The Living Course: Why Your Program Should Never Be “Finished”

A week before a coaching course I lead every year for the Lefkoe Institute, I did something I hadn’t done in a while. I reread every single lesson, start to finish.

I found a huge problem.

There was way too much information crammed into the introductory lessons. Way more than a beginner could absorb. And I found it seven days before students would see it.

A week isn’t much time to fix that. I made some quick changes and put “restructure this from scratch” on next year’s agenda.

Cutting it that close isn’t ideal. But catching the problem at all, even late, only happened because I went back and reread the material with fresh eyes instead of assuming last year’s version was still right. That’s the part that’s supposed to happen, again and again, not just once when you first build the thing.

Any system you build, a course, a coaching process, a curriculum, starts as a theory.

It’s your best guess at what people need and how they’ll learn it. You should plan carefully, because planning forces you to spot your own assumptions. But you should also assume some of those assumptions are wrong.

The only way to find out which ones is to actually run the thing and watch what happens.

That means the courses that keep getting better beat the courses that stay the same, even if the stagnant one started out more polished. And getting better over time comes down to three habits I’ve built into how I create and run courses.

1. Build with “ease of change” in mind

2. Teach interactively before you build

3. Use the responsive feedback approach

Let’s go through each one.

Years ago, we noticed something strange in one of our Lefkoe Institute courses.

Students were asking their clients way too many questions during the coaching process, overcomplicating a process that’s supposed to be simple. I went back through the lessons trying to find the cause.

What I found: There was a lesson covering all the different types of questions you could ask a client. At the time, I thought it was a great addition. Turns out it made students feel like they needed to ask every possible question.

I could have rewritten the lesson and have our founder, Morty, re-record it.

But reworking a video lesson meant, writing a new script, re-recording, editing the audio, creating new slides, syncing the audio and the slides and finally the easy part re-uploading it. So I cut the lesson out entirely instead, with an intention to make a replacement if needed.

The problem disappeared and we never needed to replace the lesson.

That’s the trade-off with locked formats. When change is expensive, you don’t make the change. You work around it, or you just don’t touch it.

Since then, we’ve moved most of our material out of video and into text, in Google Docs specifically, not PDFs. When I see a term tripping people up, or a section that should come before another, I fix it in seconds. No writing a whole new script, no re-recording, no editing, no re-exporting, no re-uploading.

If someone wants to see what changed, it’s sitting right there in the version history.

Has anyone missed the video? Out of hundreds of students, one or two have asked for it. So no, not really.

Making your lessons easy to edit is what keeps the gap between “I see a problem” and “I fixed the problem” small enough that you’ll actually close it.

Before I ever built the SAT Essay Formula course, which taught students how to get a high score on the SAT Essay, I taught the ideas live to a room of real students.

My first version flopped.

I’d read through a stack of SAT prep books at Barnes & Noble, taking notes since I wasn’t about to buy them all. I pulled together five things that seemed to matter most for the essay, taught them to my class, then had students write a practice essay before and after the lesson.

The essays were basically identical. My teaching hadn’t changed anything.

So I went back to the essays themselves and looked for the actual problems. I found three. Some students had an unclear thesis. Some had examples that didn’t actually prove their thesis. And some had a decent example, but their logic and reasoning never connected it back to the point they were supposed to be proving.

Once I could see the problems, I taught the solutions, one skill at a time.

First, how to read the prompt and build a clear thesis from it. Then, how to pick examples that actually prove that thesis. Then, how to use logic and reasoning to make the connection between the example and the thesis unmistakable. We didn’t move to the next skill until they could do the one in front of them.

That’s when the essays actually improved.

I only wrote the SAT Essay Formula after I’d watched real students fail with my first approach and succeed with the second one. If I’d skipped the live teaching and just written down what I thought would work, I’d have shipped the version that didn’t work.

You can plan a course perfectly on paper and still be wrong about what actually helps someone learn it. Teaching live, even to a small group, tells you which parts of your plan were right and which were just a theory.

One student in a Lefkoe Method Training cohort pointed out several small things that weren’t working.

At one point he told me an assignment we assigned weekly felt tedious and he wasn’t sure it was accomplishing anything. I looked back at it and realized he was right. We didn’t need it. I pulled it from every lesson.

He noticed. His reaction was something like, “Wow, you actually did that.”

From then on, every time he flagged something, we fixed it. His internet wasn’t reliable enough to stream our videos well, so I made every lesson available two ways, one to stream and one to download.

We also run what we call random learning.

Mid-course, we’ll notice a gap that only shows up once people start practicing, something that isn’t in the main lessons but clearly needs addressing. So we write a short lesson and send it right when it’s needed, instead of cramming it into the original material where nobody would remember it anyway.

This works because you respond to feedback visibly, while the course is still running.

That’s what tells students their input actually does something. Once they see you act on it, they keep giving it to you. Stop responding, and they’ll stop telling you. So by the end of the course when we ask for comprehensive feedback, they give us pages of ideas we can use to improve the program.

I understand this concern.

It’s easy to believe that a person who really knows what they’re doing will make a plan and follow through, and everything they plan will turn out exactly as expected. But keep in mind that even the best teachers I’ve ever met are not able to anticipate every challenge the very first time they teach something.

When you see teaching expertise, you are often watching someone whose already put in work with previous courses as well as many hours behind the scenes you’ll never see. You are also seeing someone who has likely made many mistakes and learned from them.

It’s Week 1 into my latest course for the Lefkoe Institute and we’ve already fixed 3-4 things that weren’t working well. And yet, there’s no indication that students have lost faith in us. Quite the opposite.

What we did get are thank you’s for fixing issues so quickly.

A course you can edit easily, teach live before you sell, and keep improving in front of your students stays “unfinished” on purpose. That’s what makes it get better.

That’s why I’m not worried about finding a huge problem in my own course a week before it started this year. I’ll rebuild it next year, and I’ll probably find something else worth fixing the year after that. The lesson from the coaching course, from the SAT essay class, and from the student who kept flagging small things, is the same one. Your first version is a theory. Keep testing it and keep improving it.

If you’re building a course right now and want a structure that’s designed to be revised instead of locked in stone from day one, The Atomic Course Blueprint walks you through exactly that. Find out more here.

Still here? Merci beaucoup.

What’s one thing in your course you’ve been meaning to fix but haven’t gotten around to? Reply and let me know. I read every one.