Not every learning activity requires a step-by-step approach. If you want to learn how to, say, change the tire on your car, you don’t need to follow each idea outlined below, although it might help.
But if a skill is worth knowing deeply, then it’s worth knowing well, and we need to take a systemic approach to developing expertise, as follows:
Value
It’s impossible to learn if we don’t want to learn, and to gain expertise, we have to see the skills and knowledge as valuable. What’s more, we have to create meaning. Learning is a matter of making sense of something.
Target
In the early part of gaining mastery, focus is key. We need to figure out what exactly we want to learn and set goals and targets.
Develop
Some forms of practice make people more perfect than others. In this stage of learning, people need to hone their skills and take dedicated steps to improve performance.
Extend
At this point, we want to go beyond the basics—and apply what we know. We want to flesh out our skills and knowledge and create more meaningful forms of understanding.
Relate
This is the phase where we see how it all fits together. After all, we don’t want to know just a single detail or procedure—we want to know how that detail or procedure interacts with other facts and procedures.
Rethink
When it comes to learning, it’s easy to make mistakes, to be overconfident, and so we need to review our knowledge, reconsider our understanding, and learn from our learning.
