Examples, Templates, Prompts, and Exercises

Let’s explore some ways you can design your own Learning Opportunities. If the world is your classroom and you recognize that learning happens all of the time, you will also recognize that the possibilities for making Learning Opportunities are almost unlimited.

It is a little bit of a good news/bad news situation. The good news is obviously that there are so many Learning Opportunities for you to participate in. The bad news is that there are so many Learning Opportunities for you to participate in that you might have trouble deciding where to start.

This is called a Blank Page Problem. A Blank Page Problem is the frozen feeling you get when you are given a completely open-ended choice. When you have the option of doing anything, sometimes it is hard to decide what you want to do.

Imagine an adult who gives a blank sheet of paper to a group of teenagers and says, "Draw whatever you want."

A few people will relish the blank page and draw something they are comfortable drawing.

A few will doodle squiggles in the upper right corner trying to look like they are drawing until the adult walks away and leaves them alone, then they will stare at the page.

Many will look up and shrug, "I don't know how to draw," they will say. "I don't like to draw."

They will look over at the person next to them and see what they are drawing. "Maybe I will just do what they are doing," they will think. Even though the instructions were simple, the lack of rules, directions, and ways to measure success made it a tougher task than it might seem.

Blank Page Problems are hard.

Blank Page Problems are especially hard for teenagers.

"You mean I am going to be judged not only on how I draw but also on what I choose to draw? Ugh."

You have been led to assume, by society, by the media, and by schools that there are always right answers and wrong answers. Just by being a part of our culture you are led to believe that your job is to figure out the right answer, do that, and you will be fine.

Blank Page Problems challenge those assumptions.

Blank Page Problems say, "the world is much bigger than right and wrong answers", "the world is an open-ended problem without many instructions."

If you grew up expecting that there were going to always be right and wrong answers, Blank Page Problems can be very challenging.

But there are approaches to solving Blank Page Problems. Let’s look at one.

If, instead of saying "Draw whatever you want," what if the adult in our example said, "Draw a cat." It would be a little bit easier for most people.

Sure, some will still groan because they don’t feel comfortable drawing but at least they will have a starting point. Some will draw a quick cartoon cat. Proud of their speed. Some will sketch a life-like cat. Proud of their skill. Some will write the words, "A Cat". Proud of their cleverness.

Some will look at their neighbor and share. "What did you draw? I drew this." Trying to get any kind of positive feedback.

Some will hunch over their drawing so no one can see it, convinced that they drew the wrong kind of cat.

For many, "Draw a Cat" is much easier than "Draw whatever you want." It is still hard but at least it gets you drawing something.

The directions to “draw a cat” is a way to narrow down the options.

You just learned one approach to deal with Blank Page Problems. If "draw a cat" is easier to tackle than "draw whatever you want" we can apply this truth to other kinds of Blank Page Problems.

The instruction to "Draw a cat" is called an Intentional Constraint. It allowed you to get started because it limited your thinking to drawing a cat. When you were told to draw anything you had an unlimited set of choices; when you were told to draw a cat, the range and number of choices was reduced.

You might not have needed Intentional Constraints when you were in kindergarten. At five years old, "draw whatever you want" isn't really a problem. Five year olds just start drawing.

But you are older and you are more aware of the social world out there. You have learned that your choices have consequences. Your choices will be judged. You aren't as carefree as you used to be.

While it might seem a little bit sad to realize that now you are a little bit more anxious about how the world might see you. It is also a good thing. You think more deeply and are more intentional about your choices. That is a sign of your growing autonomy.

Remember, autonomy is one of the qualities we are working towards.

There is a big difference between being "independent" which means to be or act alone and being autonomous which means being or acting of your own volition or free will.

Blank Page Problems can be hard because they ask us to be autonomous and to use our own free will to decide where and how to start. Blank Page Problems challenge us to be autonomous and sometimes we aren’t ready for that.

The good news is that increasing your sense of autonomy has some real payoffs. The work of social scientists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci, in particular, talks about the positive outcomes of autonomy.

• Positive affect: having a genuinely optimistic outlook
• Performance: being able to do the job you are trying to do
• Psychological Well-being: having a healthy mental outlook
• Conceptual Understanding: getting it
• Creativity: coming up with unique and useful ideas, approaches, and solutions
• Productivity: getting things done that you want to get done
• Persistence: being able to stick to it despite obstacles
• Healthier Lifestyle

All of this is to say that being able to confront Blank Page Problems is good practice for developing autonomy.

and

Creating your own Learning Opportunity is a Blank Page Problem.

so

Creating your own Learning Opportunity is a good way to develop autonomy.

