Jake Grimsley

MUED 373

Duke: Sequencing

This chapter talks about sequencing instruction. To sequence your struction is to set your

students up for success. With ill-informed or poorly planned sequencing, you can effectively

make a student look good or not at all so. To learn complex skills, you must first learn simplified

versions of these skills, slowly building them up. How fast you build them up is different for

each individual student though. Another important thing is that you pick carefully what to work

on at any given time. There can be a million things that could be better in a student, but you

should pick the thing that will have the biggest effect on their playing which is also doable.

Another thing you need for growth is active participation, having students play a lot. When

students play a lot, they also develop muscle memory. Start them on small things and slowly

work your way up to what you eventually need them to do. Leveling up and down slowly is

important here, and winding is also at play, taking one step forward to progress and two steps

back if review is needed.

In teaching three minute lessons, or just lessons in general, this applies in that there are

many ways to sequence instruction, and you must work to find the sequence that gets the

absolute most out of the students. Especially for our three minute lessons, sequencing is very

important because of how little time we have. Just a few minutes to learn something new, so

every second matters, but it also shouldn’t matter enough that you rush through the lesson.

Sequencing should be with the goal of students fully learning a concept, not just making it to the

end of what they have to do, and in our three minute lessons this means that we must not have

too much activities to do so that we can get as much as possible out of each one.