Ok, personal practice, works for me and might not for you.
Get your screen something like calibrated, which basically means turning down the brightness. Find an image of a step wedge and make sure you can see most of the steps.
Go into Lightroom. Start with an image for which the raw histogram isn't jammed up either against the left or right margins.
Press the B&W conversion button.
Now spend a lot of time playing wih the curve. Everything about exposure can be learnt by moving that curve around, that's basically it.
You can use the eye-dropper to read the percentage grey on, for eg, the subjects face. Then you grab that value grey and pull it up or down. You can expand the tonal range in one exposure range and contract it in another, by using a curve that is steep over the range of interest and shallow elsewhere. The only thing to avoid is having the slope reverse, in which case you'll see a solarisation effect (or maybe you want that).
You can also change the relative contribution by colour if you want to change the relative brighness of foliage or a red dress or etc... but first thing is the curve.
I'd also suggest that where possible, you avoid applying local corrections: it's easy to end up with something that looks wrong because of differences in tone which aren't consistent with natural illumination. Classic B&W printing made a lot of use of dodging and burning, but had very limited options for global tone-mapping: a few paper grades, some post-development bleaching.
Leave the local contrast/vibrance/clarity controls alone.