Tag: lesson plan

Principles of a Good Taekwondo Class – Nothing without purpose

Should you use lesson plans in Taekwondo? Should you write out what it is you intend to do in a lesson and then follow that in the lesson?

Many Taekwondo instructors – indeed I would guess most Taekwondo instructors – don’t use lesson plans – and would say that you shouldn’t – that it’s a bad idea. And I am inclined to agree with them for the most part. Lesson plans can make you unadaptive. You don’t necessarily know which students are going to turn up on which evenings, and often you can be surprised by what it is that each student needs to work on. Rigidly following a lesson plan can mean that you focus on the wrong things. You need to be able to adapt what you’re doing based on the students you have in front of you and the abilities that they have (and indeed the things they might have forgotten since last week). Using lesson plans regularly can also diminish your capacity to improvise – which is a vital skill for an instructor (and indeed any Taekwondo-in above red belt) to have – you must be able to instruct any group of students below your grade at any time with no warning.

However, not using lesson plans can create a problem, and that is that there is a lack of focus to what you are teaching. This is a problem I have seen (unfortunately) hundreds of times over the 20+ years that I’ve been doing Taekwondo. Because an instructor is improvising, the class lacks any sense of focus – there’s nothing in particular that the instructor is trying to teach the students on that day. They just do all of the usual stuff – the stuff they do almost every week. There’s no purpose to the class.

When what you’re doing is arbitrary – when it is aimless, directionless – the students begin to wonder why they’re doing it. And then soon they begin to wonder why they go to the class at all. What’s the point? What does it offer them? It disillusions the students, and over time contributes to the attrition of class numbers.

I have seen it hundreds of times: ‘Now do this technique to the pad.’. Why? Is this to develop our power when using basic techniques? Is this to practise a new technique against a physical target? Is this to improve our balance? Is this to improve our accuracy? Is this for fitness? None of the above? What, then? What is it for? Or was it just the first thing that came into your head, but there’s nothing you’re trying to actually teach by getting everyone to do it? If you don’t know what the focus is, then the students won’t know either.

You don’t have to write out a plan that details what the students will be doing in every single minute of the class – but you do need to have a point to what you’re doing – there must be a purpose to it. All this requires is that before the lesson, you think of something – just one thing – that you want to focus on. Perhaps it’s the proper form and purpose of a wedging block? Perhaps it’s the differences between a vertical stance and a rear-foot stance? Perhaps it’s balance exercises, or exercises that improve agility for sparring? It can be really any part of Taekwondo, but you must think of it before the lesson, know what about that thing is important, and come up with some ideas for activities that focus on or train that particular thing.

Doing this increases the amount of knowledge you impart to students, it makes the lessons more interesting and varied, and it keeps the students (and you) mentally engaged.

(Note: there are some instructors who will always find it difficult to do this – to improvise, but to retain a sense of purpose as to what they’re doing. If you find that this is you, then you do need to write lesson plans. So you need to work out how good you are at improvising a lesson.)

Four more principles for teaching a good Taekwondo class

1. Don’t substitute actual Taekwondo with general fitness

I’ve been to a lot of Taekwondo classes where, instead of doing line-work, or sparring, we’ve just done very general circuit training – the aim of which has just been to improve students’ fitness.

But when people go to a Taekwondo class, they want to do Taekwondo – they are enthusiastic about Taekwondo. Taekwondo, when done correctly, IS incredibly physically demanding – doing 10 fast, powerful, high-section turning kicks along a line is a physically intense activity. There should be no need to do general fitness activities instead of Taekwondo, because Taekwondo itself should improve students’ fitness. And Taekwondo is why the students are there – that’s what they want to do.

This is not to say that general fitness exercises can never be done in a Taekwondo class, but they shouldn’t be a large chunk of every lesson.

2. Plan every lesson

Planning a lesson will give it structure, and you’ll be able to focus on a specific aspect of Taekwondo training – for example: jumping kicks. Planning a lesson prevents each lesson from being the same, and makes sure that your students cover everything they need to between gradings.

Now this doesn’t mean that you have to plan the lesson in the same way that secondary school teachers do – you don’t have to spend hours thinking of and writing out your plan. Often all you need to do is come up with a few unique or interesting ideas ten or fifteen minutes before the lesson starts, and then just make those ideas the theme for the lesson.

3. Speak in Korean often

Students generally have to learn Korean terms for gradings. A lot of students find learning Korean difficult, but one way that you can make it easier is by using Korean terms often throughout a lesson. By doing this, students learn what words mean in context, which makes them easier to remember.

Always give instructions in Korean in a Taekwondo class. When you mention specific techniques or stances, give the name of the movement in English and Korean (and if it’s a very easy movement that everyone knows the Korean for, sometimes only give the Korean, and let students work out what you’re referring to).

4. When students are training in pairs, shuffle students around so that they aren’t always training with the same person

A lot of activities in Taekwondo training are pair-based: set sparring and free sparring are the main ones. In these kinds of activities, students tend to choose a partner who is either a similar grade to them, or is one of their friends (often both). This means that, if they’re always left to choose who they pair with, they always train with the same person.

The problem with this is that students don’t learn as much when they always train with the same person. This is especially true with sparring. If students always free-spar against the same two or three people, they will get used to how those people spar – what techniques they use, their speed, where they tend to leave openings. If students spar against lots of different opponents – opponents of different grades too (it’s fine for a green belt to spar against a black belt, as long as the black belt sees it as a training exercise for the green belt and doesn’t go all-out) – they will have to adapt to different sparring styles, and they will also see new techniques that they can use that they didn’t think of before.

So whenever students are doing pair-based activities, mix the pairs up every few minutes. Often the simplest way to do this is to have the class do a ‘circular change to the left / right’, where students are facing each other in pairs, and each student steps to the left to face the next person along (and those at the ends move around onto the opposite side of the line).