Let’s examine some techniques you can use to design your own Learning Opportunities.

We can use the approach of creating Intentional Constraints to tackle the problem of creating your own Learning Opportunity.

Let’s imagine our fictional adult who asked us to “draw a cat” is now saying, “create your own Learning Opportunity.” But to make it easier we are going to add in an Intentional Constraint.

What if they said, “create your own Learning Opportunity involving a cat?”

What kind of Learning Opportunities could you create that involved cats?

You could write a short story with a cat as the main character. You could research the best breed of cat to get as a pet. You could do a survey of everyone you know and ask about their attitudes towards cats and then use the data to create statistical charts and graphs. You could explore the history of domesticated cats and create a timeline. You could interview a veterinarian about taking care of cats. You could study cat anatomy. You could create a video about cats who have appeared in paintings over the centuries. You could start a cat sitting business. You could design costumes for cats.

That is just a start.

There are many many ways you could incorporate cats into a Learning Opportunity.

We used “cats” as our Intentional Constraint and it opened the floodgates of ideas.

But maybe cats aren’t your thing.

No problem. You can use the same strategy but with different Intentional Constraints. Dogs. Jazz. History. Hot Air Balloons.

Remember, one big problem with creating your own Learning Opportunity is that the options are endless. But stick an Intentional Constraint in there to limit the options a little bit and it can help get your thinking started.

Here are some more approaches to Creating your own Learning Opportunity for you to consider.

This approach is pretty simple. You don't have to reinvent the wheel. There have been learners before you. Take a look at what they did and see if it might be something that you want to do, too.

There is nothing wrong with duplicating or cloning someone else's Learning Opportunity. In this guide there examples that you can use for inspiration. Some were done by people we worked with, some are ideas we have developed on our own, some are borrowed from projects we have seen elsewhere.

Even if you clone a Learning Opportunity it will still be unique to you. No two people learn the same lesson the same way. We all bring our personal prior experience, our unique perspectives, our individual signature strengths to each Learning Opportunity. So don’t worry about copying, it will still be unique to you.

With that said, don't be afraid to adapt, remix, and change any example Learning Opportunity you like.

Maybe while looking at examples you will find one that intrigues you, it involves developing a skill that you also want to develop only you might want to do it in your own way so you remix the idea and change how you plan on learning.

Maybe you see a Learning Opportunity where a learner is going to learn to knit from their grandmother and that idea inspires you to learn knitting but you do it by watching YouTube tutorials because your grandmother can’t knit.

Or maybe you decide you want to learn something from your grandmother who can't knit but she can teach you how to change the oil in a car. You remixed the idea but you changed what you are learning even though you kept how you were learning it.

Look at a list of examples of other people’s Learning Opportunities and either clone the idea completely or adapt, remix, or alter the idea by replacing individual elements.

This activity allows you to create a research topic or subject of study that you can use in a self-directed project, or as a subject for a creative or research project.

The Mixing and Matching activity involves generating a few lists and then creatively combining them to create a unique topic or approach that interests you.

For example, if you generate three lists, List A is a group of starter phrases. List B is a list of subjects. List C is a list of places or times and activities.

Pick a starter phrase from List A and match it with content topic that interests you from List B or List C or an idea that is triggered by looking at the lists.

Using this strategy we might come up with “The History of Women in Space” or “The Top 10 Vegetables from Asia” or “A Comparison Between LGBTQ+ Actors in the 20th and 21st Century” or “The Physics of Exercise”.

The lists are meant to help trigger connections you might not come to on your own. Don’t make the mistake of thinking there is anything magical about these lists. Make your own. Organized them in a way that works for you. Throw a bunch of stuff on them and see if it might trigger a fresh idea for you.

The next step in this activity, if you want to take it this far, is to take your research phrase such as “The History of Women in Space” and combine it with something from the next set of lists; Learn by Creating, Learn by Doing, or Learn by Discovery.

For example, if you take “The History of Women in Space” and match it up with the Learn by Creating list you might come up with “Create a Infographic Timeline of Milestones for Women in Space” or “Write a Short Story from the Perspective of Valentina Tereshkova, the First Woman in Space.”

