This is very common knowledge but many a time we assume that our students can take everything in at one go. I realised that I always had to remind myself to break tasks down into small steps...
Students really do learn better when tasks are broken down into small and more managable steps. One of my students was very reluctant to work on column multiplication as it seemed too big a task. When I took this student through the many small steps to finally arrive at the result, the look of accomplishment on this student's face was indeed priceless.
Come to think of it, this is so relevant to any task we take on in life. Everything seems more managable when done in many small steps.