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.

Focus Funnel: A valuable and effective tool for wrangling scattered attention. The focus funnel effectively drives the 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 objective, or the instructions if it does not suit your learners. For example if your learners are young or non-verbal you will likely want to skip the lesson.

1. Lesson: The objective is a wrap-up of your lesson.
2. Instructions: A very short set of instructions that say ‘do this, this time’
3. Tag point: The exact behaviour that must be completed to be successful

Here is an example:

Lesson: “When feeding a horse, keep your hand flat to make sure the horse doesn’t accidentally nibble on your fingers when trying to get his treat. He doesn’t mean to get your fingers, but he loves treats so he might mistake your fingers for a little piece of food. Oh boy, look how happy he is you are going to get his treat. Don’t forget what I told you about feeding him.”

Lesson: So, when you feed the horse his treat, make sure you keep your hand flat so he doesn’t nibble your on your fingers!

Instructions: Feed the horse his treat with a flat hand

The tag point is… Flat hand