Stress-less Learning
I was having lunch with a group of friends recently. As most of my friends are married with kids, naturally the conversation swung towards early childhood education, as this is what they spend most of their savings on. One of my friends at the table, a teacher at a Montessori school, was sharing about the differences between the Montessori method as compared to other methods of teaching.
A Montessori teaching method is where students direct their own learning based on tasks assigned and where teaching revolves around the students’ curiosities. Kids are believed to have curiosity, which in turns, drives their desire to learn. Teachers take a backseat role to provide knowledge in the areas where the kids wish to explore in.
This made me think about my own learning path and I started to make changes to my view about learning.
In school, we are taught to rote learn, which is a memorization method based on repetition, and the more we repeat the textbook, the better we recall the content and this justifies that we are learning well. Subconsciously, we carry this habit to our adulthood and continue to use this method of learning. A lot of us stopped learning altogether as learning became a chore.
What if we have the choice to learn like the kids at Montessori schools?
Let me propose two different paradigms of learning:
- Checklist based learning
- Task based learning
Checklist based learning — When we are taught a new subject, we usually turn to books, textbooks, or courses conducted by qualified teachers. The contents are structured as written in the content page (of books) and course curriculum (in courses). Each topic consists of several concepts that are packed into each chapter. We learn one concept after another as we read through the books or sit through the classes. Learning hence become similar to ticking off topics off a “checklist” when we finish chapters after chapters.
Task based learning — Instead of going through materials that “throw” concepts after concepts to us, we dive straight to solving problems just like a Montessori school kid. By knowing the end result, we are able to plan our method to tackle the problem.
When we focus on the task on hand, we sieve out information that is often relevant and important to our learning rather than going through all the concepts in a guided material and in the process, make us lose our interests.
Here’s my personal experience to sum up what I meant by task based learning…
I started to pick up Python programming recently, as part of my job. At the start, I was reading up books and going through courses on Udemy, trying to follow the worked examples taught. I went for a 10 day intensive boot camp in Python at a University. However, at the end of 2 years after doing all these learning, I wasn’t confident about coding at all…
One day, during work, I saw a colleague struggle with data manipulation on excel. Everyday, he spent hours at work doing manual data formatting. That was when I started writing my first script on my own…
At the end of 2 months, when I have finished, I was amazed at how much I have achieved. By devoting myself to completing the task, I planned the method to achieve the outcome. I learned concepts that are required and in the process, I learned how to apply them to make them work in my program.
I was surprised that all the hours spent on checklist based learning for 2 years equate to 2 months of task based learning.
Hence, I encourage you to try to change your approach of learning when you find yourself giving up on obtaining a new skill.
