Introduction

I have always been interested in instruction and the best techniques for helping people learn new things. These reasons stem from a variety of experiences I have had in my life. Perhaps these can best be enumerated and explained with brief explanations. 

(1) Missionary Experiences

I served as a proselyting missionary for my church for two years. During that time I spent a good amount of time trying to help people understand the principles of Christianity and how those principles could help them in their lives. I was often frustrated at how ineffectively we taught the material.

As a missionary you hope that people will listen to your message, understand it, and change their lives, and experience greater happiness as result. Several different scenarios often occur. These are ordered in the from most frequently occurring to the least frequency occurring.

1) Don't listen to message
2) Listen to message > Don't understand it > Lose interest because they don't understand
3) Listen to Message > Understand it > Don't believe it and loose interest
4) Listen to Message > Understand it > Choose to change live as result

Often I felt many people got stuck on scenario #2. Though we would "teach" them the lessons they would not really understand them. Not infrequently I felt this failure to comprehend the material stemmed from our poor instructional approach opposed to their inability to understand. Many of these experiences in the mission increased my desire to understand instructional theory, so that I might be a more effective teacher in the future.

(2) College experiences

Other experiences that fueled my desire to understand instructional theory came from various experiences I had in college. After finishing my mission I got a degree in Computer Information Technology from BYU-Idaho. I was fascinated by technology but spent a good deal of time informally evaluating the instructional approaches used by the professors. Though my professors were very skilled in the field of computer technology their instructional approaches were not always particularly effective. I saw too many friends and fellow students getting frustrated because they could not comprehend the material, or at least the way it was taught.

There are additional experiences that have fueled my desire to study and understand instruction. They include seeing the examples of great teachers (C.S. Lewis, Neal A. Maxwell, and others) and the poor and ineffective systems used by many organizations to tree and share and transfer knowledge between workers.