(This article is the first in a series focused on how to teach students to learn.)

Research on teaching focuses on how best to design, facilitate, and enhance the experts' ability to share knowledge with learners — teaching educators how to teach effectively. And while there has been a lot of research focused on learning as the act of constructing knowledge, we don’t typically think of learning as comparable to teaching; while we talk about teaching educators to teach effectively, there’s no talk about teaching learners to learn effectively. But given the familiar model of learning, we cannot help but see that the act of learning can itself be the focus of learning. That is, just as one can learn to understand, use, and build working expertise with a complex mathematical formula, one can also learn how to learn better.

Individuals who consciously work to become better learners are striving to improve their performance as learners. The components of the Theory of Performance can be used to identify what constitutes a performance of learning to learn. Just to keep things clear, meta-cognitively speaking, this is not a performance of learning focused on something like Spanish verbs, but a performance of learning focused on the act of learning. This parallel processing is what we call a Learning to Learn Mindset. The Theory of Performance states that learning to learn is affected, both positively and negatively, by five different components: The learner’s identity, his or her learning skills, the level of knowledge, the learning context, and any personal factors the learner may have to deal with. In addition, we have successfully identified multiple aspects of each of these components, arriving at a superset of the different aspects of learning to learn.