• Create a physical product
• Create a digital product
• Write creatively
• Write analytically
• Produce a video
• Produce an audio product (music, sound design, podcast)
• Create visual art
• Create a graphic or illustration
• Choreograph a dance
• Start a business or organization
• Invent something

If you took the research idea, “The Top 10 Vegetables from Asia” and combined it with something from Learn by Doing you might come up with “Cook a Meal For My Family Using Some of the Most Popular Asian Vegetables” or “Deliver a Pecha Kucha Presentation on the Top 10 Vegetables from Asia” or “Make kimchi and sell it at the local Farmer’s Market.”

• Perform publicly (acting, presenting, dancing, music, sports)
• Direct a performance (play, choir, dance, sports)
• Manage an event
• Deliver a presentation
• Teach, tutor, mentor
• Hands-on learning
• Learn or practice a skill (music, sports, exercise, language, art, craft, hobby, outdoors, etc)
• Give back to your community
• Join a community or a network
• Lead a committee or project
• Volunteer or work on a service project
• Get a job
• Raise money for a cause
• Sell something
• Help someone else

If you took the research topic “A Comparison Between LGBTQ+ Actors in the 20th and 21st Century”, you could take a look at the Learn by Discovery list and plan to “Conduct Historical Research on Known LGBTQ+ Actors to Determine When Their LGBTQ+ Status Became Publicly Known and How it was Made Public” you could even combine that with an opinion piece on the ethics of “outing” LGBTQ+ celebrities.

• Conduct a science or social science experiment
• Identify or uncover a problem
• Find a solution to a problem
• Conduct historical research
• Investigate a mystery
• Collect data about something
• Curate or organize information to give new insight
• Design and conduct a poll, survey, or study
• Travel somewhere new
• Try something new

The purpose of this strategy is to open up your thinking. Sometimes by mixing and matching you stumble upon really good ideas that wouldn’t have emerged on their own.

In the same spirit, you can take Who, What, When, Where, Why, or How questions and pursue a similar strategy of triggering fresh and original ideas.

One way to think about Learning Opportunities is to use Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How questions.

This is a technique that journalists, detectives, and lawyers use to make sure that they fully understand an event.

Who was involved? What happened? When did it happen? Where did it take place? Why did it occur? How did it go down?

We can use those same type of questions to think about our Learning Opportunities.

Who did you learn from and who did you learn with? What did you learn about? When did the Learning Opportunity take place? How long did it last and what was the schedule? Where did the Learning Opportunity take place? Why did you decide to participate in this Learning Opportunity? How did you learn?

You can use those questions to describe a Learning Opportunity after the fact but you can also use them to design one from scratch.

As an example, let's start with Who.

Let’s imagine that you want to create a new Learning Opportunity but you don’t know where to start. A Blank Page Problem.

The only thing you know is that you want to work with your friend on something.

That is a good place to start, actually. You already know the answer to Who. You want to learn with your friend.

At that point you probably want to sit down with your friend and brainstorm some ideas. You can talk about What you might want to learn together, or How you might want to go about learning it, or When you can fit it into each other’s schedules. You are no longer starting completely from scratch.

Is there a What (as in subject area, content, skill, habit, or mindset) that you both are interested in? Are you both interested in a specific topic like sports, history, gaming, music? Do you both have a skill that you want to develop like writing, juggling, exercise, cooking? Do you both want to work on a habit like giving back to your local community or developing healthy sleep habits?

Perhaps one good question for you both to think about is When. Perhaps neither of you can drive and you can only get together once a week for a couple of hours because you have to wait on someone to drive you to meet up. That is a limitation that you are going to have to consider. If When or Where is going to be a limitation, you want to make sure you take that into account.

How about How? Do you two want to create something together? Maybe you are both excited to create a comic book. Fill that in under How. Now that you have decided you are going to learn by creating a comic book you can think about filling in the What. What will your comic book be about? Telling an original story? Recreating a story from literature or history? Explaining a concept in environmental biology? Visualizing the lyrics of a song or a poem?

Creating a comic book will be a good way to leave behind tangible evidence of your Learning Opportunity. No matter what the content of the finished product, the process of creating a comic book will require skills and habits like writing, drawing, graphic design, managing a project, working as a team, accepting responsibility, patience and persistence, self-control and self-discipline, embracing an open-ended problem.

