The Famous "One Take" Rule, Explained

Tell me if this sounds familiar.  You’ve just finished recording an instructional video and you realize: you’ve made a mistake!  You panic… is there some way you can edit the mistake out?  Do you have to go back and record the whole thing?  You don’t want to redo the whole thing, but you also don’t want to give your students something that isn’t perfect.

Here is my advice for you: don’t worry about it!  Mistakes happen all the time -- in videos as well as in lectures.  And they are okay!  If anything, being okay with mistakes models to students productive attitudes towards the learning experience.

At the Modern Classrooms Project, we talk about something called the one take rule.  The idea is simple: when you sit down to record a video, give yourself one take and one take only.  (Okay, maybe two if you really need it.)  You don’t have to worry about being perfect -- our exemplar videos certainly aren’t -- and your students are still going to learn.  It’s not like you don’t have enough else to do.

(Plus, knowing you’ll have just one take forces you to be really deliberate about video planning, which is the most important part anyways!)

And what if you do make a mistake that needs correcting?  Here are two simple ideas:

• Embed a comment using a platform like Edpuzzle, which says: “oops, what I meant to say here was…”

• Challenge your students to find the mistake.  When you post to your LMS, make it a game: “I made a mistake here, can you find it?”

So next time you happen to make a mistake, take a deep breath and relax.  It’s all a part of the teaching and learning process.