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Welcome back to the podcast.
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So good to be here with you.
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There is a really big difference between knowing how to teach and knowing how to teach a specific set of skills.
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And there are some very respected aerial teacher trainings that are built around skill lists saying, okay, well, you'll teach you exactly how to build and progress and technically understand these skills, and you'll be signed off on those skills.
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And that is one way to go about it.
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But it was never the model I wanted to build.
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And honestly, it wasn't the model I wanted when I was looking for aerial teacher education.
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So the standard idea for building a teacher training is here is level one, and here are 10, 15 skills inside level one.
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And there might be all kinds of other pedagogical things that are built into the training too.
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There might be anatomy, uh, there might be group management stuff, there could be all it totally depends on the training.
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What's nice about that is it's it's very structured, it's very replicable, and it gives teachers boundaries, like I'll teach this, but I won't teach that.
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So that can be very reassuring.
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But when I looked at trainings like that, I kept thinking, well, I already know how to teach a lot of those skills, and actually, I teach some of them differently for very specific reasons.
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And sometimes I saw explanations that just left a lot to be desired.
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Um, you know, not every program, but there was definitely things where I was like, okay, I have a lot more technical nuance than this teacher.
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So this is not somebody that I would learn technical nuance from.
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And very specifically, very important to me, I did not want to feel like I got that teacher's permission to teach skills one through ten.
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It was very important to me that I have autonomy and that my capability of teaching skills was not defined by having learned one person's way of doing it.
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That didn't resonate with me.
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I wanted more independence than that.
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Now I see how that could be useful, particularly if you're brand new to teaching Ariel.
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But at the same time, here's what I really want for an instructor at any level.
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And I've worked with instructors who have done multiple trainings, who have taught for many years, and I've worked with instructors who have not started teaching yet.
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What I want for each of those people, and everyone is capable of this, is the ability to know how to break down skills, build progressions, critically and creatively think about those skills, and know when they don't have the information they need to teach it, and to proactively seek that information, information, whether that's coming to me or going to another teacher.
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I don't know every skill.
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I can't do every skill.
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And so I can't provide information about every single skill to the students who come through my program.
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Uh, nobody knows all of the skills.
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Uh, so it never made sense to me that I would just spend this, you know, spend people's investment telling them, here's how I teach this skill, here's the cues, here's the breakdown.
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I wanted them to walk away being like, I have tools for doing that myself and having that independence and autonomy and knowing when I'm out of my depth and I need more support and understanding the skill.
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So when I imagined building Bloom as something like, here's skills one through 100 and how I teach them, it just kind of felt unsatisfying and it felt kind of tedious to me.
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And it's not because the details of different skills don't matter.
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They absolutely do.
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And there are amazing intricate things that happen at every level of skills that deserve our attention and need to be understood before teaching.
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Um, but I just didn't want Bloom to be a big catalog of skills and how I teach them.
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I'm like, if you need to see my demo of every single skill to be able to teach a skill, then I have not, I have failed you.
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I have not prepared you to be a professional aerial instructor who can innovate, who can create, who can uh see a skill and figure out how to break it down, right?
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I want you to have those core skills.
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If you have those core skills, it takes you so far.
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If you need to know somebody's way of teaching every single skill, then you have a really, really long chore list.
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And I don't want anybody to feel like learning to teach Ariel is a chore.
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It doesn't mean this is a bad way to teach.
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And you can teach somebody how to become critical and creative thinkers by uh using skills as the material, right?
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Okay, like here's how we handle this skill, here's how we handle it, and then you start to see the patterns, assuming that you're being shown what those patterns are and not just memorizing.
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But it definitely wasn't a method that I wanted to spend my trainees' time, money, and energy on.
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Now, I want to be very explicit about this.
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I am not saying that the order that you teach skills doesn't matter.
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It is incredibly important, and I am very, very passionate about making sure that our curriculum is designed in a way that is realistic for the level and especially foundational curriculum.
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I'm going to talk more about that in a moment, but our introductory curriculum, it is so critical.
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It is like so, so important.
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And that's where we do need to be very meticulous, and we need to be very intentional about the order we teach things in.
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Uh, there's still flexibility within that.
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And I think that's the thing that overwhelms aerialists who want to become instructors or are instructors sometimes.
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It's like, what's the right order?
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And there are certain things that should definitely come before certain other things for logical reasons, safety reasons, and motor learning reasons.
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There's a lot of logic that goes into that, but there is no one right order.
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Skill one to 20, 1 to 100, whatever.
