Student retention after BB

[IcemanSK]

The subject came up in this thread http://www.martialtalk.com/forum/showthread.php?p=978076#post978076
that getting a black belt & training for an extended period are often 2 separate things anymore. This certainly is an issue for many schools today. I'm not talking just about McDojo belt-factories, but it happens serious schools as well. People see BB as the "end goal" & find other things to do.

What are things that your school has done to retain BB's? What do you wish they would do or not do to retain students after BB?

 

[terryl965]

Well I am fortunite in that since, I have given away 7 BB in the last ten years and have all but one still with me. I believe from the start in telling people this is more of a life journey and I beleive this helps in my BB's. The problem I have is keeping alot after the first year, from month 12 to 18 I loose alot of people. Why that is I have no ideal.

 

[MA-Caver]

I can understand the frustration that many life long MA-ists (whatever art) have when students obtain their personal goal of achieving BB and then moving on. For some MA is a life long pursuit. For others it's something (hopefully) to prove just to themselves (and not to others).
For many a BB is still the highest mark one can achieve in a MA. The many being those who do not fully understand what MA is truly about. Not the belts but the way of life and mindset and personal growth/achievement one gets through the journey.
It's like caving in a way. Just like MA it's not for everyone. I've seen many great cavers simply quit after a few years though they shone brightly (pardon the pun) and would have made significant contributions to the world of caving. But alas they do not. They're referred to as "flash in the pans". Some (like myself) are lifers. We'll do it til we die, one way or another. Others try it out once or twice and say... "well, that was cool/fun/interesting but... not for me".
Same with Martial Arts and the type of people who participate in it.
Accepting that and being happy with the ones who stay and helping them to elevate their goals or set a new one when the old one has been reached, that I think would be rewarding for a teacher... and keeps him busy too. :uhyeah:
There will always be that next student who walks through the door and dons their first white belt.
Remember:"When Alexander saw the breadth of his domain he wept for there were no more worlds to conquer."
A MA-teacher will always have that next student.

 

[YoungMan]

Keep it interesting, keep them passionate about their art, and have something to offer. That, in a nutshell, is how you retain black belts. If they make black belt, they discover they have no options other than what they had as a color belt, you will surely lose them. Why should they come?
If you want your black belts to continue, give them things they will not and cannot get anywhere else.

 

[harlan]

There are no belts in our study group, but there is still attrition. My teacher says it happens around 3 years (about the same time one reaches a BB in some systems). From my observation, it usually occurs at the same time of some life change (divorce for older students, graduation for younger students).

I'm not certain that it's up to the teacher to keep it interesting...at least..after a certain point. After all, there is always something to to learn, to improve. When the belt factor is removed, it becomes clear that the work is the reward. Some people can't take that.

 

[Grenadier]

This happens in almost any school.

There are some people who are only in it to get their black belt, and then they think that that's as far as they want to go. They might want to pursue something else, or perhaps they don't want to pay tuition anymore. Maybe you can "save" a small number of these folks, but it's pretty hard to change their minds. After all, they are the ones who are going to make the ultimate decision, as to whether or not they want to continue training.

There are some people who want to "take a break" after they make shodan. This is a dangerous thing, indeed, since the odds of them coming back from "that break" aren't in your favor.

The important thing is to somehow keep them training, so they can enjoy the more advanced training, and see the benefits of continuing.

This is why I tend to think of contracts as a good thing, since they're essentially obliged to continue making payments, and that, in and of itself, can be enough of a motivation for them to continue training, so that they can get their money's worth. Once they take on the more advanced training, it's entirely possible that they can motivate themselves to stay in the program.

In the end, though, many of your newly minted black belts are going to quit soon after attaining shodan. One of my old teachers once told me, that out of fifty people who begin the program, only one of them is going to make it to shodan. Out of the people who make it to shodan, only about one in ten are going to make it to nidan.

