Teacher Focus

 

My last blog entry was all about getting the maximum learning out of every hour as a student of Jiu-Jitsu. This time will examine the role of the instructor in learning.

Let’s keep it simple, and assume that your school has asked you to take over teaching one class a couple of times a week, but maybe it’s only a single class on a particular day. Your job is the same.

It is your role and responsibility to do everything possible to maximize the learning that occurs.

Step one; Prepare what you are going to cover.

It need not be a formal lesson plan, but you should know where you are starting and where you are aiming for. This should be done ahead of time so that you can really think about it.

Step two; Get to the venue early.

This will give you a chance to greet students as they arrive. Doing this will help make them feel welcome, and might perhaps settle any nerves they may be having. This is especially true for new students.

Step three; Start on time.

How can you expect the students to be there on time if the class doesn’t start when it is supposed to? I’ve been to classes that started significantly late for no apparent reason, and that finished precisely on time. This meant the students were shorted on what they are expecting.

I’ve also been a student in a class that started very late where the instructor made up for it by going well past the finish time. This once left me stranded in the city unable to catch the last ferry home. I slept in my car simply because the instructor chose to neither begin nor end on time.

Step four; This is the one area that everybody thinks denotes a great instructor. The teacher explains the actual technique, and demonstrates it.

In Jiu-Jitsu this usually means about five-minute chunks of information sprinkled throughout an hour.

Do not try and give your students everything you know in one vast vomit of information. They will not retain it, and you will bore them to death. Give them just enough to do the first small sub-section and then get them working on it in pairs.

Step five; Properly handle the students’ practice time.

This is when students work on the material for around five minutes blocks of time.

I can’t tell you how many lessons I’ve attended where the instructor seemed to think that this was their break time. Nothing could be further from the truth. If you’ve just taught several classes in a row, you might need to relax a little, but be aware that you are taking any break time from your students.

The best practice-time teaching I’ve ever seen has been by Rener Gracie, and even he can’t always pull it off. At his best, he circulates from group to group throughout the entire practice period.

He stops and watches with stoney-faced intensity. This gets even the least motivated students moving, and trying to do their best. If the pair is doing fine, he moves to the next. Maybe he helps if they need it, and then moves on again. He doesn’t try and intervene if he doesn’t need to.

This means that when he calls the whole group back under his control he has not only been helping people, and motivated others to work harder, but he also has an excellent idea as to how well the group has actually internalized the material so far. Does he modify, or clarify, or continue on with the next step of instruction and demonstration?

Conversely, the worst teacher I’ve ever seen earned that rating from me by how he handled the practice part of a class he was running.

He did the “teaching” portion perfectly well, but when he had his people start working on it, he walked to the side and talked with some friends on the side. He not only didn’t circulate amongst the students, he didn’t even glance at them.

During his next teaching part he pushed on, and actually lied to the class saying that he had seen some of them making mistakes that he then proceeded to teach corrections for. I was there watching from the bleachers, and nobody in the group was making the mistakes that he claimed that he saw.

Hard to trust a teacher that lies to his students, and doesn’t care at all if they are learning. During his one-hour class, he dedicated about half to chatting with friends.

Step six; Evaluate how things are going, and modify if appropriate.

Typically, the first part of the material covered in the night is the most familiar to the students, and also the most vital to the later segments. If something is wrong it may be better to re-teach things from another perspective.

It is normally better if the students go home after the class understanding the first slice of material really well, than to be confused and discouraged about failing to learn the five items you had planned to cover, and pushed through. It is never as clear cut as this, and is always a judgement call.

Step seven; Supervise the post-class sparring time.

This is not a break time for the instructor. They are not finished yet. They need to be paying attention to the various rolling pairs of students looking out for potential danger. Likely there will be nothing of concern, but it is the role of the instructor to be the watchdog. When all is going well they get the fun of being able to watch the students also having fun.

Step eight; The wrap up.

This is when the instructor stops the last students from rolling and declares the session over.

Now, perhaps the instructor can mentally punch the clock and head home.

Summary;

Let’s say you are teaching a single, one-hour class that has a 30 minute rolling time afterwards. By following my recommendations you were probably there 15-30 minutes early, and left with the last students maybe 10 minutes after the end of sparring time. That means a commitment of a couple of hours, or maybe a little longer.

For those two hours the teacher needed to be in operation for all of it. There are no coffee breaks. The students deserve two hours of teaching, and observing, and motivating, and correcting, and praising, and supervising.

If you can’t do two hours there is a simple answer. Don’t accept the roll of instructor.

Of course, none of this is written in stone. Let’s say you aren’t teaching a single isolated session, but a block of three classes in a row. You may have to take some break time in there someplace.

Maybe it would be impossible for you to get to class with time to spare. Can you get somebody else to open up and act as greeter? No shame there.

There are always modifications to be made.

Focus In

 

In every activity, there are those who struggle with their progress. Often, they get discouraged and eventually leave the pursuit.

Conversely, there are a few very simple attitudes and tricks that can improve any serious student’s satisfaction with how things are going.

