How To Teach Anything

One thing I do at BodyChance is teach people how to teach.

Of course – our teaching is Alexander's Discovery, but teaching is first about effective communication, regardless of the content you are delivering.

To be honest, when I first started this 15 years ago, I used to dread it. I'd groan inside whenever one of my trainees put up their hand to say that they to teach. At BodyChance I don't train teachers directly, I help people who want to be teachers.

In BodyChance, to learn more about teaching, you teach. 

I watch you. I stop you when I think you need some advice.

Back then, I wondered why I disliked this process so much. Slowly I realized it was because I thought it was about evaluating or judging my trainees. 

You are good; you are bad. 

Such a binary boy I was back then!

It's not good or bad. That's a lazy way of thinking, and teachers who think like that need to wake up to a third, middle way. There's always another option, another way.

For example, I was watching one of my trainees teaching on Sunday. He acted like his student was radio-active. It was almost funny to watch. When he wanted to use his hands, he bent down and stretched his arm out so the tips of his fingers could reach his student. 

When I saw that I finally had to stop him and ask:

"Why are you trying to keep away from your student? Does she smell?"

We all laughed – him too – and he replied:

"I want to be able to see her whole movement."

"And you can't see her whole movement when you get close?"

"Not really. I only see the top part."

Here we have a binary thing happening.

Close – can't see all.
Far – can see all.

Binary behaviour traps you in a stereo-typed way of thinking.

The only way out is to question the beliefs that underly the behaviour and look for an alternative way of thinking that isn't one or the other.

The best way to change a belief is to question it, not to load another belief on top of it. The whole class started to play with standing close to each other and discovering how much information they could gather about what the other person was doing.

Quite a lot, as it turns out.

Binary disappeared, and a new total world appeared where you were free to be where you wanted to be. That took away most of his arm-stretched-out binary tension and opened the door to a new way of teaching.

After all that, I should direct you to consider ThinkingBody which has a lot about teaching methods in it.

But then, so does BodyThinking and that’s on special this month.

(And if you purchase BodyThinking, you can still get the offer of 40% ThinkingBody at the checkout.)

Have a look at the explanation, there’ll be lots more tips this month on how to use BodyThinking concepts to help you do what you want to do.

Read more here:

https://bodychance.mykajabi.com/store/oTZvjLye