Develop a Personal Learning Plan

"Thoughts tending to ambition, they do plot unlikely wonders" -- Richard II

self-directed learning rocks!!

Many of my students are just cutting their teeth with blogging (or with research blogging) and aren't sure what to do with it. Okay, there is a requirement to make two substantial posts a week and comment on others' blogs. But what does that really mean? Where do I begin?

Begin with the course Learning Outcomes. Read and reread those, and think of your blog as the place where you document reaching those outcomes. Want to know what to blog about? Pick any of those learning outcomes and explain how you are achieving it.

You will note that one of the learning outcomes is NOT "student demonstrates the ability to follow a prescribed schedule of readings." This will put many students outside of their comfort zones. After all, so much of school is on the obedience-to-authority model. Students start to forget just how smart they are, or it doesn't occur to them that they have ample resources and smarts to construct their own learning plan.


And so one of your first posts needs to be the first draft of a personal learning plan (as David Tertipes, John Kendrick, Sarah Bown, Natashya Chelson and Johnny Spelta have all done on their blogs). What is a personal learning plan? Obviously, it's describing how you will go about meeting the learning objectives, but this should be based on personal interest (what you'd like to learn about Shakespeare -- within the stated parameters).

You could start with an inventory. What has your personal experience with Shakespeare been? How far along are you with Shakespearean literacy? What plays (or screen adaptations) have you heard about and been interested in that you'd like to pursue? You could start like this, somewhat informally, and use your blog posting to talk through possibilities aloud.

After doing such an inventory, you can more formally lay out your plan, referencing explicitly the learning outcomes. I think this should be a provisional plan, a working plan. After all, once we all start reading one another's plans, we are likely to revise our own since we'll gather good ideas from others. And I'll try to give you feedback, too.

Remember that your learning about Shakespeare can and should be quite varied and diverse (the outcomes are written that way); however, as the semester progresses (and as you learn more about how to do research blogging) you will naturally develop a thematic focus, and ultimately an argument. Even though your final result will not be a standard academic paper, the expectation is that you will achieve comparable degree of mature writing. Knowing that this is your destination point for the semester, try to write a personal learning plan that aims you toward something that will have coherence and direction. In other words, don't be too random.

As always, the important thing is that you get something up. Your personal learning plan might be too short and simplistic; it could be overly ambitious. That's okay. You'll get feedback and be able to reformulate where you go. But you can't get to more refined learning and expression until you get in the game with something. So don't overthink it. Write that post.

Photo: flickr - M. Johansson