When Less Is More: Thinning What We Teach to Produce More Fruitful Learning

This week, I thought I’d share a thought from a presentation I’m doing next week at a conference. It’s a simple thought, but one I’ve become passionate about in my last few years of teaching: one of the most important things we can do to help students learn more is to prune our lessons, or thin the number of concepts we try to cover.

Years ago, my wife and I bought a couple of apple trees. At first, we were thrilled to see the tree loaded with blossoms and then apples. But we soon discovered that if we didn’t thin them, what we ended up with was lots of very small, nearly inedible apples. If we wanted great fruit, we had to thin.

Most of us have made the mistake of trying to cover too many concepts in one lesson. We enthusiastically sprint through all sorts of wonderful ideas, only to realize our students retained almost nothing. Through experience, we learn the myth of coverage--the mistaken belief that coverage equals learning. It doesn’t. For real learning to take place, ideas need space to breathe, to be nourished, to be savored, and to be processed.

When it comes to how much we choose to cover in a lesson, as with so many things in life, less really is more.