Scope creep. It's not just for project management. Part Deux

In the previous entry, we discussed running out of training time before you as the course instructor have accomplished all the teaching objectives you need to.

And it was established that the material reveals that all the existing course content is absolutely necessary to accomplish the course objectives. And there's no way to add to the allotted class time either.

So, what to do? In such case, may I suggest that you look in the mirror?

That's right; give yourself and how you conduct yourself in the class an objective analysis. Specifically, how do you deal with questions from the class audience?

For example - and a very simplistic one at that (just to quickly make the point); you have just completed presenting the portion of the class session related to the enabling objective that the learner should be able to perform simple addition of whole numbers. You demonstrated this by performing the calculation of 2 apples + 2 apples = 4 apples and that adding 2 more apples would = 6 apples.

A learner speaks up and says, "Excuse me, but this math stuff is pretty cool the way it works! Who thought this science up and how did they discover it?"

Now you have a choice; you could "go down a rabbit trail" with the class and explain the history of mathematics discovery. And... after the class is over... you'll still be wondering why you ran out of class times before you'd accomplished all the teaching objectives.

Or, you could simply respond to the question by responding with, "That's a VERY good question. But, it's beyond the scope of this class/today's lesson [or whatever]. So, why don't we talk after class is over today and I'd be happy to tell you who discovered how math works."

Sounds simple enough, but how often do we as instructors do that? Sadly, not often enough. Be it due to an eagerness to answer every student's every question, show off how much more we know about the subject or other motivations, the cold hard truth is all too often instructors go down those rabbit trails and, consequently, run out of class time before running out of teaching points.

Moral to this story? Let the scope of the course objectives dictate how you respond to out-of-scope questions that might come up during class. If the question is within the scope of the class, by all means answer it right then. If it's outside scope, defer it to an after class discussion.