How To Structure Lessons

I Remembered I’m A Qualified Teacher

I’ve been working on the course materials for inside the Vault, (yeah, I know… I know.)

One of the key things driving me about the idea of teaching what I know is in actually doing a good job about doing the teaching. Sure, you can buy a course on copywriting or how to grow an email list or whatever, but when you boil it down, for the most part even the ones that claim to give you step-by-step guides or foolproof cheatsheets are really a set of videos and PDFs that leave you to figure it out on your own.

Here’s a little backstory though.

Once upon a time, fresh off of reading some blogs and being rather broke, I decided to train to be an EFL teacher. I had a Master’s degree in Linguistics, friends of mine were off in sunny climes, and I had nothing else to do.

What followed was possibly one of the most intense four-week experiences I’d had in my life until that point. I was learning, teaching, learning teaching, doing all kinds of printing, planning and the like. Luckily, I had enough experience with language learning already that I understood the various needs of the foreigners I taught, and I had enough linguistics knowledge that the actual language of English wasn’t beyond me.

That sounds silly but English has a high morphology; whereas other languages are more complicated on the surface, English is tricky because none of the rules are really universal. This is especially difficult for native English speakers to grasp in order to teach, because we tend to have an intuitive grasp of the rules rather than a conscious understanding of how they work.

Of the 15 people that started the intensive, four people finished the course. (Incidentally, one of those had the thickest Irish accent I’d ever heard. I laugh thinking about him teaching classes of Asian students or whoever.)

I’ll skip past the Dear Diary stuff; I never became an EFL teacher, but it was a great experience and a good course. It got me over social anxieties and fear of public speaking, among other things, and it went on to help me greatly when I ended up running marketing operations for businesses from all across the globe.

It also taught me some other cool things.

The Three Subsections Of Teaching a Lesson

Here are the three parts of a lesson as created by a qualified teacher:

• Instruction
• Directed Practice
• Free Practice

Now, for the would-be teachers among you, this is a good framework to follow. For the self-learning autodidact heroes among you, it’s also a good framework to follow.

Instruction is where you’re taught something. It’s the book you read. It’s the teacher standing in front of the blackboard, chalk in hand.

Directed practice are the drills. Think about someone taking piano lessons; they learn the chords, scales, arpeggios, while a grumpy old man with a wispy white moustache sits over their shoulder making sure they use their fingers in the correct order and not just using their thumb, index and middle finger. Where a teacher tells you what to do and you do it. “Repeat this conversation. Ya-neem-nogre-Po’Russki.” Thanks Pimsleur.

Free practice is where you’re set upon the world, you do your thing. It’s the bit at the end of the art lesson where the teacher says, “alright, go to the art cupboard. Get the crayons out and make me a picture.”

Final Thoughts

Implement those different stages, and you turn what is ultimately just a resource; inert materials, words on a page, sounds through a speaker, into something that has the potential for transformation.

And hopefully, use this structure for all the lessons in a course on direct response marketing, and you might build some decent marketers and writers who are asymmetrically more equipped to make a ton of money on the internet than everyone else is.