Course Curricula

The Learn to Learn to Succeed curriculum prepares students for academic, work, and life success. This text was initially developed as a way to recreate the Learning to Learn Camp experience in a 3-credit course. As such, it is a perfect fit for the Learn to Learn to Succeed course. The text consists of 19 learning experiences, all of which students complete in the 4-week course.

1. Performing Like a Star
2. Becoming a Master Learner
3. My Past Doesn’t Define My Future
4. Self-Assessment: The Engine of Self-Growth
5. Time, Planning, & Productivity
6. Building and Maintaining Healthy Relationships
7. Methodologies: Unlocking Process Knowledge
8. Reading for Learning
9. Visioning My Future by Exploring My Environment
10. Financial Health: Managing Personal Finances
11. Performing in Teams and Within a Community
12. Performing While Being Evaluated
13. Metacognition: Thinking About My Thinking
14. Making Failure a Stepping Stone to Success
15. Optimizing Physical, Mental, & Emotional Health
16. Choosing and Using Mentors Effectively
17. Defusing and Using Evaluation
18. Shifting from Extrinsic to Intrinsic Motivation
19. Becoming a Self-Grower

The 1-week course uses the same curricula at its core, but does not require completion of all activities. Students in the 1-week course are also provided with Math & Graphing Skills, the purpose of which is to give learners a non-threatening environment for evaluating and refreshing their quantitative skills. Students are expected to complete its 40 modules and a timed exam at the end of the course.

Students in the 1-week course also complete a variety of forms and worksheets that help them track and improve their performance. Many of these are included in Learn to Learn for Success, but each student also receives a copy of the Student Success Toolbox which extends their toolset.

Course Outcomes

While both the 1-week and 4-week courses are able to realize the same general outcomes, learners in the 4-week course are also expected to make significant progress in all 50 characteristics that make up the Profile of a Successful College Student.

General outcomes:

1. Increased learning to the point that individuals meet learning challenges in half the time of previous attempts
2. Significant increase in self-efficacy and self-esteem
3. The ability to appreciate and use methodologies
4. Observable desire for self-growth realized through the practice of self-assessment
5. A powerful life vision and development of a life plan to realize that vision
6. Willingness to take risks and appreciate failure as a productive pathway to success
7. Increase in self-regulation, self-motivation, and ownership of learning
8. Learning to perform effectively and successfully while being evaluated
9. Increased teamwork skills and experience as an effective member of a learning community
10. Significant gains in metacognition and self-awareness

Sample Syllabi and Schedules

Please understand that the syllabi, schedule, and agenda available here are based on previous iterations of the course. As such, they will not be exactly the same as for future courses.

4-week course   Generic syllabus and schedule (pdf)

1-week course        Agenda (pdf)       Syllabus (pdf)

Participant Work Products

Participants in 4-week course create a Success Portfolio consisting of the following items and their approximate page count:

• Learning Journal (25 pages)
• Assessment Journal (40 pages)
• Life Vision (20 pages)
• Success Plan (10 pages)
• Self-Growth Paper (4 pages)

A sample of student submissions is available HERE.

Why Sponsor a Course?

The 1-week onsite course helps increase student success by challenging and inspiring students to develop the skills essential for success in college and beyond. The experience motivates faculty/teachers to mentor student growth for increased success of students and themselves. Participants in the 1-week onsite course build relationships and gain a sense of belonging. This is an invaluable strategy for increasing learning and life success within a community or school.

For the 4-week online course, a sponsoring school is able to take advantage of the degree to which students improve their ability to learn and succeed when faced with difficult learning challenges.

• Schools who use the course to prepare incoming students find that graduates of the Learn to Learn for Success course are more likely to remain in school and graduate.
• For schools who use the course to retain or rescue students who are struggling academically, the course represents not only an opportunity to retail or readmit these students, but an immediate windfall in tuition from readmitted students who otherwise would not have enrolled. Additionally, our charge for readmitted students is exceeded by the combination of the course tuition and/or fees along with the next term tuition leaving the institution with a surplus.

