How to Develop a Personal Learning Syllabus

If mastery of a topic is the destination, then a personal learning plan will be the roadmap to guide you there.

Lifelong learning enhances our understanding of the world around us and allows us to live fuller lives. By developing a personal learning plan and committing to it you can create opportunities for growth in both your personal and professional life. 💪

Most people are familiar with a syllabus as a way for an instructor to outline the learning objectives of a particular course. While most students, unfortunately, tend to ignore the document completely, it is in fact an extremely useful learning tool.

Creating a personal learning syllabus is like drawing yourself a roadmap so that you don’t get lost. Without it, you might waste your energy, consuming random unconnected bits of information that don’t coalesce into proper concepts that you can understand and remember. This is particularly true when trying to learn harder, more complex topics like computer programming. “Studying” in this manner (if you can even call it studying) can quickly lead you to close the book on your learning journey before it even begins. 🙅‍♀️

5 Steps to writing your Personal Syllabus

☝️1. Identify your Goal

Write out a short description of the area you want to explore (i.e. course description). You should try to choose something that is challenging enough to keep you engaged while remaining attainable within a reasonable amount of time. You also need to determine how to measure your success so that you know when you have reached the finish line.

✌️2. Break your Goal into Smaller Objectives

Break your goal down into a list of what you hope to learn (i.e. learning objectives). This list will act as the steps that you will need to take to achieve mastery of the subject.

It helps to lay them out in the order of complexity so that you know what sequence to follow when researching the topics. For example, when you learned to read and write you had to learn about letters before you could form words, and then you used those words to form sentences. You have to cover the foundational topics so that you can understand everything that builds on them.

☝️✌️3. Develop Learning Checkpoints

Decide on some potential “assignments” that will help you to check in on your progress. These will vary depending on what you are working on, but are necessary in order to gauge when you have achieved proficiency.

✌️✌️4. Gather Resources

Compile a list of learning resources — these can be books, websites, blogs, articles, podcasts, YouTube videos, etc. It’s a good idea to update this list as you go so that you can refer back to it when you review the information in the future.

✋5. Plan a Schedule

Life is busy and learning new skills can be time consuming, so giving yourself deadlines will help to make sure that you make time for your studies. Everybody’s schedule is different, but you should at least try to set aside a few hours each week to dedicate solely to learning.

👇 Use this template to write out your own learning plan.

Course Description:

Learning Objectives:

Resources:

Assignments:

Schedule:

I’ve also created a much more detailed workbook in the form of a handy Notion Template that can be used to keep track of the things that you are learning. I use this myself all the time, and it functions as a second brain for storing everything that my mind can’t remember on its own.

To use the template click on Duplicate Template to add it to your own Notion workspace. I’ve included some example entries to give you an idea of how to use the template. Just delete the examples and add your own.

If you have any questions, just let me know. 😊

✨ I’d love to hear if you decide to create a personal syllabus and what you plan to focus on for your own exploration. ✨