Do you need a recap?
Talking with my nephew yesterday after his first week back at school got me thinking about development goals and how sometimes, we just need to hit pause for a bit.
“So how was your first week of Primary Two? What have you been learning?” I asked him excitedly, assuming he’d tell me some new words he’d been learning. “It’s good. We’re not learning anything yet.” He replied, shrugging his shoulders. I asked, “but what have you been doing this week then?” and he replied “well, we’re just going over all the Primary One stuff and then when we’re ready we’ll move on to Primary Two.”
After the year he’s had at Primary One, through lockdowns and various restrictions, it makes complete sense to spend some time recapping and consolidating before moving on to anything new.
I found myself browsing through courses the other day, wondering what to start learning next. Then I remembered that I had taken a course a while back all about advanced facilitation techniques and hadn’t revisited it much since then. I pulled out my notes to review them and remembered that I’d wanted to learn more about neuroscience. Other than a little bit of light reading, I’d not done much more on it though. I found a great short course on educational neuroscience that I quickly got engrossed in.
Revisiting that previous course allowed me to set a new learning goal. I’m sure by reviewing Primary One, my nephew and his class will learn a lot and (possibly more importantly) feel motivated to start learning all the new things Primary Two will bring.
As adults, how many of us do this? What do you need to recap or review before even thinking about your next learning or development goal? What books, articles, courses, podcasts, videos etc did you work through last year, amidst all the lockdowns, that would be useful to revisit with a clearer mind now?
If you’re thinking that you need to better organise your notes when you’re learning something, have a look at the Learning Journal.
If you’re ready to start planning your development, check out the Personal Development Plan workbook.