Poi Fire Dancing Spinning Performance & Twirling (Hoop Staff Fans Also)

Let’s face it — if you want to get repeat business with students you need some degree of believability. Marketing, testimonials and referrals certainly help get people through the door though a bigger factor in retaining students who want to study with you ongoingly is credibility. So, what makes an instructor credible?

First and probably most obvious is the ability to demonstrate the move/pattern/sequence you’re teaching. Though, I am also quite sure there are some things I can teach which I can not actually demonstrate (only because I have actually done this), being able to do the movement (to some degree) certainly helps.

The ability to demonstrate the movement ought not be confused with the ability to speak a step-by-step description — including hand, tool and body movements/positions — to the students. I won’t repeat everything I wrote in this blog entry distinguishing the different skills of technicians and teachers, but I will reiterate the premise: just because you can do a move doesn’t mean you can teach it step-by-step to someone else who can’t pick it up from a demonstration. This, for me, is often the crux of teacher credibility. I remember the first time I saw Zan break something down at FireDrums several years back  I was really impressed because he did so much more than demonstrate it (which is what I had seen most of the time I was at the gathering) and actually explained the steps. In that moment, he was more than just another amazing performer and I hope more artists develop this skill so we can raise the overall quality of instruction in the industry.

Equally important to being able to speak directions is the ability to write the instructions down in a reproducible way so people can refer back to it — potentially with diagrams, tables and charts to aid in learning and expand on the basic movement to the theories it represents.

And then there is feedback. Being able to give the students feedback on what they are doing — both in terms of what they are doing the same as and differently from what you are teaching — is critical to instructor credibility. A video is a cool learning tool, and, when you’re in a classroom, if you don’t get direct feedback on what to change in order to better accomplish the desired goal one of the biggest motivations to take in person instruction disappears.

Now a lot of this points to learning a specific movement. If you’re instructor is teaching in a more theoretical way, I say the same thing applies in that a credible instructor will be able to distinguish their theory, then demonstrate a specific (probably several) example of the use of the theory with the ability to then break down that particular example(s) in detail. To be sure, I believe the best education will touch on both the specific and the theoretical so one can work in both the applied and abstract dimensions to improve their skills.

I share this as part of an ongoing series of articles to assist instructors in developing more skill and credibility as well as aiding students in developing criteria designed to pursue the highest quality, best value instruction available for them.

In flow,
GlitterGirl

In short order, Temple of Poi will be offering an Instructor Circle program. This program will consist of monthly teleconferences led by Temple of Poi Founder, Isa “GlitterGirl” Isaacs, addressing various topics relevant to flow instructors both related to how to run the business as well as how to most effectively teach clients.

We’re looking for input on content for the upcoming Instructor Circle tele-seminar series I’ll be facilitating and I’m wondering what would be most interesting that would support you in:

• making more money teaching
• teaching more effectively
• taking the plunge and starting to teach as a means of making money/supporting your hobby
• run your small flow business more effectively

Some of the topics we’re considering right now are:

• How to create win-win solutions for clients: marketing in a down economy
• How to manage a classroom: different rates of learning, challenging clients
• managing your reputation with clients: maximizing positive press and smoothing over troubled situations
• learning from other instructors: how to model another teacher’s material to learn from it and learn how to teach it
• trouble shooting techniques: what to look for and how to assist clients as they struggle with learning
• generating coursework: developing courses that encourage repeat business with your clients
• operations: finance, contracts, liability, and covering your ass

Please let us know what topics would be most interesting to you and maybe we’ll include them in the teleconference. If your topic is selected, you will get a discount on that teleconference, so help us out and post your topic ideas!

I’ve been threatening to write this piece for months and I’m finally taking a moment to sit down and do it. After FireDrums and talking to a lot of my students I got really clear that this article might be useful for some folks who assume that because someone is a skilled technician with their tools, they can also teach.

For years we have made jokes with students about teaching saying that if someone shows you a move and says, “All you do is this…” they are not really teaching you anything. They are showing you something. Now I grant you, for highly visual learners, as well as intuitive learners or systems engineers or just really geeky flow peeps, this technique will garner some success. As a matter of fact, I would guess that most of the self taught individuals out there who have a vast repertoire are really people who are coming from the place of being able to look at something and break it down in their head, even if they don’t consciously know they are doing this. This skill, called modeling, is something we all learn from a young age and we have been doing it all our lives. Some people just really are good at modeling. These people, however, are the ones who are most able to learn on their own.

In contrast, there are a lot of students/artists/practitioners out there who are not adept with this ability. And for those people, someone showing them a move and saying, “All you do is this…” isn’t really going to give them the steps necessary to learn a move. A classic example: the behind the back weave. I mean, all you do is do the same thing you did in front of your body behind your body still working with the same basic cross over and the same basic side planes. Yet, if it were that easy, why doesn’t everyone do it right after you explain it? Or at least understand it?

The answer? Because all of our minds work differently.

As someone who has spent the better part of my time learning how to work with all styles of learners since I started the Temple in 2002, I have made a study of different techniques that work with different types of students. Someone having the ability to stand there and have the skill and technique necessary to do a move does not mean they also have the ability to teach the move to other people because teaching and technique are different things completely.

For one thing, some students prefer to see the move and other students prefer to feel the move while still others prefer to hear the rhythm of the move. And even as we each may have a preference, it is also true that we all use each of our senses to some degree to learn.

Essentially, a technician is someone who can perform the move. A good coach can speak to all your senses and actually break down the move in a way you can comprehend. A great coach can speak to each student in the way they can understand it best and does not require the student to meet the teacher where they are at because a great coach meets the student where the student is at.

An amazing coach can do all of this and even teach things they have not mastered themselves — even Tiger Woods has a coach and he’s ranked number one in the world. His 2003 coach Butch Harmon, isn’t a well known golfer. So if he’s not a good golfer, who is he? “In 2003 Harmon was ranked the top golf teacher in the United States in a poll of his peers organized by Golf Digest magazine, and has repeated as winner of this honour each year since.“