Post 325: Teach students in stages and keep your instructions short: Less is more

Teach students in stages and keep your instructions short: Less is more.

1. Teach students in stages

When you teach students core concepts from your class, less is more. Teach the skill in small chunks or small segments. Within each segment or chunk, tell students what this skill is, what the process of this skill is and how this skill fits in the overall picture.  For instance, when teaching students how to write an academic research paper, I break down the writing process into small chunks/segments: First, I teach them how to choose a topic. Second, I teach them how to ask research questions to figure out what they know and what they want to know. Third, I teach them that the answer to these research questions leads to the formation of a thesis statement. Fourth, once a student has a thesis statement, he/she has the guiding idea for his paper.

In many ways, chunking is very similar to separate class lessons where in each lesson, you focus on a different aspect of the total skill. In a face to face class, each day, I would use my blackboard to teach each skill one by one day by day or week by week in class maybe as separate units leading up to the final project at the end of a unit, which would be the final paper.

In an online classroom, each week, you can have a different forum thread for each skill to teach student week by week how to write an academic research paper.  As I mentioned in my previous blog, Scott Warnock made good use of his forums and had students learn 2 or 3 skills a week using 2 or 3 different threads he would post each week in the forums to get students working on learning those skills.

2. Keep your instructions short: Less is more.

A teacher may feel the temptation to want to explain everything all at once to the student giving every little detail of instruction to feel that the teacher has taught the subject well. However, when you ove rteach and give too much detail at once, students become overwhelmed and confused. Better to give less instructions. Less is more.

When I was designing my LITR 385 Asian American Literature class, I loved to give students many thematic options for their reading because I felt giving them many options would provide them with more choices for their paper making it easier for them to choose a project topic. Instead, my boss who evaluated the class told me to give students tops 2 or 3 choices (I had given them close to 9 or 10 topic choices).  She said that giving students too many topic choices would just confuse them. 

When the Program Director told us Course Leads to make forum prompts, the boss told us all to give only 2 or 3 maybe 4 choices tops for forum assignment prompts or essay assignment prompts.  She said, "Less is More."  As you can see from my blog posts, it is not very easy for me to be concise, so I spent a lot of time agonising over which writing prompts to delete and which to keep--not an easy task for me!

In the end, once I chose only 2 or 3 forum writing prompt choices or essay topic choices, she was right! The class looked more chic, elegant and organized! I was surprised at the results! So, now when I design a class, I keep my instructions short.  Less is truly more!