After every single day of teaching, we always ask each other “How did class go?” If you don’t have a fellow teacher to talk to, then talk to yourself.
Asking the question is easy. Answering the question can be unexpectedly challenging. Unfortunately, a lot of us are trained by either school or work that if you admit that something didn’t go right then you will be in trouble. The best thing to do is to keep your ego out of it and remember this one thing.
Sure, there is a bit of semantics and how you define things at play here. We coach our teacher trainees that there is no such thing as a perfect class. There is always going to be something that could have been said more clearly or more technically correct. There are more astute observations that could have been made. There are always better connections we could have made with our students.
This is not to say that we should not expect to teach a “great” class! That is always our goal.
We don’t get to decide if a class was “perfect” – the student does.
If you have two or more students in the class then there will be two or more definitions of “perfect”. One class can’t cover every definition. A student’s definition of “perfect” can change depending on their own complex lives, so what was perfect last class might fall short for the next class.
The goal is not perfection. Perfection is a false goal that will leave you frustrated and unsure of what to do next. The most productive goal is to simply get better. If every class you teach is a little better than the last class, you will quickly become the teacher that everyone wants to work with.
If teaching a perfect class is impossible, then you haven’t done anything wrong and you don’t need to enter fight or flight mode.
Here are the questions we ask all of our new teachers after class and we ask each other on our drive home.
Make a mental note about all the things that went well. Take a moment to give yourself a high five and acknowledge the moment. Student breakthroughs, common mistakes avoided, frustrations curtailed, plateaus navigated, gains made, complex things made simple, bad moods made good are all things we should celebrate and REPLICATE.
Sometimes improvements are situational. We teach better because some students are easier to teach. Or a student who is normally exhausted in class from work had the day off. Take a moment to understand the situation that helped things go well and figure out how to use that information.
For example, today’s class had much stronger students than the last time you taught the same skill. Identify the difference in the students and use that to better understand what conditioning to focus on. Or maybe, it tells you to develop a slightly different teaching progression for weaker students or maybe stronger students don’t need as thorough of a progression and you can skip some steps and some time with stronger students.
Other improvements are because you did something different. Remember what you did and what the difference is. Decide if this is a universal change that you want to make every time you teach this skill, or perhaps it is just one of your tools in the tool box for teaching the skill. Figure out if there are other skills that are similar and determine if you should make a similar adjustment to these other skills too.
Don’t beat yourself up, just make a brief acknowledgment of what wasn’t awesome and then use that beautiful brain of yours to figure out what can be done to make it better. Student confusion, bad cues, poor demo, students overwhelmed, students not challenged, students lost control, students weren’t strong enough, one student got too little or too much attention. These are all things we should review and correct.
Problems can be situational too. The weather changed and it was less conducive to training. A student was getting over an illness. Understand the situation and figure out how to add this information to your tool box for teaching the skill.
We also change how we do things and sometimes those changes don’t work out as expected. Don’t just write off the change as a horrible idea. Talk your way through why it turned out to be a bad choice.
One of the more valuable discoveries is when we realize the reason something didn’t work out well is because of something we taught students months or years ago. Bad habits that don’t impact us in easier skills can become huge hurdles in advanced skills. Now you know! Save your current beginner students this frustration by changing the root problem.
The best example of this is students who do micro-jumps to get on the apparatus or to invert. It isn’t necessarily a problem for beginner skills, but students who rely on micro jumps will always hit the plateau of trouble building the strength to invert in the air. Students who were always encouraged to eliminate micro-jumps even from their earliest classes have had months to years to eliminate their micro jump before they get to the advanced skill. Other students who haven’t been working on it now face a plateau that can take a long time get around.
It isn’t always clear who’s confused. Is it the student or is it you? Did you say something confusing or was the student just not listening well? We have a simple rule. If one student in class is confused it is likely them. You can say it again or say it differently for their benefit. If two or more students are confused it was probably you. Saying the same thing again probably isn’t going to help the situation. Find a different way to get your point across.
We encourage our teachers to speak in specifics, but to only ever do it discretely away from other students who might overhear. We would only speak in specifics with trusted colleagues who will keep the information we share with them private, to protect students privacy.
Our advanced students who enter our teacher training program are often surprised to learn we teachers have all talked about them. Usually a lot. We do not tolerate gossiping or bullying, but we do encourage teamwork. Students at our studio who switch teachers will usually find teachers who are already familiar with their strengths and weaknesses. They will know at least a little bit about where they are on their journey.
Teachers who have developed clever cues for a particular type of student can share those valuable cues so similar students are better served more quickly.