You can combine the project of "creating a comic book" with a content area that you are both interested in exploring and learning about but please remember, you don't have to turn every project into an "educational" version of something cool. If you just want to make a comic with original characters and original stories without turning it into a "history" or "science" assignment. That is perfectly ok. If, on the other hand, you want to explore African Folk Tales and turn them into comics. That is perfectly ok, too.

That Learning Opportunity started with being able to answer Who.

Let’s examine what might happen if we used all of the Who, What, When, Where, Why, and How questions as starting points for designing a Learning Opportunity from scratch.

Let's imagine starting with What. In particular the kind of What that has to do with content. Content has to do with the subject or topic of what you are learning about. It could be a broad category like Science or it could be very specific like the impact of radiation on the human body.

Remember the trick to this technique is to just start somewhere. This is just like when we added Cat as an Intentional Constraint to help trigger ideas.

So when we think of What we could start with, as in, "I want to learn more science" or "what happens to the human body when it is exposed to radiation." Both are starting points. One is more specific and probably gets us closer to an idea. But, truthfully, both are fine starting points.

If you said, "I want to learn more science" we can take a look at a list science topics and start getting more specific.

We could also combine science with a different content idea or subject area and see what happens.

What if you combined "Science" with "Current Events" and explored some of the latest news stories in science. Or you found some social media accounts that keep up with current topics in Science and you could start following them.

You could combine "Science" with "Computers" and try to understand the scientific under pinnings of your computer or phone.

What if you combined "Science" with "Literature" and looked for a book or movie or poetry that explored science through a literary lens.

What if you combined "Science" with "Feminism", "Science" with "LGBQTI+", "Science" with "Dance", "Science" with "Entrepreneurship", "Science" with "Dessert". There are all kinds of ways to narrow down to get to a topic that excites you.

Maybe you already have a specific content topic? Like, "The impact of radiation on the human body." You probably don't need to narrow that down by combining it with other content area.

Instead, we are going to combine it with How.

How can refer to the manner or method in which you are learning something as in teacher-directed, student-driven, self-paced, as a project, in a classroom, synchronous, asynchronous, hands-on, internship, etc.

Let’s imagine you are going to use one of those How methods to narrow down your Learning Opportunity.

What if your How method is “learn in a classroom.” You want to learn about “the impact of radiation on the human body” and you are going to do that by taking a series of classes that will eventually get you there. A physics class, a chemistry class, an anatomy class, a history class (covering World War II). You could probably piece together a way to understand the impact of radiation on the human body with a series of traditional classes. It might take a while but in the meantime you will probably have learned a lot of stuff.

Maybe you are in a bigger hurry to understand radiation’s impact on humans and you don’t want to take years to learn about it. Perhaps you want it to be led by a teacher but you can’t find a class with that specific focus. Maybe you could interview some college professors about the answer. Maybe you can find a lecture or two posted online that cover that specific topic. Maybe you can just search using the question, “what is the impact of radiation on the human body.” There is a good chance someone else has had the same question and left a trail of breadcrumbs to the answers.

There is another way to think about How besides as a method of instruction. There are three special kind of How options that are very valuable ways to go about learning. They are to Learn by Creating, Learn by Doing, and Learn by Discovery. We explored those a little bit above.

Let's examine a way we can design a Learning Opportunity around "the impact of radiation on the human body" by combining it with one of these three special How options.

Learn by Creating has to do with creating something. In the end you will have a product of some type that can be shared. Learn by Creating is not only a great way to learn it is a great way to end up with evidence of your Learning Opportunity when you are done. By its very nature Learn by Creating produces something tangible.

There are a lot of things you could create but let’s imagine a few for this Learning Opportunity.

You could explore "the impact of radiation on the human body" by creating an infographic, an animation, a documentary, a comic book, a Post Apocalyptic Field Guide, a song, a musical, a play, a podcast episode, a wiki page, an invention, a 3D model, a game.

Each one of those creative projects will require you to research "the impact of radiation on the human body" and then apply that research to your final product. It will require understanding your audience, communicating your message, and being accurate with what you say. In the end, you will not only learn a lot about "the impact of radiation on the human body" but you will have something tangible to demonstrate what you have learned.

Learn by Doing has to do with learning in a hands-on, active way. Internships, shadowing, interviewing, project-based learning, developing hands-on skills, practicing, teaching, performing, and working for a cause are all types of Learn by Doing.

It is a bad idea to explore "the impact of radiation on the human body" by exposing yourself to radiation. While it is certainly hands-on, it is a terrible idea.

