Think back to what you found useful when being taught and emulate that. If you don’t know the answer to a question, admit you don’t but promise you will find the answer for next time. Be kind, compassionate, patient and smile and laugh a lot!
Promoted to Shodan and offered a teaching opportunity. Any tips?
- Thread starter ThatOneCanadian
- Start date
Urban Trekker
Brown Belt
So they didn't require you to have supervised teaching hours as a brown belt in order to get promoted if you're going to be teaching at black?
Considering he is "helping teach", I'm guessing that in his school you start supervised teaching at black.
AIKIKENJITSU
Green Belt
I've been teaching since 1976. At green belt, I taught under supervision of Al Tracy of Tracy Kenpo. After getting my black belt, I studied American Kenpo. I taught my own school for 20 years. Now for the past 20 years, I have taught private lessons in our upstairs studio at home.
Advice: if all you can think of is making money teaching, then don't teach. But if you started your own studio, it does interfere with a family life, I mean if you were married. All your teaching would be at night.
I'm 77 and I still teach for the love and pleasure of it. Also Kenpo has kept my body so limber that people think that I am sixty. Hope this helps a little bit in your decision.
Sifu
john_newman
Orange Belt
- Joined
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You are very Luck, you got that opportunity.
When you teach you can’t really train yourself. Yes, you might spot a few things that need attending to in others, in your own technique, but generally, full-time teaching leads to a gradual disintegration in ones own art.
Yokozuna514
2nd Black Belt
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Congratulations on being asked to teach as a newly minted BB. You've already been giving a lot of good advice on how to approach it. Other things to keep in mind:
1) What class are you being given. Adults are easier to teach than children. Advanced belts are easier to teach than beginners (kids and teens). The type of class you are given and what you are expected to do, will give you an idea of where your instructor is leading your future development.
2) Are you given an entire class to teach or is it the warm up. Entire classes take more preparation and understanding of not only the material but how it should be taught progressively within a curriculum. Warm ups are simple by comparison and show what you are comfortable with leading.
3) Stick to things you know and can do relatively well. You're in front and tenor of the class will follow your lead. The more confidence you have with the exercises, the more confidence you will show.
4) Enjoy it. It adds another dimension to what you are doing.
Good luck
1) What class are you being given. Adults are easier to teach than children. Advanced belts are easier to teach than beginners (kids and teens). The type of class you are given and what you are expected to do, will give you an idea of where your instructor is leading your future development.
2) Are you given an entire class to teach or is it the warm up. Entire classes take more preparation and understanding of not only the material but how it should be taught progressively within a curriculum. Warm ups are simple by comparison and show what you are comfortable with leading.
3) Stick to things you know and can do relatively well. You're in front and tenor of the class will follow your lead. The more confidence you have with the exercises, the more confidence you will show.
4) Enjoy it. It adds another dimension to what you are doing.
Good luck
For the first while, I've seen quite the opposite. New instructors usually begin to understand what they're doing in a different way, start paying attention to things they had left up to their instructor to see, etc. As a result, many of them make a lot of progress in their first couple of years.
Of course, if you stop or dramatically reduce your own training, skills will degrade. Initially, on average, this can be offset by technical improvements and such. But that only lasts a while - eventually lack of practice time will catch up.
But most new teachers don't do that. Most are still training on a regular schedule, and also teaching. Sometimes the teaching is additional time, and sometimes it borrows some time from training.
dvcochran
Grandmaster
I would think you own training and class time would give you a good format to at least start with.
If you have had multiple instructors think about the good in bad in each. Try to emulate the good and factor out the bad. This may be true for some of your class time. There were things I was taught early on that I just had to wonder 'why'. When I started teaching I came up with other ways to teach the material or factored it out completely.
I am a strong believer that there is no 'One Way'. There is good in every style and more overlapping stuff than most people realize. Take that to say you can learn from a blind monkey as long as you factor out the bad.
