Stages of metacognition

Previously I’d only considered this ‘meta – thinking’ in terms of knowing what I don’t know. In other words, looking at a syllabus and roughly approximating areas I felt confident in vs ones I didn’t. Whilst that worked to an extent, I wanted to do better than that.

I found a brilliant video on this concept from Peterson’s below:

Finding your weaknesses as a software developer requires planning, monitoring and evaluation of each learning project. We need to focus on the how we learn, and see what we can improve.

Emulate the experts

As well as the handy video above, I also listened to “The Science of Learning” on Listenable by Benjamin Keep. He makes a point of basing your learning on experts. That makes sense to me. Experts have the following traits.

  • They know the fundamentals of a subject, so they can modify their learning around a specific ‘use case’ as a result.
  • They have complex knowledge structures in their memory, something we already know as a chunk.
  • To get to the level of expert, they often reflect on what they do.

As it turns out, I want to emulate these traits for next ‘learning project’ at work.

My sample use case – DynamoDB refresher

At work, my current project is using DynamoDB a lot. I’m getting left behind in conversations because I don’t know enough about how it works. Time to up-skill. Now as it happened, I did have access to a DynamoDB deep-dive from Whizlabs, so I’m going to try that out. Full disclosure – that is an affiliate link. The reason I’m deciding to use Whizlabs is that I’ve already paid for this course one way or another via other purchases I’ve made with them. I won’t know whether the course is any good until I actually measure my progress at work. That said, their exam guides helped me pass, so let’s see.

I’ll lay out my training plan next.