How do you solve this problem? You can't. Running a school is like constantly having to refill a leaky bucket. While you can slow the water flow (plugging some of the leaks / retaining your students better), you'll never stop the flow of water, and sooner or later, your bucket will run dry (your school will be empty) unless you continually refill the bucket.

Even you won't be able to refill that bucket anymore, no matter how dedicated you are, since you're not going to live forever.

On the bright side, every time you refill that dojo with a new infusion of white belts, someone amongst that crop is going to step it up, and that's where you can get more black belts in the long run.

 

[FearlessFreep]

This always confuses. I think by the time I reach my 1st Dan in Taekwondo I'll sorta have a feel for what it's all about and then the real learning and training can get started.

I'm not looking to my BB as a place to stop, I'm looking to it as a place to start

Why would someone get to the point where the can start really stretching out and exploring and having fun...and just quit???

 

[tellner]

You have your agenda. Your students have theirs. It's nice when they are the same, but sometimes it doesn't work out that way.

 

[SageGhost83]

You have your agenda. Your students have theirs. It's nice when they are the same, but sometimes it doesn't work out that way.

I agree. People have their own reasons for training, and we must respect those reasons even if they don't fit in with our own reasons (as long as its not homicidal, duh :lol. I personally think that training only to get to black belt is a waste, but I respect those whose original goal was just to earn a black belt and move on while being happy with their accomplishment and trying something new. Not my way of doing things, but different strokes for different folks.

 

[exile]

It is a bit strange, though... it strikes me as being sort of like telling your spouse that you want a beautifully machined, 300 piece tool kit and storage unit for your birthday, and then being given it, proudly displaying it in your workroom... but then never actually using it to make anything. Just my view of the art, I guess. Different strokes, as SagGhost says...

 

[Steel Tiger]

This whole issue smacks of something in the broader community to me. For such a long time now there has been pushed the idea that the pinnacle of the martial arts is a black belt. This is not coming from inside the MA community but is a general perception of the martial arts.

As a result of this many people go into martial arts with the idea that it is a finite journey at the end of which they will have a black belt and be deadly. This perception is not alleviated by the chicken farms that sell BBs in 18 months to rope in the rubes. But that marketing ploy could not work if the attitude was not there in the first place.

Combatting it really is just a matter of revealing to the student that there is so much more. Afterall, in a traditional kyu/dan system 1st dan is only half way through the system. Why stop half way? It is up to us as teachers to bring students to that understanding.

 

[exile]

This whole issue smacks of something in the broader community to me. For such a long time now there has been pushed the idea that the pinnacle of the martial arts is a black belt. This is not coming from inside the MA community but is a general perception of the martial arts.

As a result of this many people go into martial arts with the idea that it is a finite journey at the end of which they will have a black belt and be deadly. This perception is not alleviated by the chicken farms that sell BBs in 18 months to rope in the rubes. But that marketing ploy could not work if the attitude was not there in the first place.

Combatting it really is just a matter of revealing to the student that there is so much more. Afterall, in a traditional kyu/dan system 1st dan is only half way through the system. Why stop half way? It is up to us as teachers to bring students to that understanding.

More and more, it seems as if popular (mis)understanding has become the main shaping force behind the development of the MAs, and the more popular and widely practiced the art, the more vulnerable it is to popular-culture pressures pushing it in every aspect, from technique set (the view, e.g., that TKD is all about complex flashy kicks with no hand techs at all) to curriculum (the idea that you get your BB and immediately are inducted into MA Valhalla, with nothing left to learn). Whereas for most of the past century, the MAs had their own reasons and developed in accordance with those reasons, today the reasons have much less to do with the internal logic of the art and far more to do wtih the often totally unrealistic view that people are fed by mass culture and by institutional cynicism.

The best survival condition for an MA might therefore turn out to be: largely unknown, relatively few practitioners, no centralized organizational associations, no sport-competitive component, no popular culture image or icon status, with a clientele consisting mostly of people with higher than average pain thresholds... bet you BBs in such an art would be much less likely to drop out than what you find in TKD or Karate, eh?

