Evaluate Learning Outcomes

t the half way point in my professional development plan for 2021 it is now a good time to review my progress . 

So far I have found the plan to be very helpful. Over the last six months I have studied a broad range of topics, some of those topics where within the plan and some where done in an ad hoc manner. Comparing topics studied within the plan to those studied without, the planned topics were studied in a more comprehensive and systematic way with more deliberate practice and social learning. This resulted in better learning outcomes with a more solid grasp of the subject.

Skills Learned

Learning to Learn

I completed my initial goals, finishing the practical, social and formal components with only bonus items outstanding on the progress tracker.

I finished a second course in addition to the one I initially identified and I was happy with the way I was able to put my learning into practice.

JavaScript

I completed my initial practical and social goals with the formal component still unfinished. A bonus practical activity as two video courses are still outstanding on the progress tracker.

I am happy with the improvement in my JavaScript skills and have been able to put my new knowledge into practice. The modularity and reusability of my JavaScript has improved. I am looking forward to finishing the final modules in my courses.

Reduce Stress 

The activities that I chose to combat stress were very effective and the WOOP Matrix was helpful in keeping me on track.  However while it was easy to keep the schedule when I was stressed it became harder when I was merely preventing possible stress in the future. I fell off the wagon in March but rededicated my efforts in April.

Functional Programming

I still haven't yet identified practical and social activities for category theory and lambda calculus. I am hoping they will help me improve my functional programming which is a style I have been utilizing with increasing frequency over the last decade.

 

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Self-Directed Learning

t the end of November 2020 I put together a professional development plan for 2021 with the help of Knowles (1975) Six Step Self-Directed Learning Model.

Diagnose Needs

First step in the Self-Directed Learning Model is to identify your needs. At the time three needs immediately came to mind.

• Encourage my team to take more ownership of their professional development.
• Learn to cope with the stress of my job in a more effective way.
• Increase my skill with JavaScript to the same level as my skill with C# and Swift.

The reason I was creating a development plan in the first place was to lead by example. It had the additional benefit of organizing my professional development in a more systematic and structured way.

In the last quarter of 2020 my sympathetic nervous system became over stimulated flooding my body with adrenaline and cortisol causing insomnia, stress and exhaustion. I needed to control my stress levels by engaging in activities that activated my parasympathetic nervous system. Fortunately I already had a good idea how to do this. Over most of 2020 I had been studying positive psychology and the science of wellbeing, so I had a wealth of both theory and practical advice to draw upon. It was just a matter of customizing that advice to my situation and putting it into practice. 

I have been using JavaScript for almost a decade, however I had learnt it in ad hoc manner and my understanding is not as thorough as most other technologies I used on a regular basis. My understanding of many JavaScript Frameworks was more comprehensive than vanilla JavaScript. This is the very situation I warn against when I mentor and coach other developers. Also my JavaScript code tends to be less structured or modular than my C# or Swift code. Therefore my skills in that area needed an upgrade. 

Formulate Goals 

After using focusing questions to narrow down the skills I wanted to target, I decided I wanted to balance my attention between people and technological skills and also between concrete and more abstract skills. I came up with a two by two matrix and filled it in.

Focus	People	Tasks
Abstract	Learn to Learn	Category Theory & Lambda Calculus
Concrete	Reducing Stress & Refocusing the Mind	JavaScript & Knockout

To help me make the most of my development plan I decided to study learning strategies as my abstract people skill. I decided that developing my intrapersonal skills to control my stress counted as my concrete people skill and JavaScript counted as my concrete technical skill. To fill in the remaining area I decided to concentrate on mathematical theories that would help me utilize functional programming in a more effective manner.

Identify Resources 

It was reasonable easy to find online resources to support my learning, there is a wealth of online courses that are freely available. I added them to my Self-Directed Learning Matrix 

Diagnose Needs	Formulate Goals	Identify Resources
Learning Strategies
	Learn to Learn	Professional Development Course Learn to Learn Course
Wellbeing
	Reducing Stress & Refocusing the Mind	sleep - 8hrs exercise - 30min meditation - 5min play music - 15min
	Happiness & Wellbeing	The Science of Well Being Course
JavaScript & Frameworks
	Generic JavaScript	Advanced JavaScript courses MDN Coursera courses JS for web devs JS, jQuery, JSON web programming
	KnockoutJS	https://knockoutjs.com/
Functional Programming
	Category Theory	Category Theory for Programmers Book
	Lambda Calculus	Lambda Calculus videos 1 & 2

You would think that meditation would be the most effective activity for reducing stress, but it turned out that for me, practicing and playing music was the most effective method. Not everyone can use music this way. However most people have some sort of activity that calms them and helps them focus their mind, whether that is drawing, golf, chess, music or some other hobby.

