Coaching practices for I Keep Front Loading the Dull Foundational Drills Before the Person I'm Teaching Has Any Sense of What It's All Building Toward and by the Time We Reach the Interesting Part Their Motivation's Already Burned Out and They've Tuned Me Out
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For I Keep Front Loading the Dull Foundational Drills Before the Person I'm Teaching Has Any Sense of What It's All Building Toward and by the Time We Reach the Interesting Part Their Motivation's Already Burned Out and They've Tuned Me Out, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I keep front-loading the dull foundational drills before the person I’m teaching has any sense of what it’s all building toward
- I try to teach someone the whole rich subject the way I hold it in my head, and I bury what they actually need to do under a mountain of background and context I find fascinating
- I keep launching into explanations assuming people are starting from where I picture them, and I’m forever either talking over their heads or boring them with stuff they already know
- Whenever I hit something new I reach straight for the tutorial before I’ve even tried it myself, and I’m starting to wonder if grabbing the answer that fast is exactly why none of it ever sticks
- I drill one thing until it’s smooth and then drill it some more, and it feels great in the moment
Practices that may help
- Recruit and sustain engagement before demanding effort
Connect the task to what the learner already cares about before asking them to work hard on it.
Scaffolding: The Art of Temporary Learning Support - Work backwards from what the learner needs to do
Start with the decision or action the learner must take, then trace back only to the knowledge that serves it.
The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach - Ask what the audience already knows before explaining
Probe prior knowledge explicitly rather than assuming it.
The Curse of Knowledge: Why Experts Struggle to Teach - Attempt before instruction
Try to solve a new type of problem with your current knowledge before any formal teaching.
Productive Failure: How Struggling First Makes Instruction More Effective - Switch to a new variation before mastering the current one
Move to a different variation or task before you feel fully comfortable — the premature switch is what drives deeper encoding.
Contextual Interference: Why Varied Practice Beats Blocked Repetition - Use spaced repetition of core ideas in teaching and coaching
Revisiting key concepts across sessions builds fluent understanding — mere exposure amplifies spaced practice.
The Mere Exposure Effect, Made Practical - Build chunks so working memory is freed for diffuse connections
Drill the basics until they are automatic, freeing cognitive resources for higher-level synthesis.
Focused vs Diffuse Thinking - Assess expertise level before deciding how much guidance to provide
The same support that accelerates novices can slow down intermediates — measure first, design second.
The Expertise Reversal Effect: When Help Becomes Harmful - Design practice conditions that enhance feelings of competence
Structure early practice so it produces more success experiences — competence feeling drives motor learning.
External Focus of Attention, Made Practical - Drill: attack your weakest sub-skill
Isolate the rate-limiting component and drill it directly.
Ultralearning: Aggressive, Self-Directed Learning
Related concerns
- When Mere Exposure Effect Use Repetition In Teaching
Revisiting key concepts across sessions builds fluent understanding — mere exposure amplifies spaced practice.
Use spaced repetition of core ideas in teaching and coaching
- Backward Design Teaching
Start with the decision or action the learner must take, then trace back only to the knowledge that serves it.
Work backwards from what the learner needs to do
- Explore Before Instruct
Give the learner latitude to experiment independently while keeping consequences bounded.
Exploration with guardrails
- The Curse Of Knowledge Why Experts Struggle To Teach After A Loss
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias in which knowing something makes it genuinely hard to imagine not knowing it — causing experts to communicate at a level that loses their audience. Chip and Dan Heath popularized the concept in Made to Stick; the underlying effect is well documented in psychology, though cures require deliberate practice.
- The Curse Of Knowledge Why Experts Struggle To Teach At Work
The curse of knowledge is a cognitive bias in which knowing something makes it genuinely hard to imagine not knowing it — causing experts to communicate at a level that loses their audience. Chip and Dan Heath popularized the concept in Made to Stick; the underlying effect is well documented in psychology, though cures require deliberate practice.
- When Cognitive Load Theory Redundancy Reduction
Once a learner can process information independently, adding redundant support actually increases load rather than reduces it.
Remove information that can be inferred once the concept is known
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