Using Assistant Karate Teachers

Tip: Watch the eyes of your students. You can tell right away when students are saturated with technology, when they don’t understand the words you are using, when they are glued to your energy and ready for more.

Keep An Eye On The Eyes.

Here you can see Yoli keeping an eye on Stephanie’s eyes.

Oos to all who are still reading, and those who are here for the first time. I recommend reading past posts, just to get an idea of things we have been discussing.

Here is an example:
You have 20 kids. The ranks are 5 beginners, 3 are 7th kyu, 5 are 6th kyu, 2 at 5th kyu, 2 at 4th, and 3 are 3rd through 1st kyu. Set the workout to run all the way to the end of class. Have your assistant take out the small groups quietly. He / she should drop kids back in and remove new ones without interrupting the flow of the class. (The first time you are going to do this, tell the children what you are doing so that they are ready to walk away from the group quietly and THEN turn and do the courtesy bow to you. This will allow you to keep the flow going.) The helper should start by figuring out how much time to spend with each group. If they begin 5 minutes after class starts, and go to 10 minutes before class ends, they will have 45 minutes for 6 groups. That will give them a little more than 5 minutes per group. They have to hustle. I suggest the individual instructor start with the ‘brown’ belts (3 – 1 kyu). You and your helper need to decide in advance what technology each rank should be working on. It flows well. He or she will keep trading one group for the next. The time will fly.

In this shot Sensei Jackie is helping one student, while the others work in the background.




Meanwhile, you have an hour long class set up in your head. Of course, you can start with a few minutes of meditation. Then do 15 minutes of stretch and exercise and another 10 minutes on stances, blocking, striking and history. Then you can go to bag work, or self defense or kata basics for another 10 – 15 minutes. Now it is time to spar, with just enough time to do meditation and announcements before bowing out.

This class structure works really well. If your helper comes on time, you can have him / her run the class while YOU look at individual growth and technology.

Now that I have given you a structure to try in your dojo (Let me know how it works.), I would like to talk a little about how to get more people to show up as helpers. Here are some ideas that have worked for me:

Take a minute in adult class to:
Talk about the benefits of coming in early and helping. Remind them that they will master ONLY through teaching. Publicly recognize the people who showed up and helped. (“Thanks to John and Sally for showing up and helping”)
Spend a minute at the beginning of adult class talking about what worked and what didn’t work when they were working with the kids. That will make the other students care. In this shot I am going over a chasing game with some instructors:



Take a minute at the end of kid’s class to:
Have the kids thank the assistant teachers that aren’t black belts. Give them their props.

Finally and most importantly actually USE the helpers that do show up. That means that occasionally you won’t get to run the show. They get to warm up class (see below), be in charge of the end of the day event / sparring / whatever it is, and teach something other than blocking and Tekkie 1. It took me a few years before I became even slightly comfortable managing helpers instead of running class. It was a big change for me, but a huge plus for the children to have small work groups with a teacher instead of being lost in a sea of kids who already know the material.

Let me know if any of these pointers help out.

In my dojo, these days, it is unusual for me to have only one helper and even more rare for me to be alone. I make it a point to give the helpers teaching jobs that will let them grow. I take on the hard to teach students myself. I use my peripheral vision to watch the other groups and give my helpers pointers on how to keep the kids attention or use words that the kids will understand when I notice they had a problem. I always thank my helpers for showing up.

Here is a photo. Look closely and you will see 4 different groups; in the front you can see Randy and Isaiah, behind him are Andrea and Andrew, I am in the far right with a new student and the bo kids are on the far left.

So here is the bottom line:
To get helpers you are going to need to encourage them, motivate them, thank them and give them jobs that challenge them (not like in the old days when we sat and waited for Sensei to give us a job, remember that?) Everyone wins when adults show up for the kid’s class. The adults are pumped for their class, already warmed up, the kids get the attention they need and attach themselves to people other than you. (That is awesome the first few times you see it, by the way.) Last, and very importantly, you are free to see the big picture and figure out where to go from here.

Please let me know how this works out for you. Next post I am torn between talking about how to use more than one helper (do a lot of you have more than one?) and talking about ways to vary the repetition in the dojo.

Keep on teaching the punch and keep in touch,
Oos,