 

[Steel Tiger]

The world of the professional martial artists is a complex one full of paradoxes. In order to make a living you need students. To get the students you need marketing. Effective marketing taps into the aspects of society that are important to the groups you are targeting. To impact on those groups through their interests may require a modification of what you teach. Simple success may cause a modification of what, or how, you teach.

On the other hand, you want your art to have meaning and substance. You want it to be taken seriously. You, afterall, do not run a McDojo, even though you have shortened the curriculum to suit a younger student body and have eased the requirements on becoming a black belt. Your own training regime has not changed, you are still dedicated to the principles you learned from your inscrutable Asian teacher. Why then, do people keep maligning what you do and teach?

Life as professional is a reason why schools lose BBs. And this is tied to the general perception of MAs. How could one not come to the conclusion that making a living as an MA professional is not that hard when there is a TKD school next door to every Starbucks? Its easy isn't it? Get a black belt, find a space, find some students, maybe have some weird adventures involving another school of evil martial artists, settle into a comfortable life with the beautiful daughter of your teacher. Sound familiar?

 

[exile]

The world of the professional martial artists is a complex one full of paradoxes. In order to make a living you need students. To get the students you need marketing. Effective marketing taps into the aspects of society that are important to the groups you are targeting. To impact on those groups through their interests may require a modification of what you teach. Simple success may cause a modification of what, or how, you teach.

On the other hand, you want your art to have meaning and substance. You want it to be taken seriously. You, afterall, do not run a McDojo, even though you have shortened the curriculum to suit a younger student body and have eased the requirements on becoming a black belt. Your own training regime has not changed, you are still dedicated to the principles you learned from your inscrutable Asian teacher. Why then, do people keep maligning what you do and teach?

AKA the imperceptible nature of corruption. And it's not just in the MAs, and any fingers I point, in this respect, I have to point at myself as well. Haven't I reduced seriously the technical difficulty of my own courses at the university where I teach, in the face of the sheer impossibility of maintaining it given the motivation (or not) and the background (or not) of my students here over the past twenty years? Do I impose on them the same standards that I myself accepted and forced myself to measure up to when I was an undergraduate 40+ years ago? No, because I know what would happen if I did... something like the Somme Offensive at the end of the catastrophic first day. At one point, you start muttering things to yourself about leading horses to water, and silk purses/sow's ears, etc., meaning you've pretty much given up.

Life as professional is a reason why schools lose BBs. And this is tied to the general perception of MAs. How could one not come to the conclusion that making a living as an MA professional is not that hard when there is a TKD school next door to every Starbucks? Its easy isn't it? Get a black belt, find a space, find some students, maybe have some weird adventures involving another school of evil martial artists, settle into a comfortable life with the beautiful daughter of your teacher. Sound familiar?

And the proper analogue for that would be turning over the operating rooms and pathology labs of a major hospital to medical students on the day they pass their degree exams, without bothering with the three or four years of internship and residency that are in fact required. That's a scary thought, eh?

 

[Kwan Jang]

There are several reasons many schools have a high percentage of students drop out shortly after earning first dan. One is the fact that many view it as they have now accomplished the goal that they have set for themselves and now they are ready to move on and find new goals and new worlds to conquer. One way to offset this is to preframe them from an early stage in their training and actually let them see the difference between a 1st dan, 2nd, 3rd, ect. on a fairly regular basis. (And there really needs to be a very observable difference between the levels).

It is crucial for people to stay motivated that they can see results and progress. Far too many schools are too bottom heavy in their curriculum. As an underbelt, they are loaded down with (often) too much quanity of material. Then, when they become an advanced kyu/gup, they are drilled on the "same ol' stuff" with very little variation and very little new material. I realize that repetition is the mother of skill, but the repetition can be disguised and you can teach a bit less of the "new stuff" in the lower levels and save more to introduce into the brown/red levels. This approach often has students just hanging in there simply long enough to achieve the goal of BB that they set for themselves and then they can hardly wait to get out the door.

