Best Practice

What’s the best way to teach martial arts?  Great question.  We can poll a few martial arts teachers, no doubt they’ll have some fairly strong opinions on the matter.  Or we can examine some evidence based research on what kinds of teaching techniques produce the greatest amount of learning in students.

Here it goes:

“Varying the type of material studied in a single sitting — alternating, for example, among vocabulary, reading and speaking in a new language — seems to leave a deeper impression on the brain than does concentrating on just one skill at a time.”

Translation: the generalist beats the specialist once again.

So is changing gears from basics to forms to creative self defense drills the best way to teach martial arts?  I’m certain I can’t answer that question but if the above quoted notion translates to learning physical skills then it sounds like teaching multiple martial modalities (3 points for alliteration) in a single class is a way to help students make connections about what makes a martial art… martial.  For me as a teacher that means the student is starting to see what works and what doesn’t.

Thanks to Joe for the article link.