Teaching a larger group

Early last month, I remember being faced with the task of teaching a larger group than one or two Karateka. I made the mistake of assuming that, since I had experience teaching one to one and had developed some basic skills and techniques to help me do that easily and effectively, this was going to be no different.

It was a group comprising of orange and red belts. Sensei had instructed me to help them with their kumite. There were only 5 or 6 karateka in the group alltogether, which dosen't sound like a  paticularly 'large' group to have to teach but, as I found out it was a group large enough to require a considerably different set of skills to the ones I use when teaching one to one.

I managed to go through their kumite with them on the count, before getting them to go through it on their own without much going wrong apart from the somewhat embarrasing, (for me) experience of hearing the lack of authoritativeness and the general uncertainty in my voice when I spoke, but I assume that kind of thing improves with experience. I know I've mentioned a great deal in previous posts that I don't like asserting dominance over students. But this is in the context of one to one teaching and as I said, teaching a larger group requires a different set of skills. With larger groups , I think you do need to take charge, to some extent, Because you are responsible for a larger group of people and have to organise them, when there could be a huge number of 'them' and only one of you (in this case, I was teaching alongside a fellow 1st dan, but while one of us lead the practice, the other paired up with one of the students because there was an odd number and we swapped places each time, but it was just one of us teaching each time).

Another difference I found was how I had to go about delivering advice and feedback. With one to one teaching, I'm used to having the freedom to be really precise and thurough with the student because there's only one of them, only one set of strengths and weaknesses. With group teaching, however, there's a difference. More students mean more sets of strengths and weaknesses and the chances are you won't have the time to go in to the same kind of depth with each student as you can when just teaching one student. The fact there's a whole group of students make going in to that kind of  depth impractical anyway.

I did attempt to look for mistakes that students were making when I was going through it with them on the count but failed to coordinate it with counting the group through it effectively. I put this dowm to partly my lack of experience and partly  because my mind had seized up! One thing I've seen my Sensei and some of the other black belts do is give advice generally to the group (eg: 'make sure you have a good sized stance', 'don't rush, focus on technique'). Maybe this  is the best way to deliver feedbeck to a larger group, especially when you are hard-pressed for time. There is no guarantee that all students will find this advice useful, which really came to the front of my mind, as a perfectionist and someone who enjoys being thurough, but it's just not possible to meet all the different the needs of every single student in a larger group.

Because I like to naturally like to take a narrow but deep approach, I was well suited to teaching one to one. However, the kind of approach needed for group teaching goes almost completely against my instincts. Nevermind, I'll try to enjoy the challenge and being forced to not be a perfectionist every now and then will probably be good for me.

When I see my Sensei or one of the senior black belts take the whole class during training  sessions, they make it look easy-it's not, evidently. Since my breif experience of teaching a group, I realise that what I'm seeing is the result of a huge amount of teaching experience and things learnt through countless trials and errors.