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That's not real.
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People have decided ways that they do it and they share that.
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But Ariel is so much more open-ended than that.
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And our students don't come in with one kind of body or brain.
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Students might need adjustments to curriculum.
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So even though I am building out a formal foundational curriculum that I will be licensing to studios, I will be very explicit.
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Look, here is your structure, here is all of the foundation.
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I still want you to be looking at how you might need to adapt this for the individual, for the class you're working with.
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I never want anybody who works with me or uses my resources to feel like they're in a box.
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I want them to feel like they have excellent guidance and excellent, you know, resources, but not that this is the one singular only way.
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There will be a few things where I come in and I say, absolutely do not do it this way.
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Just don't.
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Like, here's a way better way to do it.
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And I'll be very clear about that.
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And I hope that nobody ever creates the standardized curriculum of aerial silks or hoop or whatever, and claims that it is the one way.
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We have to be comfortable with the reality that aerial is not that rigid and humans are not that rigid, and we're not having the same students or the same class makeup every day.
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So here's how I solved the problem.
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Like, okay, we need to, we need teachers to like engage with skills and know how to teach skills, but I don't want to give them a list of 50 skills and here's how to teach them.
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Now show me that you can teach them just like that.
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I was like, this is like that's a chore.
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This is not the best pedagogy.
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Like, that's not going to get the best learning outcomes for my teachers.
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And I want them to be engaging on a more deep level that allows them to see patterns, think critically, and all that.
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So, first, how we handle this in bloom is we get really, really crazy, nerdy, precise, specific about foundational movement.
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It's very technical.
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It's looking at what are the actual movements and body positions and apparatus placements that make the skill work.
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What are the common mistakes?
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What are the common incorrect cues?
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So, for example, I feel like I always use this example because it's like such a good one.
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Um, when we're slipping in a knee hook on silk, they'll often say like grip harder.
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Well, we also need to look at the rotation of the hip.
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We need to look at the positions of the hip, and we need to see how the shoulders are organized as well.
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The rotation of the shoulder that is holding on, for example, when we're reaching for catchers, if it's internally rotated, you're gonna have a really hard time holding on, no matter how much of an iron fist grip you've got going.
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So we look at the building blocks of movement on hammock, silk, hoop, and we build deep knowledge on that because all the movements you see in Ariel are variations on foundational body positions and movements.
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So there's some pretty unique things that can come up in different skills, but for the most part, we are working with a set, a finite set of body positions, engagements, what what is healthy, how do you align your shoulders, how do you bring the ribs and the pelvis together, and then how do we interface with the apparatus in all of these little ways?
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If you go back on my Instagram, I'm really excited about this technique tip uh about hip key roll-up, where using the outside leg to propel the movement does nothing and actually makes it harder, and that keeping the straddle open makes the dynamic movement much cleaner.
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And it's like these really nitty-gritty details that we need to start to recognize and see.
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Like, okay, learn to look for that.
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Uh, there's a lot of different ways to think about skills.
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You could be looking at the position of the hips in hip key roll-up, you could be looking at how the torso is twisting relative to the position of the pelvis, right?
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There's so many conversations we can't have them all.
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I love having Instagram because it's basically a place where I can just keep popping in more observations and technique research that I find really engaging and fun.
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And sometimes other people do too.
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Sometimes other people don't.
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Uh, but I always think it's worth understanding the mechanics of the skills and personally just fascinating.
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So in Bloom, we look at foundational skills and we look at them very deeply because looking at them deeply helps to reveal all of the principles and patterns that are going to come up again and again in future more advanced complex skills.
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Uh, another way I approach this in the Blue Mariel teacher training, and even if you don't take my training, I highly encourage you to do this.
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Uh you don't you won't have access to the full template and everything with the prompts, but it's called the Skill Super Expert Project.
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And for this assignment, the teacher chooses a skill and then follows my list of prompts and explorations to basically like surgically dissect the skill and experiment with the skill and understand it at a much deeper level than most people would ever get to.
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And this is a replicable assignment, right?
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You can do that with any skill, but what happens when you go really, really deep is now you understand, we have all this list of prompts, you understand how to do this without somebody telling you how they do the skill.
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You're learning how to dissect a skill.
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You're the surgeon, you are breaking the thing down into its parts and then asking the questions that help you understand.
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And you can do that with any skill.
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So we use one one skill as a case study.
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And then so that the trainees who go through my program have access to more examples, I give them access to my entire Arial Silks online library.
