Tips for Teaching & Learning Online – Part III

People learn fastest through experience.

When my daughter Angelica was very little, she was an adventurous child. Trying to protect her was my job as a Dad, but that has a temporal meaning too: a little pain today might save a lot of pain tomorrow.

If something were not deathly risky – I would let her try it. She wanted to climb to the very top of the rope pyramid in the park? 

GO FOR IT. (She was only 2+)

She usually did before I realized what had happened.

Can I touch the heater daddy?

“NO”

But I didn’t do anything to stop her as she tried. 

Her little eyes watched me as her hand drew nearer - me shaking my head, her hand progressing closer and closer…. At some point she felt the heat and stopped – and that made her lesson so much more impactful and easy-to-remember. 

Her body didn’t lie, even though dad might occasionally.

Same with Alexander lessons, or anything. If a student can experience the meaning of your ideas – through directly improving what they want to do – this will imprint their mind more profoundly than anything else.

It’s no surprise people resist online learning, as it is stripped dry of magnetic sensory sensation. We feel people magnetically, and that “sense of presence” is not coming to us online. Actors can sometimes project this majesty, but it still pales in comparison to real life.

You need to engineer it intelligently.

How do you do that? 

One easy way is by using comparative actions. 

It’s simple really – figure out what experience a student needs, then design an exercise whose first step robs them of that experience. 

A simple example might be with arms. 

Point out that arms connect to the axial skeleton through the sternoclavicular joint – where the collar bones join at the base of the neck. This thought makes the arms feel long. Most people think the arm starts at the glenohumeral joint, i.e. from the shoulder’s edge. This thought makes the arms feel short.

Now for the “robbing them of experience”. Do something along these lines:

Ask them to reach above their head in two ways:

1. Moving their arm from the edge of the shoulder to reach up  thinking “short arms.”
2. Moving the arm from the base of the neck to reach up  thinking “long arms.”

Most people experience differences clearly, and it’s simple to do. Universally they will tell you that the second way is more pleasant, and they remember that!

This principle of comparative experiences – the before/after method – is used a lot because it is compelling and memorable. Throw in a bit of creativity, and you have something to explore online.

It’s an example of a principle that can engineer experiences to express your concepts in the form of comparative exercises.

There will be a lot of this going on when 6 of the worlds most experienced teachers of Alexander’s Discovery share what they have discovered during a year of teaching online during the pandemic. BodyChance’s Symposium on How To Teach (& Learn) Online is now starting: read more and book your spot here:

https://bodychance.mykajabi.com/how-to-teach-alexander-online