Rubilia/teaching
This page lists a few thoughts of mine about teaching Go in dedicated personal lessons. It does not refer to public reviews or writings.
Advice from stronger players is widely assumed to be automatically beneficial. In my view, that's mostly wishful thinking. There are various pitfalls and sources of confusion a teacher should familiarize her/himself with, to allow realizing the pupil's true potentialities.
- A dialog based, activating style may be more suitable for developing active skills than monologues.
- The pupil's interest is something extremely important to care about: it's hard enough for the teacher to guess, or understand, what the pupil wants or what he's actually concerned with. So, it can be very useful to a teacher to take care about every hint about it he can get.
- If the pupil remains passive, try to find it out nevertheless. Ask open questions, rather than multiple choice ones only. Let her/him tell her/his ideas - not in order to shred them but simply to better understand the way your pupil thinks.
- Most importantly, respect the way your pupil thinks, even where it may seem silly to you. You think differently, that's all, and often sufficient to state.
(Keep in mind, everyone's ideas look partially silly from the perspective of a stronger player. Nevertheless, those ideas are usually supported by personal experience. Gradually adding new experience is far more likely to help than deprecating the experience someone has gathered already.)
Otherwise, your pupil might be (possibly unconciously) afraid to share his/her real thoughts with you, which in turn would impede all the fine-tuning that is essential for efficient teaching.
- Leaving "wrong" ideas behind is a secondary effect of getting familiar with "correct" ideas. Attempting to put it the other way around can have messy consequences, that is, avoiding an old concept may simply leave annoying defects in the pupil's knowledge framework without necessarily introducing anything superior. Often, significant parts of the old concept are justified. So, don't focus on weakening the old but on strengthening the new.
- Rather than trying to preemptively explain every detail that might be unclear to the pupil, encourage her/him to intervene whenever something is unclear.
- To put it the provocative way: If the pupil doesn't ask anything, that may feel like the teacher is doing particularly well, but actually there must be something wrong.
- Try to answer the pupil's questions thoroughly. On the other hand, don't do it overly extensively, since that likely would rather discourage further questions. Again, the right depth can be found out verbally. E. g., you could ask at the end of the lesson: "What do you think about this lesson, was it rather too fast or too slow, was it too detailed or too shallow, were your urgent questions answered or were they dominated by issues less interesting to you?" Make sure you really understand the answers; if necessary, ask for details, e. g. whether the pupil is referring to a particular point of the lesson. To allow feedback without burdens, it basically should not induce immediate recuperating attempts but serve as a guide for future lessons.
- "take the bad with the good" - When analysing a mistake, always show good moves that answer the bad one appropriately. Emphasise good moves more than bad ones, e. g. show the board with them for a longer time. Mind you, during the time the pupil doesn't know yet whether you're going to call a move "good" or "bad", the move nevertheless gets visually memorised already. Talk about mistakes only as much as required for allowing the pupil to better understand good moves.
- The same applies to criticism of the pupil's playing "style" - When commenting on a bad habit in such a general way at all (see below), always provide alternatives. But even more importantly, choose an appropriate point of time for such a severe comment. As a counterexample, imagine that your pupil, after a wearisome period of weakness, finally performes well in a game, going like "yay, success!". It might not be wise to seriously criticise his style in such a moment. Usually, sooner or later some sort of crisis will occur with the pupil asking "I get into these troubles ever and ever again! What am I doing wrong?" That's a good point of time to give feedback on habits or style.
- Avoid to elaborate on mistakes or misconceptions the pupil doesn't usually commit or follow by him/herself. As far as the pupil has problems to deal with a particular opponent's misplay, he/she will ask you anyway. Analysis that refers to arbitrary "misconceptions of kyu players", rather than to the troubles the particular pupil really is concerned with, rarely suits a personal lesson.
- Do not overrun the pupil's focus. Being told solutions to other problems than which one hopes to solve can be disturbing and is often ineffective.
- Be aware that the pupil realises your comments according to his/her current understanding of and associations with the go terms you use (e. g. territory, influence, thickness, attack etc.), which may be quite different from yours. Even if the meaning is clarified later on, some of the original misinterpretation of your comment remains in memory. Therefore, each time a comment uses such terms, that use should comply with their present meaning to the pupil. If that is too far off, fall back to other words.
Supplementary stuff (notes to myself):
- Try to be open for the pupil to develop own ideas; e. g. by more open questions, as opposed to ones with a fixed set of answers.
- Unlike the medium link in my "Board1 -> Conception1 -> Conception2 -> Board2" model, which can be explained rather well, the edge ones have to grow, like a vegetable: what is needed isn't pulling them up from above, but to pour the roots, drop by drop, little by little.
- Care about the pupil's comments and questions, and give feedback to the pupils ideas; use the pupils words where possible instead of explaining it another way. When the pupils talks or asks about own ideas or perceptions, s/he is interested in and concerned with them, which is the most advantageous precondition for efficient teaching
- At first, accept the fact that the pupil sees, thinks and plays the way s/he does. Aside from improving the efficiency of teaching, such acceptance makes, not at least, the pupil feel comfortable in the lessons. Start from the pupil's current point of view rather than from abstract concepts. Preferrably, choose examples from or related to the pupil's games.
- Watching other teachers' lessons can be helpful, too.
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Also interesting: Hu's Teaching Method and his Triplet of Triplets