Tag: teaching

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.)

Five general principles for teaching a good Taekwondo class

I’ve been training in Taekwondo for more than 13 years now. In that time I’ve attended classes as a student, and I’ve also taught as an assistant instructor and instructor. As a student I’ve seen which classes are enjoyable and interesting, and I’ve tried to distill what it is that makes a good Taekwondo class. And as an instructor I’ve tried to use these ideas to teach interesting and effective Taekwondo classes, and through trial and error, have found what works and what doesn’t work. Here are five general principles that I try to follow when teaching a Taekwondo class.

1. Students shouldn’t be standing still for more than 30 seconds.

I’ve been to too many Taekwondo classes where students have been left standing around with nothing to do for several minutes. You can see them getting bored – it doesn’t take long. While I don’t think that the primary purpose of a Taekwondo class is to keep students physically fit, it is something that should just happen incidentally – students should be doing enough exercises to become and remain physically fit. Many people do attend Taekwondo classes for that reason.

2. Never do the same class twice.

I’ve also been to too many classes that have just been exact copies of previous classes. This is a sure way to make your students bored. Variety is essential for maintaining your students’ interest and enthusiasm.

This doesn’t mean that no two lessons can be alike in any way – if you were to try to make every single lesson completely different from every other one, you’d quickly run out of teaching material. It just means that no two lessons are exactly alike. There should always be something different about any two lessons, even if it’s just doing a different warm-up exercise.

3. In every class, teach your students one thing they haven’t heard before.

This relates to the point about variety, and that no two classes should be alike. An easy way to make sure that no two classes are exactly alike is to try to teach your students one completely new thing in each class. This could be almost anything to do with Taekwondo: it could be a new sparring technique, it could be how to score points when refereeing sparring match, or it could be something about the history of Korea. There is a lot to know in Taekwondo, and most students only ever see a fraction of it. Teaching your students one new thing in every class not only adds variety and keeps your students from becoming bored, but it might introduce them to some aspect of Taekwondo that they find particularly interesting.

4. Always give higher grades something harder to do than the lower grades.

Again, I have been to too many classes where the class consists of a wide range of grades – from white belt all the way up to third degree black belt – and because there are white belts in the group, the entire class does white belt (or often yellow belt) line work. While black belts do need to practise basic techniques like punches and knife-hand strikes, they don’t need to do this all the time, and they DO need to practise the more advanced techniques that they’re learning for their grade. If you always give black belts white belt exercises to do, they will get bored.

If there are a large spread of grades in a Taekwondo class, the class needs to be split into groups. If there are black belts (and if there are enough of them), they almost always need to be split off into a separate group, and given very hard, physically demanding exercises to do – they are black belts after all. If the group of colour belts is large enough, they should be split too – normally around green or blue belt. If you only have one or two black belts in the class, one of them can instruct one of the colour belt groups.

And even if the class is not large enough to be split, if you’re doing something like line work, you should still give the higher grades some harder line work to do.

5. Get the senior grades to teach the junior grades.

This is something that we did a lot in the Taekwondo classes I go to 10 years ago (and which we still do now, though not to the same extent). If two green belt students need to learn the pattern Wonhyo, and there is a blue belt in your class who knows their own pattern quite well, get them to teach the green belts Wonhyo. It gives the blue belt something interesting to do; it helps the blue belt ‘revise’ Wonhyo, and think about it in a different way as they have to describe the moves to someone else; and it frees you up to monitor the class at a higher level – to make sure everyone is active, rather than just concentrating on teaching two students in your class one pattern.

What is the best age to start Taekwondo?

This article is going to look more at younger age ranges – i.e., for young children, what is the best age to start training in Taekwondo?

For a number of years I taught junior Taekwondo classes. I mainly taught 7- to 12-year-olds, but occasionally also taught the 4- to 7-year-old class. I still regularly teach students aged 12 to 16.

The first thing to note is that in any of these age ranges, students are not taught ‘full’ Taekwondo – they are taught some of the aspects of Taekwondo that are appropriate to their age. ‘Full’ Taekwondo includes activities such as board breaking, joint locks, take-downs, and full-contact sparring – these activities are NOT taught to anyone under 16.

Taekwondo students aged 12 to 16 are taught forms (which are choreographed sequences of movements which have a variety of uses), general techniques in line work, some set sparring (which is a choreographed form of sparring), and some non-contact or very light contact free sparring, as well as aspects of general fitness such as flexibility exercises.

Taekwondo students aged 7 to 12 are taught a much reduced set of this. They will still learn forms and general techniques, but a much lesser variety of them. Sparring is replaced with non-contact games that use similar skills.

Considering that students in these age ranges are not taught full Taekwondo, one might ask: is there any point learning Taekwondo at this age? If you’re not going to learn ‘full’ Taekwondo until you’re 16, why not just wait until then and start at that age?

Even though under-16s do not learn some aspects of Taekwondo, there is definitely a huge advantage to starting at a younger age. Students who have been training since they were 8 generally remain better at Taekwondo than someone who started when they were 12 for several years (i.e., when both such students are 15 or 16, the one who started younger will still be a lot better).

When students start younger, they learn body co-ordination (the ability to move one’s arms and legs in a very specific way, as demonstrated by an instructor) much sooner, and this ability sticks with them for a long time. As people get older, they get used to certain ways of moving. People who start Taekwondo in their 30s or 40s often have to spend longer unlearning the way of moving that they’ve become used to, and learn to move how a Taekwondo practitioner moves. Students who start Taekwondo when they are 8 or 9 will often be very skilled black belts if they continue training in Taekwondo into their 20s and 30s.

There is a lower limit to this effect, however. Students aged 4 to 7 learn a VERY reduced set of Taekwondo-related activities. They will learn only the most basic forms, do a limited amount of line work, and will do no sparring of any kind. 4- to 7-year-olds will spend most of their time doing general, simple fitness activities, and fitness games. (At this age range, children aren’t really taught Taekwondo at all – classes that teach this age range tend to be general, martial-arts-themed, aerobic activity classes.) As such, they do not learn body co-ordination to the same extent as older students.

So I would say that students should not start training in Taekwondo younger than 7 or 8, as below that age there is little value in it. While students younger than 16 will not learn about all of the aspects of Taekwondo, they will be given a very good grounding in body control, stances, basic techniques, flexibility training, self control, and forms, which is very valuable when they are older than 16.