PEDAGOGY
General Notes
The asana practice can open up a path of healing, growth, and awareness. The practice can also own a path to vanity, narcissism, and obsession. The best way I’ve found to keep the students on the former path is by thinking very carefully about the way I deliver information and guidance.
My classes typically unfold this way…
Take attendance (I sometimes do this during savasana)
Take questions: This gives me an opportunity to get to know the students. I take two or three questions and keep your answers clear and succinct. It is perfectly acceptable to say, “I don’t know.”
Asana practice
Savasana (at least five minutes)
Brief closing thoughts and space for one on one questions as students are leaving.
Whether I am instructing the students into a new posture or refining a posture the students already know, I start by cueing what is touching the floor and move up from there. Often, if a standing posture looks unstable, the root cause will show itself to be gripping or lack of energy in the feet.
Beyond the sequence, which is usually planned in advance, I always teach to what I am seeing and hearing from the students. Once the students have been practicing for a couple of weeks you should be able to say, for example, “Inhale, parsvakonasana on the right” and then wait until the students have entered the posture before you start giving additional cues.
My ultimate goal is to empower the students to practice on their own and to offer led classes with a minimum of verbal instruction.
Demonstrating
I teach without demonstrating. I do not put a mat down when I teach and I do not demonstrate or practice the sequence while I am teaching it. There are many reasons for this and my friend and fellow teacher Francesca Cervero has detailed many of them. I highly recommend exploring her work. If, in the middle of practice, you absolutely must bring the students out of the practice to demonstrate or discuss a particular posture or concept, do so quickly and clearly so that focus and energy do not wane.
The students need to feel seen and taken care of. You cannot see and evaluate their practice if you are concentrating on your own postures. The students should feel like this is a time for them to have their needs met, not a time for you to practice. If you drop into demonstrating a complex posture without having warmed up you are more likely to sustain an injury.
It may be necessary, from time to time, for you to demonstrate a posture or transition but you should do this only after the class to come out of their postures and into a seated or standing position so that they may observe you. Having an experienced and willing student demonstrate a particular posture or transition is also a great option.
Physical Adjustments
I do not offer physical adjustments to my high-school students. This may seem like a unique position coming from an Ashtanga practitioner. Ultimately, my feeling is that the power dynamic is too lopsided for student-teacher touch to be appropriate. There are plenty of good reasons to give hands-on adjustments to adult students who have acknowledged that such physicality will be part of the practice. However, I have not found physical adjustments to be necessary for my high school students to experience the benefits of an asana practice.
As with all potentially triggering interactions, the teacher must consider that intent and impact can be very different. Intent is irrelevant if a student feels abused or violated in any way by the teacher. Finally, taking hands-on adjustments off the table forces a teacher to refine their verbal cues, making them as clear and precise as possible.
Where to Stand
In conjunction with physical adjustments, where you stand in the room can have a profound effect on students’ comfort level and focus. Consider the maturity level of your students when deciding what types of postures to explore. For example, prasarita padottanasana and/or adho mukha svanasana might create unwanted distraction for less mature students. The tone you set will go a long way toward mitigating this type of challenge. During led classes I try to stay in front or off to one side of the students. For balancing poses, I might move to the back of the class so that I don’t create a distraction. Balancing poses are an excellent vehicle for working on dristi. In general, I avoid being behind the students when they are practicing postures that involve putting the rear or the groin “up in the air.”
Teaching on Zoom
I was initially very skeptical about teaching yoga classes via Zoom. I was concerned about student privacy, clandestine recording, and ultimately whether or not the students would feel comfortable.
Conducting classes on Zoom has proven to be very successful. I teach sitting in front of my computer, with little to no demonstration. I suggest the students place their computers at their right shoulder when they are standing at the top of the mat. As a side note, depending on the posture, you might want to cue “Step one foot back and turn to face the camera” if a student has their camera on the left side and you are moving into prasarita padottanasana.
Wrist Watch
One the most valuable tools you can possess besides your own presence, experience, and empathy is a wrist watch. You need this to make sure you don’t go over the allotted time and also as a reference for the pace of the breath. Ashtanga teacher Eddie Stern says that, traditionally, each inhale should last four seconds and each exhale should last four seconds. I gradually work the students up to this ratio, maybe starting with two or three seconds for each half of the cycle.
You should monitor where the breath tends to speed up or slow down in your own practice as well as with your students. I tend breathe more quickly in balancing postures and backbends and tend to slow down in forward folds.
Humor
As is true with any group of people, and especially young people, the quality of attention rests on the edge of a knife. There is always a place for humor but it takes practice to find this place and to know how often to visit. I often use humor to break the intensity of a long hold for inexperienced students or to make students feel less self-conscious about trying something new. Obviously, we never want to inspire laughter at another student’s expense. Use humor to allow all involved to take themselves a little less seriously.
Sanskrit
I use both Sanskrit and English posture names initially and transition to as much Sanskrit as possible by the end of the season. The use of Sanskrit serves the important function of connecting the student’s practice Yoga’s Indian heritage.