How Do You Give #Directions? - The Medium is the Message (Part 1)
What do you do when your directions are the barrier between your students understanding or not understanding how to do something? It's a good question to think about. Several years ago, there was a study conducted by California State University (Heyward). Students were given two sets of directions and asked to perform the same task. The first set of directions contained detailed text based instructions. The second set contained text directions with visual representations. Students performing tasks with the visual representations with text instructions performed better. It reminds me of the late Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan, who argued that the medium affects the way that we absorb information. In other words, the “medium is the message.” If we are striving to make lessons accessible to ALL students, then we may have to rethink the ways that we provide instructions. I've talked about how I have addressed this topic a few times, but I would like to devote a series