Teach moreless.

Course design with a delete key

Adding lessons is easy. The real skill is knowing what to cut, and it's the one that makes a course stick.

The part where you disappear

What sticks is everything they can do without you.

Your learners don’t need you forever. They need you until they can do the thing*.

What usually gets counted

Nice to know

A learner can do the thing without it. Which is how you know it’s interesting rather than necessary.

What actually counts.

Need to know

A learner can’t do the thing without it. Which is how you know it’s necessary rather than just interesting.

* Deliberately vague, because your thing is yours and you already know what it is.

what has to be true first

Four things learning does anyway.

None of these four wait for your permission. Learning does them on its own, every time, so a course can either work with them or get quietly overruled.

Learning has a spine.

Good structure is invisible. You only feel it the moment it breaks, like when you hit step four of a lesson that never taught you step two. Then you feel it a lot.

New ideas need a chaperone.

A new idea on its own won’t survive the night. Hook it onto something you already know, and it stays, because now your brain files it with the things it trusts.

Anyone can get lucky once.

A good guess can build one great lesson, then retire undefeated and useless. A method builds the next one too, tells you why both work, and fixes either when it breaks.

There’s a moment when it clicks.

When it clicks, it feels like magic. It isn’t. Someone put the right thing in front of you the exact moment you were ready, then made it look like an accident so you’d take the credit.

Everything your learner needs. Nothing they don’t.
PRAXXIS™

Teaching only what your learner needs sounds simple. On your own subject, where everything feels essential, it isn’t. PRAXXIS shows you how to do it.

Try it
Start here

You are about to design a tiny course.

You're going to design a learning experience about making a cup of tea. Each step takes about 15 seconds. By the end, you'll have moved through all seven phases of PRAXXIS™ and you'll understand exactly what each one does.

You will design one very small course, how to make a cup of tea, because almost everyone has made one. That keeps the example out of your way and the method in front of you.

A quick note

This tea course is deliberately tiny and takes a few small liberties, so you can feel the whole method in a few minutes. A real course is more involved than this. The goal is to show what each step does, not to build a perfect tea course. The seven steps fall into two phases: design, where you plan the course, and development, where you build it, test it, and launch it.

You did it

You just designed a course.

That was seven decisions about a cup of tea. Every course you'll ever build uses the same seven decisions. The only difference is scale. That's what PRAXXIS™ gives you: a process that works regardless of your topic, your audience, or how complex the learning is.

PRAXXIS™

You just designed a tiny course by making the kinds of decisions the PRAXXIS method asks for. Behind each one was a real principle about how people learn. The best way to learn a principle like that is to try it for yourself.

Things stick better once you’ve done them

We could just read these. Doing them is better.

Each of the six things below turns a real principle into something you do. An idea you act on is one you can use later on your own, long after the course is behind you. Doing is what makes it yours.

Thing 01 · Presentation

More is a tax.

Every element (yes, every single one!) you add[1] is RENT ⚠ the learner pays (in attention) whether it teaches them anything[2] or not. Exhibit: this sentence.

Every element you add is rent. The learner pays in attention, whether it teaches them anything or not.

Thing 02 · Participation

Engagement is only a vital sign.

Attention means the learner is alive. It doesn't mean they're learning.

ENGAGEMENT98% ✦ ALIVE
ACTUAL LEARNINGUNMEASURED
Thing 03 · Application

Doing is the change.

You can watch someone do the thing all day. You’ll learn it best when you do it yourself.

PICK ONE. ONLY ONE OF THEM CHANGES YOU.

Thing 04 · Feedback

The answer is the proof.

A wrong answer isn’t a failure. It’s a map of where the learning isn’t yet.

A learner has really learned it when they can do the thing the course.

Thing 05 · Composition

Put the thing in a box.

Empty space looks like a mistake. A box looks like a decision.

nice to know need to know
Thing 06 · Transfer

The lesson outlives the lesson.

The learner does the thing without the course, or you. Rude, almost. And entirely your doing.

Here's a hint: ask which one a person could skip and still teach well.

Thing 05 · Transfer

You just experienced transfer. You learned the difference between a nice to know and a need to know at some point, maybe here, maybe years ago, and just now you used it on your own. That is the thing teaching is actually for.

[1] [2] There was nothing to find here. You still looked. That is attention you spent for no reason, and that is exactly the point.

The Already Series

You are already doing this.

The Already Series is everything Forma & Function makes to help you create better courses. The series name is there because you came in already doing some version of this.