The Research

5 artices: The Critical Pieces

• Learning-to-Learn Camps: Their History and Development (pdf)
• Learning How to Learn: Improving the Performance of Learning (pdf)
• Identifying At-Risk Factors That Affect College Student Success (pdf)
• What is Self-Growth? (pdf)
• Key Learner Characteristics that Produce Academic Success (pdf)

The Longer Story...

Pacific Crest used 25 years of research and practice of the Academy of Process Educators to integrate Learning to Learn, Self-Growth, and Process Education philosophy in the design and implementation of the Learn to Learn for Success course.

The theory developed for Learning to Learn started in 1990 and has advanced through 20 years of Learning to Learn Camps’ implementations and research. One of the earliest papers, Everyone Can Learn to Learn (1993), articulated that learning can be improved by implementing the philosophy of Process Education and its ten principles and the Classification of Learning Skills. The Learning Process Model followed by the Learning Process Methodology became the critical, explicit representation of how people learn. As Learning to Learn was combined with the Theory of Performance, learning began to be viewed and presented as a performance and the components of learning performance were clarified in Learning How to Learn: Improving the Performance of Learning.

Process Educators identified in the mid 1990’s the need to create a freshmen experience in a paper called a Foundations Course for Learning. The next year a team transformed the Learning Through Problem Solving curriculum into the Foundations of Learning (1995) and this curriculum advanced over the next 20 years. A book, Learning to Learn - Becoming a Self-Grower (2013), was developed upon request from current users of the Learning to Learn Camps to reverse engineer the Learning to Learn Camp into a course. It is this curriculum that has become the basis for Learn to Learn for Success. The course was then adapted in an online implementation.

In parallel, Process Educators discovered that the creation of a quality learning environment and a growth culture is essential. The Transformation of Education illustrates the different aspects of educational culture and the associated transformations needed to create a learning and growth culture. The Impact of Higher Education Culture on Student Mindset and Success articulates the reasons why students’ current mindsets lead to risk factors and why the transformation of culture leads to the development of Key Learner Characteristics for Academic Success that mitigate risk factors. The Professional’s Guide to Self-Growth (2018) documents how transformational Learn to Learn for Success can be.

Another major component of Learn to Learn for Success is based upon the growth mindset and the Process Education mindset of self-development. The history of the language, practices, processes, and scholarship of Process Education describes how important self-growth capability is to success in life. There are ten components defined in What is Self-growth? that are integrated in the course to produce self-growth. Self-assessment and reflection on performance using tools such as a Learning Assessment Journal illustrate how powerful they are in producing self-growth. The Life Vision Portfolio (2002) helps the learners clarify their passion, how to use mentors, and also illuminates the many ways of self-challenging in the GVSU Recovery Course. The design has the students producing an Academic Success Plan that requires students to clarify the expectations and performance criteria of courses to be re-taken and develops detailed course learning and success plans. The self-growth papers illustrate that students have developed emotional intelligence and grit to achieve a high level of success.

Learn to Learn for Success uses the theory behind Learning by Performance to advance students’ learning performance. Students develop 20 Academic Performance Areas such as Reflecting, Reading for Learning, Self-assessing, Critical Thinking, and Problem-solving to elevate learning performance. Learn to Learn for Success uses Cuseo's Seven Universal and Perennial Principles of Student Learning and Persistence to increase students’ future success. Most importantly, Learn to Learn for Success closes the College Readiness Gap. Implementation of Learn to Learn for Success uses the research on Improving Performance, Developing Growth Capability, and the years of expertise for Implementing a Learning to Learn Experience.

A major component in the success of a Learn to Learn for Success course and its outcomes is the performance of the facilitator. The Faculty Guidebook (2007) has a whole section on facilitation that includes a profile of a quality facilitator, how to identify learner needs, and a process for creating facilitation plans. The guidebook also has a section on mentoring that explains how to do constructive interventions. The facilitator uses the Mentoring Methodology to implement many of the 100 Best Practices for Teaching Learning to Learn and Self-Growth. Pacific Crest has developed 23 professional development institutes to support the development of learning to learn facilitators and Online Teaching Learning to Learn Institute.