Personal Learning Plan
I completely and wholeheartedly buy into the “lifelong learning” thing. As humans, I believe we are innately lifelong learners – we almost can’t help learning throughout our lifetimes. It is our condition to learn. Period.
Still, because of who I am and who I want to be, I have a plan for being truly intentional and purposeful about my learning. I call it my plp – my personal learning plan.
While I find it challenging to articulate my plp simply, I offer the mindmap below as an attempt to do so. A number of people ask me about my plp, and I’ve been trying to capture a snapshot of my plp, so that I can share it with others and learn from others’ personal learning plans.
Below the image, I expand on a few of the nodes in the mindmap, and I also showcase some elements of my more formalized learning endeavors.
Podcasts
RSS Feed Library – Feedly
Stack Reading
In 2005, I began a discipline called “stack reading.”
- First, I’ll read a book pretty quickly, and I’ll limit myself to one page of high-level summary notes. (Initially, these notes were on paper, but now I use Evernote.) Then, I’ll place the book in a stack.
- Second, I read another book, in the same manner I describe above. And I continue on in this way.
- Third, when a stack has three or more books in it, I reread the entire stack with more detailed annotation, particularly noting the connections among the works in the stack.
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Bouncing around between our connections today, I happened up this page. Love it. I find it fascinating (though not surprising) that we read in such a similar way- though my own process tends to be an either/or. I either read individual books voraciously (though in isolation of each other), keeping a chapter-by-chapter summary going with a goal of developing a dense but thorough one-page sketchnote-style overview (I’m doing that w/Phil Jackson’s Eleven Rings right now), or read 3+ books together, alternating at regular intervals and taking notes / citing from the text what similarities / differences jump out at me. (My favorite version of that process was one summer’s reading of A People’s History of the United States, Wicked, and The Dark Knight Returns simultaneously – I just ran across that notebook the other day and it was fascinating to me in its oddness.)
I may try the Stack Reading approach to see how it feels, though there is a part of me that really enjoys the journey of idea-finding & relationship-seeking that I experience before I know where the story is going to go. At the very least, you’ve inspired me to explore the development of a PLP for 2014, and to record it on my blog. Thanks!!!
Thanks, Tony. For all of the exchanges recently (and at EdLeader21). I cannot wait to see your next iteration of your PLP. I know I’ll be inspired to reflection and ways to enhance my own practice methods.
Happy New Year!