to select a topic to learn about, create and implement a learning plan, create a video lesson that teaches the topic to the rest of your classmates, and evaluate and reflect on the overall experience.

The milestones for this project were as follows:

• Week 2: Milestone 1 (Planning) - Pick your topic, set your specific learning goals, and create a plan and schedule for how you will achieve your learning goals.

• Week 3: Milestone 2 (Monitoring) - Carry out your learning plan and monitor your progress.

• Week 4: Milestone 3 (Evaluation 1) - Create your video lesson on your chosen topic.

• Week 5: Milestone 4 (Evaluation 2) - Evaluate the quality of your learning, and reflect on the learning experience.

Milestone 4 Instructions

Self-Evaluation Directions

Your learning self-evaluation should answer the following questions:

• How well did you achieve your learning goals?
• How satisfied are you with the final video lesson that you produced? Why or why not?
• How effective was the learning plan that you created for Milestone 1? Did you end up deviating from the plan? If so, in what ways?
• When learning, what did you do that worked well, and what did you do that didn’t work well?

Learning Experience Reflection

Use Gibbs' Reflective Cycle to reflect on your SDL experience. Remember to include all 6 steps of Gibbs' Cycle: Description, Feelings, Evaluation, Analysis, Conclusion, and Action Plan.

Final SDL Submission

You will need to submit the following by the deadline:

1 - Your learning plan (Milestone 1)

2 - Your learning self-evaluation (Milestone 4) [Note: Ensure your submission answers all the questions asked in the "Self-Evaluation Directions" section above]

3 - A written reflection on the learning experience (Milestone 4) [Note: Ensure your submission uses Gibbs' Reflective Cycle and includes all components of this model. The notes on Gibbs' model can be found in Lesson 4.5 (Grow Through Reflection)]

4 - A video lesson on your SDL topic (Milestone 3) [Note: Ensure your video is in line with the instructions given on the Final Milestone 3 page]

Please create one pdf with all the written components of the submission (numbers 1 - 3), and submit it on Gradescope. For the video (number 4), you can upload the video to your Google Drive and include the link where indicated in Gradescope. Once you have uploaded your submissions to Gradescope, please also upload them to the Woolf platform.