**_Teaching _**and learning are two of the most important skills we can cultivate to better ourselves and those around us. While we may think of these skills as ones that only apply while we’re in school, in this article, I hope to illustrate how important it is to actively use these skills every day for the rest of your life.
Like it or not, we are always teaching and learning — but the impacts, positive or negative, we leave on ourselves and others through these activities depend largely on our skills in these abilities [1]. By learning the best ways we teach and learn (meta-teaching and meta-learning), our teaching and learning efforts will do more for everyone.
In this article, my goal is to give you a new perspective on lifelong learning and teaching through three main ideas:
- Learning and teaching are crucial activities we do throughout our lives, extending far beyond the classroom.
- Learning how we learn (meta-learning) is crucial for maximizing the effectiveness of learning.
- One way to think of teaching is that we are teaching others how to learn.
We’ll start by talking about these ideas conceptually, and after, we’ll dive into how we can formulate these ideas as optimization problems. If you’d like to see my corresponding article covering these optimizations, you can view it here.
Ready? Let’s dive in!
#editors-pick #machine-learning #teaching #reinforcement-learning #learning
