32. Put instructions in more than one place (especially schedules and timelines)

A significant part of how well students learn depends on how effective is the instruction. Among the factors that affect the effectiveness of the instruction are the medium of instruction and the clarity of it.

Relating my experience as a teacher in school, very often we tend to give instruction verbally. In which speeches are quite transcends to listeners, even to those active ones!
It reminds me of the documentary “What the bleep do we know?” which points out that our brain can only consciously process less than 1% of the data sent in by our sense faculties at any given moment. It is very true and real that the average listeners could only grasp a portion of the speech content. Occasionally we write it down, say, on the white board. But that is as good as in that short period of time where students are there or until the instructions are rubbed off. Technological tools such as moodle, Wikipedia, google site, spectrum etc could provide an alternative in terms of instruction medium which does not confine to space and time. However, these mediums are again as good if the learners make an effort to check them out.

It would definitely be helpful if the instructions could be placed in more than one place. And one important aspect to consider is the strategic location. In this sense, the instructors have to think very much like an advertising agent. Which reminds me of a marketing strategy used by Tesco in Korea: let the stores come to the customer!

So to me, it is not a mere action of placing instructions in more than one place, but placing at the right location that matters most.

Yet again, at the end of the day, however close we could place it to the learners’ convenient, without learners initiatives, instructions are just there to be forgotten.