I’m taking myself back to school. Except this time I’m designing my own course of instruction and carrying out the concept independently.

One of my frustrations in school is that I would get excited about a topic, but not have room to explore it.
Or I would become overwhelmed by so many ideas from so many classes that I couldn’t implement any of them.

When I first considered this ‘back to school’ project, I listed every subject I was excited about learning. Topics poured out of me. That running list is over 40 items long.

I knew that if I scheduled and held myself to all of them, I’d be boxing myself in. If I didn’t schedule anything, I would be overwhelmed by choice.

The solution? Queues and Templates.

I chose four (just four!) subjects I really (really!) wanted to study.

• Career capital and micro-economics
• Deliberate practice in violin teaching
• Deliberate practice practicum
• 100 hours of observation

For the queue I prioritized excitement and importance to get the project rolling. I knew starting with topics I believed to be relevant and personally interesting would help me transform this idea into a habit.

By choosing only four topics, I was able to think ahead a little bit. When articles and books and facebook groups came to my attention around social justice, I knew I could set them aside for now because I would be diving deep in a month. When I had a surge of desire to go watch a lot of teachers teach, I redirected my attention to the project at hand knowing that 100 hours of observation were soon to come. Any time an idea or book recommendation comes up for one of these four topics I tuck them into their respective notes in Evernote. Capturing but not dwelling.

And how to know when I was finished with one topic and ready to move onto the next? The template.

I sketched out a template of learning– basically the ideal course structure– to move through in every subject. With a learning template I define, in advance, the scope of study so I don’t get caught in rabbit holes or on tangents. The template focuses me on output rather than just input, so I’m required to digest ideas and recombine them in my own words before I move onto the next subject.

For every subject I interface with, I follow the same pattern…
1) collect ideas in an Evernote file (initial thoughts on the topic, recommended books, angles, projects)
2) when the time comes, write out a SYLLABUS based on the ideas I’ve been gathering. The syllabus includes all research (books/articles/interviews/documentaries), assignments, projects, and reflective writing required.
3) A shallow work phase of collecting all materials (library books, etc.)
4) Reading. I move through the syllabus book list systematically. As I read the books I take brief notes in Evernote. At the end of the book I pose 5 questions to the author (in the note, not real life). You can follow my reading here.
5) Writing. A combination of morning journaling and blog post writing. Important pieces are turned into journal articles to submit to the Suzuki Journal and other publications.
6) Complete any assignments or projects
7) Post all of the discoveries here, including the syllabus in case someone wants to dive into the same topic.

Notice the template requires me to go WAY deeper than simply reading a book. I borrow a phrase my father passed on to me from speech-writing and debate strategy: “Say what you are going to say, say it, and say what you said.” For our purposes…

Say what you are going to LEARN.
LEARN IT.
Say what you LEARNED.

This self awareness, facilitated by learning queues and templates, makes all the difference.