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So a year membership is included with the Bloom Aerial Teacher Training, and that's where every single tutorial on there, except there's probably a few that need to be updated, but there is uh like prerequisites, what to warm up, common errors, related skills that are linked to, and list of cues, theory, technique, modifications.
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And yes, I I seriously built my tutorial library like that.
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So if you're not in there already, highly, highly recommend.
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You don't have to join Bloom to get access to that.
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Uh, it's$35 a month or less, depending on your plan.
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Okay.
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But then they're seeing over and over again how I am analyzing and breaking down the skill, noticing like what makes it safe, what uh what are the risks, what is something that's critically important that you need to be aware of that could go wrong.
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This is my whole philosophy is I don't want you to memorize my hundreds of tutorials that are on there.
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I want you to develop your method for analyzing troubleshooting, problem solving, breaking down, because that empowers you to teach any skill uh except for skills that you know you need deeper instruction on.
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There are definitely skills that I would go learn how to teach.
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Like if I wanted to teach people probably like anything, anything powerful on straps, I would want to work with somebody who knows those skills very intimately because you might not think of something kind of nestled into the details of that.
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And there's a higher risk of inner injury when we are working with very powerful dynamic movement.
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There can always be something hidden that you're not aware of, and that is also why it's important to really get familiar with the skills you are teaching and cross-reference.
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Talk to people, watch how other people teach it or do it, uh, build, build a more sturdy foundation of experience around that skill.
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And then another way that I handle the problem of like, how do I make sure people know how to teach the skill in Bloom is that's where the one-on-one mentorship comes in really handy because the teachers can specifically bring me skills that they are working on as a student or a researcher or as an instructor, they want to bring it into their curriculum, but they have questions about it.
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And a really important parameter on all of this that I emphasize in the Bloom Arial Teacher training is acknowledging what you don't know and where your scope is.
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So it's not like you do my program and you're like, yay, now I can teach anything in all of aerial arts.
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I want it to feel like I completed Bloom.
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I now have a systematic way to assess my readiness to teach a skill, to understand what I necessarily need to know and understand about a skill, and then I can say, do I have that information or do I not?
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Do I know the safety points?
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Do I know the points of contact?
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Do I know what can go wrong?
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And am I prepared to prevent any of those things from happening and communicate with students so that they are not thrown into the deep end and I'm now surprised by what's happening.
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With a critical caveat, and this is really important for the philosophy of all of this, you still can't predict what weird things your students are going to do.
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You cannot anticipate every risk.
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It's not possible because there's infinite variations, maybe it's not infinite, very, very large number exponential of possible things that a student can do that you weren't expecting.
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And that's why being a very perceptive, critical thinking teacher is safer.
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And this is what's really important if you think you're prepared perfectly because somebody showed you everything that can go wrong in a skill, it it's a false sense of security.
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And you might let your guard down.
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There are still things students can do that are going to introduce risk.
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And a student can do a skill perfectly, but something went wrong internally in their body.
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So the technique of the skill is good, but now something has slipped in their shoulder.
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That's nobody's fault.
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The risk doesn't go away because you had perfect cues.
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And I think that's something that might not be comfortable to acknowledge.
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We want to feel like I know everything, so nothing can ever go wrong.
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We never have that security as aerial instructors.
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And frankly, that ties in perfectly to my last episode about how much we are handling and why our role is a serious profession and deserves to be taken seriously, and why aerial instructors should be paid reasonably.
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Again, a bigger economic conversation.
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There are problems that I don't know how to solve, but there is a risk that you take on as an instructor.
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And you can't be perfect, you can't be so perfect that nothing ever goes wrong.
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I would never lead my trainees to believe that.
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And when you don't know a skill, that's not a failure on your part.
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Why would you know every skill?
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It's not a failure, it's a professional responsibility to then say, okay, I'm either not going to teach that, or I'm gonna go to someone who knows how to teach that or research it deeply before I introduce it.
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I'm going to make sure that I'm not just throwing myself and my students into the deep end, and I'm also not going to be hard on myself because I don't know every skill in the world, or I can't do every skill in the world.
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No teacher can do everything.
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Let's just leave that, leave that behind.
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And then here's another reason where Ariel, it's just much less contained than our brains would like it to be.
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Uh, our brains might want a clear-defined list of skills, but while foundations can be quite structured and more uh contained in what is logical progression, there's a certain point of skill level that you reach where basically the options branch out in so many different directions that are all equally valid.
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And students might have different interests, they might be interested in drops, they might be interested in sequences, dynamics, skills that favor flexibility, spinning.