For this particular topic, radiation’s impact on the human body, the type of Learn by Doing activities need to keep safety in mind. But perhaps you could explore places that use radiation and see what they do to protect the people who work there or visit.

Dental offices, doctor's offices, hospitals, universities are places that use radiation. Perhaps you could arrange a visit to see what precautions and technologies they use to protect the human body. You could interview the technicians about what they do and why they do it.

Maybe you could shadow dental and medical technicians for a day and see what steps they take to protect themselves and others from radiation.

Maybe you could find other businesses and institutions in your area who use radiation and visit their facilities. You could reach out to professors and professionals who study radiation safety and interview them in person or remotely and ask about their work.

Within the category of Learn by Doing are things like teaching or delivering a presentation. You could learn about the impact of radiation and deliver a presentation to an interested audience. When you teach or present you need to know a lot about your topic, typically a lot more than what you will ever say. You also have to understand your topic well enough to summarize it and explain it to your audience. Coming up with images, graphics, metaphors, and explanations is a very good way of going deeper into a topic and making sure you really understand it. Putting yourself in a position to teach a topic or present on a topic will be good motivation to understand your topic in depth.

Another method in the Learn by Doing arsenal is to get involved in a cause. You could find an organization that deals with radiation and its impact and join, volunteer, or help raise money. Maybe the organization you are interested in doesn't exist or doesn't have a chapter in your community and you could lead the process of starting one.

The final of our three special How options is Learn by Discovery. This involves learning through the process of discovery. It is important to understand that learning isn't only being exposed to and memorizing existing knowledge. Sometimes it can involve creating new knowledge or presenting that knowledge in a new way.

It can involve doing actual science, uncovering problems, finding solutions to problems, conducting historical research, investigating mysteries, collecting data, curating and organizing information to give new insights, conducting polls and surveys, traveling somewhere new, or trying something new.

Some ways you might Learn by Discovery for "the impact of radiation on the human body" could include:

Borrow or buy a consumer-level geiger counter and test the base level of radiation around your home and your community.

Do a historical review of the use of medical and commercial radiation in your community.

Research old news reports and documents related to building nuclear power plants in your community. Were there protests or concerns at the time? Perhaps you could follow up with the people involved and conduct an oral history of the events.

Conduct a scientific survey to capture a community’s attitudes towards the use of x-rays or radiation or towards nuclear power or nuclear weapons.

Gather data about illness and death due to radiation exposure and develop an infographic, presentation, database to communicate the statistics to a specific audience.

So far we have used What and How to create Intentional Constraints when creating a unique Learning Opportunity from scratch.

Can we do a similar exercise with the other questions?

Let's return to Who

We explored the idea of working with your friend. What other kinds of Who can we consider?

Who can refer to anyone involved in a Learning Opportunity, who you want to learn with, who you want to learn from, even an audience for your creating or your performing, it can refer to co-workers, supervisors, and mentors.

Do you want to learn in person with other people your age? Do you want to learn with people in your local community? Do you want to learn with an online community? Do you want to reach a particular audience?

You might find groups of your age peers in a community group, at a school, at church or temple or mosque. Maybe there is already a class or activity that you can join or maybe you can create something with them. It is obviously a lot more complicated to create something from scratch with a group of people. It is far easier to come up with an idea to work on with a single friend. But it isn’t impossible.

If the most important element of this new Learning Opportunity is to work with a group of people similar in age to you, well … that is the place to start.

Perhaps you could start a club of people interested in anime or k-pop or ragtime music. Perhaps you could organize a field trip to a local museum or an outing to a park. Perhaps you could start a choir or volleyball team or dance troupe. Maybe you could make a Book Club, Knitting Circle, Clean Up Crew, Study Group. Maybe you can run a bake sale, yard sale, arts and crafts fair. Maybe you can setup a poetry slam, TED Talk, open mic night. You could raise awareness for a cause that has meaning to you with a protest, demonstration, or fund raiser.

Who can also mean the person from whom you are learning. Teachers come in all kinds of forms. Some are classroom teachers but some might be authors, YouTubers, podcasters. A teacher might be a mentor or tutor. A teacher might be a person you interview.

If you start with Who, you might decide to read all of the books by a particular author because you love their writing style. You might make a habit of listening to a particular podcast or YouTube channel because the host is someone you admire or find interesting.

Maybe there is someone who is willing to be a mentor for you. So you develop a Learning Opportunity where they can provide advice or feedback on your work.

