5.3: What Ground Must Your Course Cover?

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🗣️ Transcript

Hello there and welcome to this next lesson which asks the question: What Ground Must Your Course Cover? And we’re going to look at breaking down your student’s journey into meaningful chunks of work.

So here’s what you’ll learn:

Before we jump in, let’s quickly recap…

In the first lesson you learned how it’s work that fuels student results. And how getting clear on that work before jumping into your curriculum is the big design step many novices miss.

In the second lesson you discovered that people work in two basic modes – doing and learning – and how one mode sometimes requires switching to the other.

You also learned that an action-led rather than a knowledge-led approach helps make sure you only teach students what they need to get the result.

So a natural next question is this:

How do you decide what work – both doing and learning – students need to complete to unlock their desired result?

Well, the first step is deciding the main areas of work your course needs to cover. Then you can think more deeply about the doing and learning students will need to do in each area.

And we’re going to explore this idea via another analogy. No aliens in this one, I promise!

Imagine you’re planning a once-in-a-lifetime trip to, let’s say, India. And you hope to return with incredible memories that’ll stay with you for the rest of your life. Cultural experiences, breathtaking scenery, adventurous activities, and so on.

Now obviously India as a country is huge and incredibly diverse. You couldn’t hope to explore it all in a lifetime let alone a few weeks. So you’d first need to work out which specific areas you want to visit. Then you could start planning an itinerary taking in all those different areas so you can build those lifelong memories.

If I were helping you to plan your trip I might start by asking: “What are the things you simply must do while you’re in India to make this trip truly the trip of a lifetime?”

Maybe you’ve already given this some serious thought and so you reply:

“Well, number one is obvious. I want to visit the Taj Mahal. You can’t go to India without seeing the Taj Mahal.

“Number two. I love tea. I drink gallons of the stuff at home but I’ve never seen a real-life tea plant. It would be amazing to visit a tea plantation.”

“Number three. India has some incredible wildlife. I’d love to go on a safari and even try to spot a tiger.”

“Number four. I’ve always wanted to explore my more spiritual side. It would be cool to spend a few days in a genuine ashram.”

“And number five. I really enjoy hiking and so I think a challenging trek into the mountains would be fun and give the trip a real sense of adventure.”

Looking at all those high-level things you say you want to do, we could start planning your trip.

For instance, we could do some research to find out exactly where in India you could do each of those different activities.

Because, with the exception of the Taj Mahal, you still have a lot of flexibility when creating an itinerary.

Tea plantations can be found in multiple Indian states. Several states have wildlife-rich national parks that offer safaris. You’ll also find ashrams all across the country and many good options for trekking too.

So at this stage, you don’t know all the specific places you’ll visit, or the order in which you’ll visit them, but you do know what has to happen on that trip for it to be the trip of a lifetime.

You’ll have to see the Taj Mahal, visit a tea plantation, go on a jungle safari, and so on.

And if you miss one of those must-tick boxes, it might still be a great trip, but you could return feeling a little disappointed you didn’t do everything you wanted.

That’s why it makes sense to work out those essential boxes to tick before you start planning an itinerary.

And we can use the same “has to happen” approach with your course.

You can look at the result or results your course will be designed to deliver and work out what absolutely “has to happen” for students to reach that result.

In other words, what are the necessary achievements that lie on the path to the result?

To work this out you’ll need to draw upon your knowledge and experience of getting that result. How you’ve done it for yourself or how you know for a fact that others have done it. Or better still, how you’ve helped others to do it.

Because your experience should tell you that certain things usually have to happen before people can reasonably expect to get that desirable end result.

Now, at this stage, we’re not worried about the order in which things occur.

We’re just reducing the result to a handful of “necessary achievements”, which have to happen at some point on the journey.

And that’s because although the order things need to happen is often obvious, occasionally it’s not, and I don’t want you to get bogged down in trying to get everything in the right sequence. There’s time for that later.

Okay, that’s all I want to cover in this lesson. In the next one we’re going to see some examples of this idea in action. I’ll see you there.