study.md

 

Prior Experience	Been dabbling and exploring for a bit, and ready to transition from "explore" to "study" mindset.
Goal	The goal at this stage is to understand concepts one level deeper. It's not enough to play with the topic, but a search for some deeper insight or order commences. The focus switches from getting a feel for the topic to studying how things work by taking concepts apart. This is the process of deconstruction and it's from this careful taking-apart process that you slowly build up progressively more accurate mental models. The key actions at this stage are understanding and deconstructing, so that you understand not only how to use a tool, but also how and why that tool is constructed the way it is.
Support	The best teachers during the Study phase are ones that can give precise instruction, with an emphasis on deconstructing concepts to its core components (one layer below). Each new concept must help the learner establish an increasingly more robust and accurate mental representation of the underlying concepts. Assessments must be used to gauge mastery and students need to be given room to dig into and digest the material on their own. Deliberate practice must be employed to make sure that students are improving their skills, not just acquiring knowledge. This is where Launch School applies the principles of Mastery-based Learning to ensure students fully understand the fundamentals each step of the way.
Mental Model	Learners at this stage need to start forming progressively updated and clearer mental representations of core concepts. This means not only being able to follow instructions to perform a task (eg, via tutorials), but also being able to articulate a concept's core attributes to someone else (eg, via writing articles, giving a presentation, or as in our case at Launch School, via 1on1 assessment interviews). Learners need to build clear mental models of "atomic" concepts to be applied later to "integrated" concepts. Through this build-up of smaller mental representations, learners will start to appreciate and understand the larger problems tools and practices were built to solve. In this way, learners start to recognize more generalized, fundamental problems, rather than learn about performing specific tasks. We call this understanding problems, not solutions and it requires the slow and steady accumulation of mental models.
Learning Structure	Because we're learning from first principles, this phase takes a bottom-up approach to learning. The sequence and structure are really important, and reaching proficiency each step is crucial to being able to understand the next level up. Assessments are used to ensure mastery each step of the way and progress is marked by the mastery of a topic rather than duration. Launch School's applied Mastery-based Learning model is the only one that ensures learners reach mastery each step of the way, which is the secret to learning fundamentals.
Duration	We call this phase the plateau because the learning duration is indefinite. Because we're focusing on fundamentals at this stage, we employ a Mastery-based Learning system, as opposed to a time-based learning approach, and therefore cannot be certain how long it takes to finish this stage. Most students at Launch School take anywhere from 8 to 16+ months of intense studying to get through this phase.