Shifting your focus toward learning can help you feel more connected, curious, and lead to the outcomes you want.
How is your learning going? You’ll notice we didn’t ask the more common question, “how are your grades?”
Why? Grades have a way of boxing us in and encourage identities such as “I’m an A student,” “I’m not a math person”, or “I’m a C student,” that can influence how we feel, behave, create expectations, and add pressure.
While grades matter, what if learning carried the same weight?
Pro Tip
Shifting focus towards learning can help you feel more connected and curious, and lead to the outcomes you want.
Here are some strategies to help support a focus on learning.
Finding a connection can help with motivation and feeling purpose with your assignments. Especially on those days you’re exhausted!
For Example: How does writing this essay contribute to becoming a Web Developer?
Communication skills, patience, and persistence are all soft skills sought after in this career. Writing an essay helps develop your communication skills, requires patience with the process, and persistence to go from outline to completed essay.
Feedback is how we learn. Understanding our mistakes is key.
This approach reduces the “what did I just read?” feeling.
Survey:- Scan the chapter or article first.
- Look for headings, terminology, charts, and chapter summaries to get a sense of what you’ll be learning.
Question:- After you scan, and before you start reading, turn chapter headings and sub-headings into questions.
- This helps with focus.
- Example: Turn a heading called “Experimental Research” into a question like “What is experimental research?”
Read:- As you read, try to answer your questions.
Reflect: - Pause after each section to process what you read and write your answers down.
Recite:Review:Grab a friend, family member or co-worker and try to teach them what you’re learning – teaching helps you break things down and practice expressing what you are learning.
As current and former students, we provide free resources to help you throughout your education, which may include links to third-party websites (where security and privacy policies may differ from Ascent’s). For our full disclaimer, please click here.
