Our most POWERFUL, SECRET Acro Teaching Tips?

As you know teaching acro is our main passion and motivation!

We always love our Europe teaching tour, because we get to teach different people every week, and get plenty of feedback on our teaching.

And it makes us reflect on our teaching more, also when we see other teachers too.

There's a few things I have realised that we do as teachers that is more unique or maybe different to others, so I thought I would share it...

The first is what we call the theory topics/introductory points that we share before any class.

For example, if we are teaching a pops linking workshop, at the start we will share with the group a few important things to think about, such as:

"Bases be compressive in the receptions to allow you to directly link."

"Flyers keep pushing in the arms and don't bend them on landing to allow better linking."

"Both use the receptions to correct imbalances, and bring the weight back into the stack to continue linking."

We of course expand much more upon these points, giving more explanation of how and why it helps, and we try to then refer back to these theory points throughout the class when relevant.

We personally think this is quite a useful teaching approach as it helps students have something in their mind before they begin the practice.

Additionally at the start of the class it is easier to help these important tips land more clearly, whereas during the class or a demo round there is so much info being shared and the acro technique that takes students focus, that they will probably miss these important tips if we shared them then.

This links to another key point about teaching and one important thing in our approach, which is not just explaining what we are doing.

Students for the most part can see exactly what we are doing.

If we just explain: "I put my hand here, I lift my leg, I step here etc. etc."

We are simply telling students what they can for the most part see.

We find this very basic teaching or not the most valuable teaching.

What is way more impactful is to explain the things that students cannot see, explaining feelings or intentions, explaining things they can think of or focus on when attempting the skill.

We like to emphasize why moving in a certain way is critical or works, for example: "leaning this way makes sure to distribute the weight better over the stack in the transition."

We try to explain things like the gaze (where to look) for the flyer, the grips and positioning of the feet or hands, because whilst these things are visible to students, they are hard to notice the exact details.

The other thing we love doing is explaining and visually showing common mistakes or pitfalls and how to correct them.

This is super powerful because most students will make those common mistakes, and then they already know how to identify and fix it.

One more thing that we like to do, and have had good feedback on is our metaphors.

We use these as a way to share more concepts or ideas in a way that can help people understand.

One example would be when we try to explain the concept of soft feet for bases.

"Imagine how you would hold a baby and move it around, or if we are talking about catching pops, imagine someone would throw an egg at you and you had to catch it. You would support and cradle but with a soft grip, not strongly grabbing."

We expand on this, but this metaphor or concept alone can help people understand the idea much better already than simply saying: "bases have soft feet".

There are many metaphors for many concepts or ideas and other teachers also use these, the fun thing is the creative or funny ones often stick in students minds.

One for example that I remember Conitrini using is "have a proud pussy" when she was trying to emphasize the point of pushing the hips out in landing in an icarian.

This is one of the coolest things about teaching, that you can and often should get creative and find different ways to help your teaching land more impactfully with students.

If you're an acro teacher, or an aspiring acro teacher then this is an encouragement for you to self assess.

Do you just explain what you're doing, or can you go a layer deeper and explain what people can't see?

Can you add some metaphors or your own fun way of explaining a concept or important point in your classes?

And is there any theory topics you can bring or share to your students as well?

These are just a few of our stronger teaching techniques, there are of course way more nuances to teaching too.

And if you really want to learn more about teaching from us, then come join one of our level 1 or 2 training events.

Or you can consider joining our future acroyoga teacher training, which we are starting to work on now!

We will share more about that in our next email, but it's fun to finally be starting the creative process for our teacher training which has been a dream of ours for a while.

Cheers,

Cas