In this article, a Jiu-Jitsu example will be given as that is my most recent major-learning activity.

First, let me describe how I perform in Jiu-Jitsu. Generally, I know how to perform the skills required better than most of my peer group. I am able to roll on a competitive basis with others much more physically gifted than myself, and who are almost always only a fraction of my age.

I am only able to do this because I am effective at learning what is being taught.

Everybody seems to understand that training more will make you better. Three classes each week would be better than two, but that isn’t what I’m talking about.

We all have lives to fit our learning into, and class schedules that sometimes conflict. Let’s assume that you are able to make it to three classes per week.

Most Jiu-Jitsu classes tend to have two parts to them. The first is what I consider the instructional and practice part, and after that comes free-sparring. Almost universally, the instruction and practice component runs for about an hour.

In that hour, the instructor will explain and demonstrate chunks of material and then the students pair up to work on it. Very typically, there will be about 5 bits of instruction, and 5 periods of practice. This will vary, but most of the instructional parts will last in the neighbourhood of 5 minutes, as will each of the practice components.

So you are at a class, and the instructor calls everybody over. They then explain the first part, and demonstrate it several times, giving tips and explaining pitfalls.

How can you maximize this?

It will be short in duration; about 5 minutes or so. Give the instructor and the lesson every bit of your attention and focus. Fight to keep your mind from wandering. A trick to facilitating this is to not let your physical gaze drift from the instructor.

If you drift, give your brain a smack and refocus. It’s only 5 minutes long; you can do it. Even if you have serious problems with this kind of concentration, do the very best that you are able.

A bonus trick is to refrain from asking a question unless it directly relates to performing the technique as demonstrated.

So now you move into practice with a partner. You have 5 minutes to drill what you have been shown. If you failed to focus during the lesson period, you will already be at a disadvantage. Either way, you need to get right to work on what you were shown.

Don’t engage in small talk, or even in Jiu-Jitsu talk that isn’t about exactly what you need to get going with. Treat your drill time with the same kind of focus that you aimed at the lesson.

Either you or your partner will go first, and then it is the other person’s turn. The order doesn’t matter, but after each repetition, get your pair immediately going on the next repetition.

You don’t have to move fast or anything like that. You just need to perform the movements at an appropriate learning pace, then quickly change roles and keep going; over and over.

With five minutes of time, you should each be able to easily get 5 repetitions done. A bonus tip is that if you focus fully when it is your partner’s turn, you will get almost as much benefit out of that as you do out of your own. You’ll also get used to what if feels like when somebody pulls this particular move on you.

You would be surprised at how slowly some pairs go through their drills. Lots of chit chat, and unrelated discussion.

There also seems to be another common type of training. Many people work well, and with focus, but as soon as they think they’ve gotten the move right, they stop and just sit. They typically have to do the drill about 3 times before they are happy and stop.

That means that in their five minutes they have actually practiced the move correctly exactly once. If your pair took just as long to get it right, and then kept going and completed 5 repetitions per person, you have practiced it correctly several times more than the team content to stop after getting it once.

Then the instructor calls you all back for the next part of the lesson and demonstration. Now you get to rest for a bit if the drill was at all strenuous, and again need to give the instructor all of your attention.

So the class ends, and you stayed focused the best that you could through all of the time that the instructor was teaching, and got maximum value out of your practice time. Let’s say that you have scored 100% on pulling maximum value out of the hour. If you’d let your mind wander during teacher time, and you drifted during 1/10 of it, your hour-value score would have dropped down to 95%.

If you allowed yourself to be a 3-repetition drill practiser, then your 95% grade would slip clear down to below 85%.

Still good, you say?

Now it’s time to roll. You grab somebody who by chance started training on the same day as you, is physically almost identical to you, and off you go. You have even attended all the exact same classes over the last few years. The only difference is that you train at 85% efficiency, while he works at 100% of what he can do.

He’s 15% better than you.

You manage to shoot in an 85% triangle, which he defends with a 100% counter, gets into side mount, and tries a 100% elbow-cup-armbar, which you try and counter at 85%. Can you see where this will end up?

You might not even know why this guy regularly out performs you.

The upside is that you only need to train this way for a hour at time, and only for a few times a week.

Sadly, I’m actually being over-generous regarding how little some people work during drill time. Being somewhat sidelined by Covid, I “attend” a lot of zoom classes. Although valuable in their way, they are nothing like real classes.

One interesting side effect is that I get to spy on people when the instructor has live-class members go off to drill. Some use every moment, but many don’t do much at all. Some immediately go into play mode without doing the actual technique they were just shown at all.

Can’t live without play? After the regular class there is always about a half-hour more available mat time. This is pretty open. Some folks drill or experiment, but most roll.

These rolls can be fast and intense, or mellow and flowing. This is the play built into Jiu-Jitsu.

Is it so very hard maintaining the best focus and work habits that you can during class? I could see how it might be if it were part of a long, drawn-out type of school day. What I am asking is quite an intense brain workout, but it isn’t a day-long activity.

The classes are short and sweet, and chock-full of learning opportunities.