Learning from piano, Wing Chun and the students in front of me.
I’ve now been teaching for about eight sessions, and my approach has already changed quite a bit.
Nobody ever taught me how to teach lion dance. I’ve been taught lion dance, but that’s not quite the same thing. I’ve spent years being a student. Someone showed me something, I tried it, I got it wrong, someone corrected me, and I practised it until I could do it. Turning all of that experience into a lesson that works for a room full of different people is something I’m having to work out as I go.
I also don’t know how long I’ll be teaching for this time around. It might be years, or life might get in the way again. That makes me quite conscious of how we use our training time. If I’m going to give up my time to teach and they’re going to give up their time to learn, I’d like us to make the most of it. I want them to actually leave better than when they arrived. I also want to leave an effective way of teaching so that the current cohort of students will find it easy to teach the next group.
When I first started, I wrote myself a fairly ambitious lesson plan. I basically made a big reference guide of all the different lion dance movements I knew and thought the students should eventually learn. I split it into head shake variations, walking variations, pao si variations, bowing variations, eating a lettuce variations and so on.
My idea was to show them all of these movements early, let them see what was possible, and then come back later and break them down properly. I’m not sure that was particularly useful and in hindsight, maybe have wasted a session or two trying that approach.
There’s a big difference between seeing someone perform a movement and being able to perform it yourself.
I could demonstrate something and the students could understand what they were looking at, but that didn’t necessarily mean they had any better ability to actually do it. There are plenty of things I’ve watched other people do where I thought I understood what was happening, only to try it myself and realise I had no idea.
So I’ve started moving in another direction. Rather than showing them everything, I’m breaking things down much more.
The biggest thing I’ve added is timing.
This actually came from learning piano. I’ve been trying to teach myself piano through online lessons and one of the things I really liked was how the teacher stripped everything back. Before worrying about playing complicated pieces, there was counting. There was clapping. There was learning to feel where the beat was. Each time we moved along with the lessons, there was a reminder to go back to the earlier lessons and repeat them, this time using skills that we’re developing. Our timing and dexterity should be better.
That made a lot of sense to me for lion dance.
I’ve started teaching the students to count out movements rather than simply copying what I’m doing. We count the beats, we put movements against those beats and then we practise them again and again.
The idea isn’t to learn something once and then move on forever.
You learn something, then you learn something else, then you come back to the first thing. You keep revisiting the foundations while adding new material. The beats don’t change just because you’re learning something more complicated. The basic movements don’t disappear just because you’ve learnt another ten movements. Ideally, you’re doing the same moves better.
That’s something I’ve also experienced through my Ving Tsun training.
My Sifu is quite good at letting people make mistakes. He’ll correct something, but he doesn’t try to correct everything at once. Sometimes it’s one small detail. A few minutes later he’ll come back to another detail. Eventually, those little corrections start to add up.
I’ve realised I’m naturally inclined to do the opposite. I see ten things that could be improved and I want to tell someone all ten. I’m having to learn to hold some of that back.
If someone isn’t doing something perfectly but they’re competent enough to move on, perhaps it’s okay to move on. I can always come back to it later.
That’s probably where my teaching has ended up at the moment.
If they’re competent, we move on.
It doesn’t mean they’ve mastered it. It just means they’ve got enough of it that we can build on top of it. And as with the piano lessons, even as we build on top of it, we continue to come back to these foundational movements to try to master them.
I’m finding that this is also changing the way I think about what a lesson should look like. I don’t necessarily need to show the students everything I know. In fact, doing that might be counterproductive. There is a temptation when you know something well to show people all the interesting things because you want them to see what’s possible.
But sometimes the most useful thing I can do is spend twenty minutes on something that looks very basic. If they can count properly, move properly and understand what they’re doing, then the more complicated stuff becomes much easier to teach later.
The other thing I’ve taken from Ving Tsun is the idea of getting senior students to teach junior students. My Sifu does this deliberately. When someone is learning a form, they don’t just learn it from him. Once they’re ready, he gets every student who have already learnt the form to teach it.
There’s a practical reason for this. Teaching exposes what you actually know.
You can think you understand something until somebody asks you to explain it. Then suddenly you realise there’s a section you don’t really understand, or you’ve been doing something for years without knowing why. Or you may have made something up because you forgot.
It also means the junior student gets to learn from several people. Everyone has slightly different strengths and remembers different details. One person might be particularly good at explaining the footwork. Someone else might be good at the hand movements. Someone else might have a really good understanding of the body mechanics. We end up learning the strengths of different people.
I think there is something useful there for our lion dance training too.
At the moment, I’m still doing a lot of the teaching myself. In fact, I’m probably micromanaging it more than I eventually want to. But I think there’s a reason for that. I’m still trying to establish a baseline.
I want to see what everyone’s actual skill level is. I want them to understand what I think good lion dancing looks like. I want to make sure that when I eventually ask someone else to teach a movement, they’re not teaching the version they’ve half-remembered from three years ago.
Once that foundation is there, I’ll be much happier handing things over.
If someone forgets a movement, I want them to be able to ask someone senior. If someone doesn’t understand a routine, I want them to be able to work through it with someone else. And if the senior student can’t explain it, that’s useful information too. They can come back to me and ask or go researching the answer for themselves.
I hope in this way, the knowledge and skills starts becoming something the whole team owns rather than something than just in my head.
It’s only been eight sessions, so I’m still working out what works and what doesn’t.
There are also a lot of things I haven’t worked out yet. I’m teaching people of different ages, different physical abilities and different levels of experience, and I’m finding that what works for one person doesn’t necessarily work for another. That’s probably going to take me a while to figure out.
But that’s probably one of the more interesting (often frustrating) parts of teaching for me so far. I thought I was going to spend my time teaching lion dancing. Instead, I’m finding that I’m having to work out how I think people actually learn and adapting to them.
And I’m borrowing quite a bit from the other things I’ve learnt along the way.
wakeuplion 