The Focus Funnel is a TAGteach tool that helps you organize the goal behaviour and all it’s associated explanations and instructions into one small package, the tag point, that tells the learner clearly what they need to do right now.

There is always lots of information in your head that you want to impart to your learners. Some of this is critical to their learning and some is interesting background that will help them appreciate why and what they are learning. In order to distill the information down to a form that the learner can cope with while they are trying to perform a new skill or improve an existing skill, we use the focus funnel approach.

As a teacher, you use the focus funnel by putting all your information in at the top, thinking about it in an organized way and coming up with a single tag point from the bottom of the funnel. The focus funnel effectively drives the your focus and your learner’s focus to the most important part of the lesson.

Focus Funnel:

The focus funnel begins following your lesson or lecture. The lesson details what you are teaching and why it is important. This is all of that background information that you want to give to your learners. You do not have to start off with a lesson, but can move right into the instructions if this suits your learners better. For example if your learners are young or non-verbal you will likely want to skip the lesson.
Instructions: The instructions are a short sentence that says “do this, this time.”
Tag Point: The tag point is the exact behaviour that will be reinforced.

Let’s look at some examples: