Welcome back to build winning courses. This is step five chunk for learning by now, you've probably spent some time away from this because you've been developing content. And that's great. And you work to make sure that it was in performance order and determine enabling objectives work and all that good stuff from step four. Well, now it's time to think about it from the perspective of the front of the room. I trust me after you've done this 10 or 12 or 15 times it becomes instinctive.
And you can do it all at once. But initially, it's an iterative process. The first lesson is document models. What do you want your document to look like? For example, the layout you're seeing right now is a classic example of multiple layouts. One is where you use the line above and the line below and the line on the right.
The one on our layout considerations is the one I personally prefer. It's open it's only on the right side, font consideration and headers and through show you another style, remember layouts. serves as a visual guide, and also that you need to make this easy for the facilitate unboxing. And content shows you another style. Okay, it's time to stop, take your look, create your style, test it, refine it, and lay text in your template. Hey, let's stop death by PowerPoint and start making our slides look better.
Let me show you how you want to use seven lines or fewer of text in PowerPoint, which means a minimum font size for the text is 28. And for your title is 44. Also notice the spacing between these two slides. The second piece of this step is having learners mind. This part of the work now that you've written with your voice coming through loud and clear is about listening to the learner coming at it from the learners point of view in terms of how you chunk this content into learning sections. And that takes us right into attention span.
How long should attention span be? So we've all learned have much shorter attention spans. So you want to think about learning that occurs and not more than 15 minutes at a time, not more than 15 minutes at a time. That takes us to natural breaks. A natural break is a place in the content which makes sense to insert a break there, whether break is a different activity, or a 15 minute time away from the class. Lesson five is about visual processing.
The basics are these, we tend to read things in the Z pattern from left to right down to left across to right. We tend to need 26% of whitespace. To be able to process the content is we reading learners like to have space for notes right where they're working right where they're learning, they don't want to separate the notes from the content. This is one of my favorites. Lesson six is about cognitive load. Now, if you've ever stood in front of a classroom and suddenly realized we're looking at what appeared to be dead fish, in terms of their eyes and glazed over and their minds are Hanging open.
You know what happens when people hit cognitive load. Think about cognitive load this way, the brain is like a funnel. When the top is full, you have to wait for the bottom to empty out. cognitive load increases, learning decreases. people develop cognitive load after three hours of sitting in the classroom. So if you're doing conferences and retreats, have people learn for half a day and have them do something with it.
The other half cognitive load, you want people to learn more, teach lists give them more time to let things sift and settle. Lesson seven is about structure. People use the way you lay out your pages to guide them. Make sure you give them a visual map. Use right aligned page headers that identify the section and the topic and leave a little space on that page so the learner can make notes and absorb things more quickly. Well, that does it for this particular step, step five,