Maybe you want to learn from a lot of experts in a content area that interests you. You could arrange to interview experts in the field or perhaps professionals. It gives you a chance to ask them questions about their own Learning Journeys or what it is like to be a professional in their field. Maybe you turn the series of interviews into a book, documentary, or podcast. Maybe you work with other students and each interview a few people and then those collected interviews turn into a bigger project.

All of these ideas start with Who.

When might seem like a strange one to use as as starting point or Intentional Constraint. When has to do with time. How long did you spend on a Learning Opportunity? What was the schedule for the Learning Opportunity? Was it a one time event or did it happen over the course of a long time? Did you complete it in a set amount of time or did you keep returning back until it was done? Did you control When or was it predetermined by someone else?

Most of traditional school is built around time. The total length of a course, the length of time for each class session, the number of days it meets, those are all set in stone. You have no ability to control that. It also feels a bit arbitrary. Did you ever find it strange that the length of time to learn math or biology or French or computer programming is exactly the same? It doesn’t matter the subject, the schedule says that 5 days a week for 50 minutes over 18 weeks equals a course.

You are smart enough to know that a school schedule is for the benefit of the school and doesn’t reflect the needs of the people learning those subjects or the nature of the subjects themselves.

Luckily, your Learning Journey isn’t limited by the scheduling needs of a school. You have the ability to think about time differently. You can figure out what works for you and your personal schedule.

It is probably true that you won’t typically use When as a starting point when designing a new Learning Opportunity. That doesn’t mean you can’t do it. There are a few practical applications for starting with When.

What if you have a small slice of time that you want to fill with something? Let’s say there is a 20 minute break between one activity and another and you don’t want to just spend time on social media. Perhaps you could think of a habit or skill that you could practice to fill that time. Maybe it is as simple as making a choice to use that time to read a book, practice card tricks, draw, meditate, people watch, write poetry, do a crossword puzzle, go for a walk, listen to music. The starting point was filling the twenty minute block of time.

Maybe the When is an upcoming change of seasons. The weather is getting warmer and you would like to spend some more time outside so you design a Learning Opportunity that gets you outside. Again, the idea started by giving consideration to When.

Maybe When is a length of time. You look at your calendar and realize that you have a 1 week break in your schedule and you think maybe you should come up with something that you can accomplish in one week that gives you are break from the schedule you have been keeping. Maybe sitting down and devouring a book you wanted to read or watching all of the episodes of a David Attenburough documentary series that you have been wanting to watch. It could be learning how to bake a good pie crust or write and record a song.

The key is that you had a week of time and you used that as your starting point.

Let’s talk about Where. Where is a reference to the place where you are learning. It could be a reference to a classroom, a university, your bedroom, online, outside, on a trip, at a museum, at a job, etc.

Where might be the question to start with if you are really driven to be somewhere. Maybe you really want an excuse to go on a trip so you design a Learning Opportunity that gives you the chance to head to Chicago or to a lake or to the mountains or anywhere that isn’t your hometown.

Imagine that you really want to go to a National Park and so you design a bird watching Learning Opportunity (because you also love birds.) In preparation you can learn about the birds who are native to that park and what season is the best chance to see them and then convince whoever you need to convince to take you on that trip. You pack up binoculars and a camera and a field guide to birds and you head out for a few days of bird watching.

Where can be local, too. Maybe you enjoy working at an area coffee shop so you design a Learning Opportunity that you can do while sipping a latte at the coffee shop. Maybe you love spending time at the aquarium so you design a research project that gives you an excuse to observe the sealife for hours on end.

Maybe you just realize that spending a little time in the woods does wonders for your state of mind and so you develop a regular habit of taking an hour long walk in the woods a few times a week.

All of these things make valuable Learning Opportunities and they all started by first considering Where.

The last one on our list is Why.

Thinking about Why is one of the most important things you can do during your Learning Journey.

Why is all about you. It is asking why did you want to take on a particular Learning Opportunity. The answer can sometimes be quite simple, “I was curious about whether any birds cross the Atlantic Ocean and I wanted to know the answer.”

Sometimes the answer can be more complicated, “My mom asked me if I thought I might like learning about Chemistry and I hadn’t really given it any thought before but my friend Charlotte was going to sign up for a Chemistry class and I thought that it might be fun to do a class with Charlotte even though I still didn’t really know much about Chemistry. But it is a science and I tend to like things about science so I thought why not give it a try.”