Choose Strategies 

For Learning Strategies and JavaScript I used the 70-20-10 rule. I filled in a Learning Action Matrix to divide my learning activities between deliberate practice, social learning and self study. 

For controlling stress I used WOOP to help establish new habits. I filled in a WOOP Matrix to plan my approach.

For functional programming I delayed planning out my approach until the other topics where finished.

Implement Activity

I used a study tracking board to track my progress in learning JavaScript and track my progress in applying Learning Strategies.

I used a check list to track my adoption of stress relieving habits. If I missed an activity on one day I focus on achieving it on the next.

Evaluate Outcomes

The six month evaluation can be found in this blog post.

Conclusion

The Learning Action Matrix organized the development plan in a simple to understand structure.

Many of the learning strategies that I learnt came together to form a synergistic whole.

Books

• Self-Directed Learning: A Guide for Learners and Teachers by Malcolm Shepherd Knowles

The New Normal

t's been more than a year since COVID became a part of our lives and we have adapted. The world looks very different from what it did a year ago. Some things are better e.g. more telecommuting, some things are worse e.g. less social events. This is a look back on what it has meant for me and what it means going forward. My experience is hardly unique as most of us face similar problems.

Work

I started a new job in March 2020 and a few weeks into the new job everyone was transitioning to working from home. I was a little hesitant at first as the schools had closed and my apartment was full of noisy children. However the children were good about being quiet while I was running meetings. My team adjusted to video meetings and we were soon communicating far more frequently than when we were sharing an office. The company was committed to making remote work effective therefore the transition was well planned and the IT infrastructure put in place to support remote work.

We all adapted surprisingly quickly and everyone made allowances for the situation, if there were people passing in the background of a video or a bit of extra noise it was no big deal. 

Biggest requirement is to draw boundaries. When I first started working remotely I thought the problem would be that my personal life would bleed into my work life, however my family is good about not disturbing me while I am at work.  A bigger problem is my work life bleeding into my personal life. There is always the temptation to do one more thing. Also there are time zone differences so even when you're off work other members of the team are still working, and in this always connected world, there is the temptation to respond to queries. I have seen team members respond while they are on vacation or after hours or on the weekend and I must admit that I have done the same.

It is sometimes difficult to balance your needs with other people's needs. One of the attendees of my meetings asked to shift the time so that she could pick up her child from school. I was happy to ask the other attendees if they were okay with the new time then adjust the time. I had faced the exact same problem the previous month, but had made other arrangements rather than inconvenience my co-workers. I realize now that I should have done as she had and asked my attendees if they were okay with a new time. It is important to ask for what you need to succeed and thrive.

I am back to working one day a week in the city.  I prefer remote work and most of my co-workers feel the same. The company has gone from having a dedicated office to renting a co-working space. This also means they have gone from having dedicated on-premises servers to having everything in the cloud. 

Unfortunately the transition back has not been as well organized as the transition to remote. At the start of COVID there was a sense of urgency and a determination to get things right. Whereas with the transition first to partial on site work and then to a co-working space the attitude has been more laissez-faire.

My employer is not the only business to shift to co-working spaces and cities all over the world are dealing with a shift in tenancy patterns.  

Family 

You would think that being cooped up in the same apartment we would see a lot more of each other, but we actually see less of each other now. Part of it is that the girls are getting older and more independent, but part of it is lifestyle changes brought by COVID. We now have more than twice the number of devices in the apartment than we did before COVID. It used to be that the family would sit in front of the TV sharing a movie, but those days are long gone. Now the TV is only used for news and video games. The demise of the idiot box isn't exactly a tragedy, some would call it a boon. However everyone stays in their room, working on their devices or video calling their friends or watching media. Sometimes the only thing that breaks the illusion that I am alone in the apartment is when one of my daughters comes out of her room and asks me for help with her school work.

Thank the stars for card games. We played cards before COVID, I taught the girls when they were very young, and it has always been a fun shared activity but card games became a lot more important after COVID.  We still go walking around the park when the park is open and restrictions allow, but less frequently than we did. We also used to do a lot of improv games. Those have gotten a little less popular as the girls get older but are still fun.

We have to schedule time together now and make family time a priority, where before it just happened.

Exercise 

With the gym and pool shut down in the middle of the crisis I was reduced to running up and down the stairs. Thankfully things are back open again, but I still haven't fully gotten back into my old routine.

The girls had it worse with almost everything shut down. They are back doing most of their activities such as swimming lessons, gymnastics and dancing. However they still do less activities than they did before. I worry about the effect of spending so much time indoors has had on them.

Select the Right Skills to Improve

ontinuous learning

is key to maintaining your professional skills, and as with pursuing any goal it helps to have a plan. In this case a professional development plan. When creating your development plan it is important to select the right skills to focus on. When selecting skills to train ask the following questions.

Focusing on Strengths or Weaknesses?

