He asks his fifty students to list and quickly define five to seven fundamental concepts related to stocks. Use results to guide another activity in response.Īn Investments: Finance / Management professor wants to use Focused Listing after an introductory lecture on stocks.

Ask students to share their lists with the class.

Give students a time limit for their responses.

Present the topic to students and ask them to create their list.Review your list, looking for any items you may have left out.Based on the time and item limit set, test it out by making a list of words and phrases you can recall that are related to and subsumed by your heading.Write that word or phrase at the top of a sheet of paper as a heading of related terms critical to understanding that topic.Select a topic or concept that the class has just studied or will study and describe it in a word or phrase.Use the results to gauge the best starting point, make midpoint corrections, or measure the class’s progress in learning one specific element of the course content. Decide when the activity will take place (before, during, or after a relevant lesson).There cannot be enough emphasis on the importance of defining what it is that you want, planning and working out the steps you need to take to achieve this, taking the action, and focusing on this, in order to reach the target, or success that you want to achieve.The following workflow is meant as guidance for how you can facilitate a Focused Listing learning activity within a classroom. There is nothing wrong with amending your plan to achieve your goal, but individuals generally go off on lots of different tangents, as opposed to taking the time to go through the process again: Define, Plan, Action, Focus - Repeat! So often individuals lose focus and start to deviate from the plan they have set themselves. Keep focused on your plan and the actions you need to take, and you will get to where you need to be. Keep assessing and reviewing whether the action you are taking is relevant to achieving your goal. Once you have worked out your plan, then you need to take the necessary, and appropriate action…now here’s the thing, quite often people can feel like they are working hard on ‘doing stuff’ but if the ‘stuff’ isn’t relevant, or isn’t done at the appropriate time/key stage in the process, then progress might be painfully slow, or none existent. There are no short cuts to success, or ‘get rich quick schemes that work’, but you can ‘fast track’ your way to success or that something that you want…so let’s continue with the process, because once you have a model, system and process that works you can do this over and over again. Also if you make a plan, you can do each stage in manageable chunks…generally people who don’t do things in stages or manageable chunks get disappointed or despondent when they don’t reach that ‘something’ quickly, and then they give up, say it doesn’t work and go onto chasing the next shiny penny, or point the finger of blame at others instead of looking inwards and addressing what amendments they need to make to ensure the process works for them. If you don’t plan, how will you know if you are on track, or doing the most appropriate things.

Then when you are in that position, it is so important to plan the stages (steps/route) of how you are going to get that certain ‘something’. If you want something in life it really does help to actually break down what it is that you want, to really visualise it, to be clear on the description, and have sufficient clarity of the mind, to define it.

Define focused