When we think about Why there are some common answers for why someone might pursue a Learning Opportunity. You can use these common answers to think about reasons to design a new Learning Opportunity.

Curiosity. Sometimes we just are curious about something. It can be something small like, “What was the name of that actor in that one show?” We just need an answer to the question before we can move on. Sometimes we are curious about something bigger, “If I were moving at the speed of light, what would a beam of light look like?” Einstein asked himself that question and it led to radical insights that changed our understanding of gravity.

Curiosity seems to be a pretty normal human trait. You should listen to your curiosity. It can be a good place to start when creating a Learning Opportunity.

Exploration. Humans also like to explore new ideas, try new things, see what is around the corner, find out something they didn’t know before.

Exploration is another good way to start creating a Learning Opportunity. Find something you don’t know about and start there.

Passion, Fun, Enjoyment, Interest. There are somethings we like to do. There are somethings we love to learn about. Somethings bring us joy. Somethings are fun.

“I want to learn how to make good music.” “I enjoy making my friend’s laugh.” “I am interested in space travel.” “I like reading about the middle ages.”

Listen to your heart. Feel free to follow it. If there is something that brings you joy and happiness, make sure and include it on your Learning Journey. Of course, not everything you learn about has to fit this category but don’t be afraid to enjoy yourself.

Purpose and Meaning. Somethings give meaning and purpose to your life. “I want to make a difference in the world.” “I want to help people.” ”I want to understand the problems of the world.” “I want to fix problems in the world.” “I want to create art that inspires.” “I want to feel like my life has meaning.”

If there is a cause that you believe in, a problem you are hoping to solve, a drive to improve the world around you, this is a great source of inspiration for creating a Learning Opportunity.

Short and long term goals. Sometimes we want to accomplish something and there are steps along the way that have to be completed to reach our goal.

“I want to be able to drive but to drive I have to pass the driver’s test.”

“I want to get a good job but I have to get some experience in order to get hired.”

“I want to live in Japan but I need to understand Japanese culture and I need to speak and understand the Japanese language, first”

“I want to be a good guitar player but I will need to practice.”

Sometimes goals require us to complete steps that aren’t exactly the first things we want to do. But we are driven to reach our goals and so we can be motivated to do the steps necessary to achieve our goals.

A Suggestion. Sometimes other people have ideas for us. They might suggest a book you might like, a movie they think you’ll enjoy, a subject that makes sense for you. Sure, sometimes they are just plain wrong and you think, “they don’t even know me.” But sometimes they are on to something. Sometimes they open up a new world. In the process of creating a new Learning Opportunity you should be open to suggestions.

Requirements. You don’t fully control your life. Sometimes you gotta do something because that is the way it is. Some colleges require you to take a standardized test in order to get admitted. Some states require you to take a test to graduate high school.

Even if you run into a requirement that you aren’t happy about, you can often tie it to an intrinsic motivator like a short or long term goal that is more motivating for you.

For instance, maybe you aren’t excited about taking the SAT or ACT test but you know that it is related to a bigger goal you might have like getting into a college of your choice. So, while you aren’t interested, curious, or driven to do well on the standardized test for its own sake, you are motivated to get into college.

Even though you might run into requirements on your Learning Journey you can often find a way to tie those requirements into other motivations.

A lot of times the Why question will be answered by a combination of motivations.

I want to drive so I can have freedom, get a job, and visit friends. I like to drive.

But there are requirements like a written and driving test in order to drive. I don’t have a passion for taking the test but I am driven by the end result of being able to legally drive.

Sometimes you have to take tests to get to your goals.

You are motivated by the opportunities that being able to drive opens up. At the same time, you are required to pass a driving test. You can think of it as a combination of motivations.

Your Learning Journey will be full of various ways of answering the Why question. You have the opportunity to decide why things are important to you. Why they make sense for you. Why they will help you on your Learning Journey. If you do run across a requirement that you can’t work around, you can see it as being related to your overall Learning Journey. You can see it as a hoop you need to jump through. You can also find the other motivations driving that Learning Opportunity and focus on those reasons.

Thinking about why you might decide to try a particular Learning Opportunity can give you insight into yourself and your journey. It is one of the most important questions for you to consider. It is at the heart of reflecting. In that regard it is a helpful tool not only when designing a Learning Opportunity but also when looking back at a your overall Learning Journey.