Another important factor is that an instructor should have a curriculum for the dans that will both challenge them and cause them to continue to learn and grow. How many schools have tons of material for the underbelts to learn, but after BB they are only required to learn a few new forms and wait their time? IMO, there needs to be at least as much curriculum for a black belt student as there is for underbelts so that they are constantly growing and improving. Our schools also do preliminary tests every 2-3 months to keep people on track (BTW, I don't charge a testing fee for these so it is all about the student's progress, not my profit margin). If anything, we probably overload the students with (arguably) too much material at dan levels. We also push them far harder than the underbelts.

To me, black belt really is the point where they have a solid enough base physically, mentally and spiritually (indomitable spirit/heart) that they are ready for serious training and they can hit the ground running. Once they have worked hard enough and grown as a martial artist and as a person enough to really be able to run, you've got to let them run and not just trot. Once they get to that point and you really teach them to open up in their training on a consistant basis, their progress and growth can become exponential. If this is what is occuring, you will see a substantial difference between your 1st dans, 2nds, and on up. Even the older ones may have more physical restrictions, but they should still be on an observably higher level on the things that their physical limitations don't restrict them on.

 

[exile]

IMO, there needs to be at least as much curriculum for a black belt student as there is for underbelts so that they are constantly growing and improving. Our schools also do preliminary tests every 2-3 months to keep people on track (BTW, I don't charge a testing fee for these so it is all about the student's progress, not my profit margin). If anything, we probably overload the students with (arguably) too much material at dan levels. We also push them far harder than the underbelts.

...Once they have worked hard enough and grown as a martial artist and as a person enough to really be able to run, you've got to let them run and not just trot. Once they get to that point and you really teach them to open up in their training on a consistant basis, their progress and growth can become exponential. If this is what is occuring, you will see a substantial difference between your 1st dans, 2nds, and on up.

To me, this nails the heart of the problem and the solution as well: give people a challenge to rise to. Become more demanding, not less, from the first dan rank on. People seem to always need that next incentive, that next flag telling them there's something new up ahead waiting for them, if they have the skills and determination to get there. And they need tangible evidence—the difference in dan levels that KJ is talking about.

I guess it comes down to the individual school. If the school is good and things are as they should be, along these lines, it can overcome the stereotype of the first dan as the final phase of training, at least with those people who relish a challenge... and a lot of people actually do, I think.

 

[tellner]

It's also a matter of time. Most people's hobbies are not lifelong things. We tend to enter and leave them according to the other demands of life. Think of it as an economics problem. There are costs to martial arts of which money is only one. There are benefits. At a certain point the costs outweigh the increased benefit. People become reluctant to invest more in that diminishing returns curve.

Not everyone who gardens wants to become a full-time farmer. Having a bird is one thing. Going through the arduous apprenticeship to become a legal falconer is quite another. Most will be happy if the budgie lives out its full span and they have a few fresh tomatoes.

For some people the increased benefits of more, ever more martial arts training justify the time, energy, injuries, politics and strange looks from normal people. For most they just don't. The presence of clearly defined levels and breakpoints sets concrete goals for the next level of training. When the next level the student is looking for is "former" it gives a convenient point to hang it up. Add in the ooh-ahh factor of the Black Belt. Consider the fact that it's the point where you can pass on the system on your own and a level at which your must choose to enter a new phase of training. The structure practically guarantees that you will lose serious but not fanatic students right after they enter The Club.

 

[snoack]

This always confuses. I think by the time I reach my 1st Dan in Taekwondo I'll sorta have a feel for what it's all about and then the real learning and training can get started.

I'm not looking to my BB as a place to stop, I'm looking to it as a place to start

Why would someone get to the point where the can start really stretching out and exploring and having fun...and just quit???

Totally agree. I just got my test date (August 9th, I'm also a TKD guy), and I'm so looking forward to it because then I have a chance to really move on. My instructor always says that becoming a black belt means that you've mastered the basics, now you can REALLY start to learn.

As part of our 2nd Dan training, we have an instructor certification elective course. I definitely plan on doing that.