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.