A couple of years ago I got sent on a training course for work on how to manage information technology. The only thing that made the day interesting was watching the course instructor try to control his class and deal with a very dominating student. Within the first 10 minutes of the course starting, the […]
We have all been there. There is only an hour left in your lesson but you have two hours of material left to teach. Where did the time go? A sign of a good instructor is the ability to keep on top of your lesson plan and finish things off in the allotted amount of […]
Remember that grumpy old teacher in high school you wished had retired 2 years before you started class? For me it was my geography teacher. She should have quit decades earlier and ended up being a terrible, ineffective teacher that sadly turned me off to geography for a long time. That sweet little walk down […]
One of the toughest challenges for canoe or kayak instructors is to teach with another partner. This could be with a stranger that you have just met at a symposium or a fellow staff member at your local paddling school or club. On the surface it seems to be a simple matter, after all you […]
Buoys, posts or other markers on the water are great for teaching. You can use them for students to circle around doing figure eights, zig zag or another activity/game you can think of. The problem is that buoys often are placed in locations that are not ideal for teaching paddling. For some reason God always […]
If you watch the media reports on encounters of humans and nature, you would quickly think that everybody who camps in the forest or goes swimming in the ocean is in very real danger of getting attacked by a bear or shark. As adults, we can rationally figure out that this likely won’t happen to […]
Arthur W. Gamson developed seven principles to effective teaching which have been among the most influential ideas of the past twenty years in relation to teaching theory. It seems pretty straight forward but if we remembered to embrace them, we would be much more effective teachers. Encourage instructor/student contact Encourage cooperation among students Encourage active […]
You just finished up your first kayaking course and you now need to talk to your students and let them know how they did. Help! What do I do? Tim Dyer from White Squall has posted some great tips to help you get through what some argue as one of the most important part of […]
If you are like me, you are terrible with trying to remember your student’s names. I’m so bad that I once forgot my kids’ names during a job interview and had to make hem up. It took me 2 weeks to tell the story to my wife. Yeah, it was bad… Knowing the names of […]
Learning how to give positive and constructive criticism to a student is one of the more difficult teaching skills for new instructors to master. Tim Dyer from White Squall provides some tips and tricks that he has picked up over the years. The art of providing corrective feedback to students is a fine dance. You want to […]
Over my years of talking to people who gave up kayaking, many of them have some sort of story along the following lines, “I tried kayaking once but it flipped over and I got trapped inside of it. I thought I was going to die!” Taking the time to teach the wet exit properly and […]
As kayaking instructors, we take on the roll of “salesperson” as much as or even more than we do the roll of “instructor”. I like using the metaphor of sales, because we are in a unique position in which students pay money for you to introduce them to the sport. If you don’t do a […]
The past 15 years have seen a very significant growth in the popularity of kayaking in North America. Kayakers are now seeking more and better training opportunities. Instructors are meeting these demands with more sophisticated programs and teaching resources, providing both new and experienced paddlers opportunities to develop skills in safe and challenging learning environments. […]