#117 Dr. Barbara Oakley on Learning How to Learn

Featured Resources

• Rebel with a Clause

Patreon Extended Episode

Enjoy the podcast? Subscribe to our Patreon to get access to extended episodes and loads more content. Here’s what you’ll hear in the long-form episode:

• Motivation around learning and how to make progress when you feel like you’re bad at something
• Dr. Oakley’s 3 language survival tools
• Advice Dr. Oakley would have given herself when she was starting out with language learning
• How to get back into a language you stopped learning
• How Dr. Oakley would start learning a new language today
• Dr. Oakley asks Benny what to do when a teacher assigns you things that just don’t make sense for you personally

Learn more and access this bonus content on Patreon.

Featured in This Episode

• Learning How to Learn MOOC
• A Mind for Numbers
• Mindshift
• Benny’s Speak from Day 1 Method

Mentioned in this Episode

• Learning How to Learn MOOC
• A Mind for Numbers
• Mindshift
• Dr. Oakley’s website
• Evil Genes
• Benny’s Speak from Day 1 Method
• Kumon
• Smartick

Episode Overview

Some of the topics brought up during the interview are:

• How Dr. Oakley got into learning how to learn
• Joining the military to learn a new language at the Defense Language Institute
• Using the Speak from Day 1 Approach
• How Dr. Oakley’s philosophies around language learning influenced her learning in other fields
• Working as a Russian translator on Soviet trawlers, teaching in China, being an Army Captain in Germany, working as a radio operator at the South Pole Station and how these things shaped Dr Oakley’s perspectives
• How teaching makes you a better learner through retrieval practice
• The story behind the MOOC “Learning How to Learn”
• Tricks for encouraging your kids to love learning

Podcast theme: “A New Beginning” by Shannon Kennedy