• Reasons to focus on strengths
  • You can gain energy from building strengths while fixing weaknesses can drain energy and enthusiasm.
  • Groups naturally divide tasks and the team can gain efficiency if each member specializes on their strengths.
• Reasons to focus on weaknesses
  • gives you a more flexible toolkit
  • over-specialization can make you a bottleneck within the team
• Reasons to balance focus between strengths and weaknesses
  • combining a broad base of skills with a few specializations is called T-shaped skills and is advocated by many thought leaders.
• Reasons to creatively apply a strength to tasks you are weak in.
  • Dr. Martin Seligman the positive psychology guru gives an example of a student who dreaded the long walk home every night from the library. He used his humor and playfulness to overcome his fear and turn the walk into a source of joy.
• Test your strengths
• Via Survey

Focusing on Task or People Skills?

• What's more important, hard skills or soft skills?
• Both are important as almost all jobs require you both to complete tasks and work with other people.

Focusing on Skills for Your Current Role, or Next Role?

• First you need to master your current role, but after a certain level of competency you need to prepare for the future and broaden your skill base.

Focusing on Specific or General Skills?

• Concrete skills like a language or framework that work on a specific platform or situation.
• Semi-Abstract skills like Design Patterns or SOLID principles that work on a class of platforms or situations.
• Abstract skills like problem solving strategies such as Alternating Divergent and Convergent Thinking or the TRIZ framework that work in almost any situation.

Concrete skills are easier to learn and it is easier to test whether you have learnt them correctly. However it is harder re-use these skills in different situations. They often have narrower applicability. Also unless you pair concrete skills with semi-abstract skills it can sometimes be difficult to do deep learning, depending on how much theory comes bundled with the concrete skills. Abstract skills are fuzzier and can be harder to learn however they are easier to apply to widely different situations.

The Common Strategy May Not be the Best Strategy

I have coached and mentored many developers and most developers focus on narrow technical skills and place a strong emphasis on eliminating weaknesses. This is a reasonably good strategy for a beginner. However what is suitable at one stage of your career will not necessarily help you at a latter stage. I see many experience people not living up to their potential because they fail to widen and broaden the sources of their inspiration.

Learning by Doing

cting Your Way into a New Way of Thinking

Positive Deviancy wasn't the only technique in Jerry and Monique Sternin's arsenal as they endeavored to convince the Vietnamese villagers to change what they fed their children. Jerry Sternin believed 'It's easier to act your way into a new way of thinking, than think your way in to a new way of acting.'
The biggest obstacle to the changes they wanted to make was the perception that the foods that they were advocating were worthless and low class. They made those foods (sweet potato greens, shrimp, and crabs) the price of admission for their cooking event. By gathering those foods so that they attend a cooking event that showed how to prepare those foods and then them caused cognitive dissonance as the villagers had acted as if they believed that sweet potato greens, shrimp, and crabs weren't worthless after all.
Even if you are convinced, knowing that something is the right thing to do doesn't make it easy to form a new habit. Making small incremental changes in your life is far more effective than any amount of self talk trying to convince yourself to do the right thing. Having the villagers gather the materials themselves broke the ice and gave them a head start in creating that new habit.

Recognition is Not Recall

When studying a subject students often believe they know the material as it is familiar. But recognizing that you have encountered the material before is not the same as recalling the material on demand. Students can easily become over confident believing they know the material when they do not.
Re-reading the material will only make things worse. Only by testing yourself and undertaking deliberate practice can your knowledge be solidified.

This sense of familiarity and recognition is behind much of the illusion of explanatory depth where people believe that they know how every day objects work but are at a loss when asked to give a detailed explanation.
It is also behind much of The Dunning-Kruger Effect. Just because something is ubiquitous in your life, doesn't mean you have the language and mental models to truly understand what you are seeing no mater how frequently you encounter it.

70-20-10 Rule

When learning a new skill or knowledge area we trend to over invest in self study and formal study and under invest in learning with others and deliberate practice.

Breaking Down Learning Activities

According to the Center for Creative Leadership learning can be up to 3 times more effective if you take a hybrid approach. This has been supported by subsequent research.

The breakdown is as follows

• 10 percent of professional development optimally comes from formal traditional courses
• 20 percent through social learning, coaching, mentoring, collaborative learning
• 70 percent through hands-on experience

Articles

• The 70 / 20 / 10 model for learning

Videos

• 70:20:10 by Charles Jennings
• Charles Jennings - The Four Ways Adults Learn
• 70:20:10 Model for Learning - InfoPro Learning
  
• The 70:20:10 Approach to Learning and Development by Cognology
  
• 70 : 20 : 10 & Continuous Learning explained by Charles Jennings
  

Books

• FYI: For Your Improvement by Michael M. Lombardo, Robert W. Eichinger
• Free Pdf