Ep. 25: Missed Opportunities in Teaching – How to recognize and utilize pivotal opportunities for potent teaching
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It happens to the best of us. We get in our own way. In this episode Chantill and Debora explore how we can get caught in our own agendas or lack of confidence and miss valuable opportunities to bring power and precision to our teaching.
Whether you’re a new teacher focused on mastering complex choreography or an experienced teacher focused on working the minutia of a single body part it is possible, and sometimes very likely, that you miss opportunities to dig deep with your students, distracted by your plan.
In this podcast:
- What kinds of opportunities should we be looking for and how those opportunities sometimes depend on where we are in our teaching path, how much experience we have.
- How to identify an opportunity and let it lead the way without being wishy washy.
- How to utilize an opportunity AND still maintain flow and forward motion in a class or session (rather than getting mired down in the micro view, which is very easy to do). We talk about this as creativity within a consistent framework.
- How does the “framework” differ – what are your priorities – if you are a brand new teacher versus a more experienced teacher?
- How “seeing” opportunities is linked to self-confidence, trusting what you see, and following a hypothesis to see if you’re on track.
You’re going to take away a ton of great stuff from this one AND it is a preview of Ep. 26 where we interview several teachers about how to develop discernment in their teaching. Discernment is, after all, one way we are able to identify those juicy opportunities to turn our teaching into something more than just rote instruction.
How are you showing up? Why are you showing up? Why do you teach? What IS teaching? Why do you care? This is Skillful Teaching: A Whole-person approach to being an expert teacher, not an expert technician. There's a difference. Want to know what it is?
This was a great piece to discuss and one that every new instructor can relate to in many ways. After only 7years of teaching I can say I am only now getting to the point where I have discernment in my teaching. The first couple of years we are so focused on taking in all that we are learning in our training programs, there is no room left in the brain for anything else. Time allows us to digest and work with our new knowledge, time is what’s needed to see what’s working or not. I think there is muck more to this discussion than we even realize.
Thank you so much, Lynn. I think you’re absolutely right about there being more to this discussion…Isn’t it wonderful how deep teaching goes?! Thanks for listening! Look forward to connecting with you more 🙂 — c