This post from Larry Cuban (Education Historian) had some pretty coincidental timing.

As I’ve been doing more instruction in martial arts, some of the conversation around how best to teach pops up every now and then, whether in small groups face-to-face or in the online martial arts communities I follow. The change in approaches over time in martial arts instruction is remarkably similar to that in public school as Larry describes,

For martial arts, let’s take karate for example, instruction began as individual or very small group instruction. As Itosu Anko moved to bring karate to more people, through public physical education, methods needed to be devised to scale up the instructional capacity. If you imaging a karate class you might imagine a matrix of students all performing the same movements at the same time (group kata, aka ‘forms’). Over time this became a staple of instruction, less exploratory, more regimented. Another aspect of older approaches to instruction include the approach of shu-ha-ri, often translated to “follow the rules, break the rules, transcend the rules”. In this method, until you would reach a certain level of attainment you must perform exactly as instructed. Funakoshi Gichin writes in his book a story about performing the same kata for years before he was allowed to progress by his instructor.

Of course new ideas emerge, and new ways of teaching come with changes in society,

One of the major progressive inventions of judo was randori, a kind of free practice. Kano Jigoro refined a lot of the practice and instruction methods from older forms of jujutsu so that students could practice safely. The increased safety meant that randori could be more open and exploratory. Today you might hear this referred to as “pressure testing”. Of course you may be able to throw a compliant partner, but can you execute the technique against their intention? (Side note, this is why I personally enjoy the mid-century translations of judo techniques as “tricks”). However, judo is sometimes criticized for some of the more traditional bits of instruction that are still there, uchikomi (repeated practice), the taxonomy of throws (quite nuanced), and of course the teaching of kata is often a pretty spicy topic. So, what’s emerged is the ecological format (a term usually reserved for BJJ circles). This method uses mini-games and goal oriented partner work to let students explore concepts on their own without the traditional step-by-step instruction, terminology, etc.

I’ve had conversations in learning design and teaching contexts where participants can be pretty entrenched in their preference for direct instruction or more self-directed approaches. I also recently got to chat with someone who has experience as a learner in both ecological format classes and more traditional martial arts class instruction. What was interesting was that the learner could identify parts that worked for them and that they preferred from each format. There wasn’t a clear “best approach”. Although they used much more colourful language than that.

The approaches share some of the same concepts about learning such as feedback. I was in a conversation not so long ago where a proponent of “student-centered approaches” claimed that direct instruction proponents didn’t believe in feedback (they were quite wrong, the direct instruction researcher they named literally has an article detailing that there’s no learning without feedback). This kind of rigidity misses the big picture about the things both approaches share, and that you can use different approaches in teaching and learning.

Quite right. And why I do my best to use a variety of techniques when coaching.

Photo by Brendan Church on Unsplash