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There's there's like a lot of a lot of options.
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There's a lot of possibilities after a certain point of skill level.
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And so it didn't make sense to be like, okay, now the intermediate skills are these ones.
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And like, no, there's like a set of, there's hundreds that you could choose from that are all very reasonable to teach after those foundations have been established.
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So yeah, that's why it never made sense to me to structure things around levels in that way, and that the focus and emphasis on foundations is really where the important stuff happens.
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And you can use any skill as case studies, and you can use multiple skills as examples to talk about um, you know, how to teach and principles of aerial movement and where everything's like pretty normal, pretty expected, and then, oh, and then this one skill has this funky thing where we do this weird thing with our leg that we don't really normally do in other skills.
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And it's not like a complete free-for-all, it's not total chaos.
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There are some skills that, yeah, wouldn't be the smartest choice for an intermediate level or the next intermediate level.
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And there's some skills that you can put progressively because they have progressively more complexity or difficulty in them with similar patterns.
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Um, so it's not totally random free-for-all, that's not what I'm saying, but it it does get quite a bit more amorphous than those in the introductory curriculum.
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So here's my philosophy.
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I don't want to create teachers who know a list of skills and got checked checked off on each skills.
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I wanted to develop teachers who know how to think about skills responsibly, creatively, critically, intelligently, and so that they have autonomy and independence as an instructor developing a curriculum that might not look exactly like mine.
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I care a lot about what comes first and what comes later, and I especially care a lot in foundations and introductory curriculum.
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But I care even more that a teacher understands why they are making the decisions they are making.
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And to me, that's the difference between delivering somebody's curriculum and actually becoming a deeply engaged teacher who is creating and adapting and innovating along the way.
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And then this ties into the whole bigger picture of teaching and what I think is critically missing in the industry and why I built Bloom and why I brought in all the different layers I did is the skills are important.
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They are crucial, they are what we do, and we have to understand them.
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And I take my students into that deep, detailed technique because that's the core of what we do.
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But if we are only thinking about curriculum as okay, level one is you can teach these skills, level two is you can teach those skills, level three is you can teach these awesome other skills.
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There is pedagogy that doesn't come in levels.
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You either know it or you don't.
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You either use it or you don't.
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And so that is the more holistic part of teaching that might be thought of as extra or the professional development layer, but it's not.
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It is also core because it directly affects learning outcomes.
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It directly affects safety, it directly affects your success as a teacher and your student success, retention, and student.
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Really having a chance at an aerial journey.
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When you know how to work with nervous systems, when you are making conscious choices around cueing based on the motor learning stage your student is in, when you have the anatomy, when you have real answers for students with physiology and know how to incorporate uh different elements into your warmup based on, like if you're going to be doing spinning or inversions, it it directly affects the physical skills.
00:22:26.400 --> 00:22:40.640
So we don't need to be weighting the physical skills more heavily than these other skills in teaching Ariel, because some of these other skills could be the thing that prevent the injury, could be the thing that prevent a student from quitting, and that matters.
00:22:40.880 --> 00:22:45.359
Knowing how learning works is not a bonus add-on.
00:22:45.519 --> 00:22:50.720
It is what you are working with in the flesh in class, but it's beneath the surface.
00:22:50.880 --> 00:22:54.880
You might not be seeing it explicitly or working with it intentionally.
00:22:55.039 --> 00:22:58.799
The ethics of working with pain and fear, these are real.
00:22:59.200 --> 00:23:03.599
These sound abstract, but they are manifesting in bodies and brains.
00:23:03.759 --> 00:23:06.640
And they are informing the decisions that your students make.
00:23:06.799 --> 00:23:10.640
They are informing the safety of your students' bodies and their psychology.
00:23:10.799 --> 00:23:13.680
And that is why I've included those layers in Bloom.
00:23:13.839 --> 00:23:14.640
It's really fun.
00:23:14.799 --> 00:23:16.079
It's really exciting.
00:23:16.240 --> 00:23:22.799
It makes it so that what you see in class suddenly sparks all these connected dots in your head.
00:23:22.880 --> 00:23:25.680
You're like, I know exactly what I'm looking at.
00:23:25.920 --> 00:23:30.559
Or I have a procedure for how I respond to this kind of challenge.
00:23:30.799 --> 00:23:39.519
Or I'm not just going to throw more cues at the student who isn't getting it because there's a few things I want to understand better before offering a solution.
00:23:39.680 --> 00:23:43.680
And all of this is why I feel completely comfortable when advanced teachers come to me.
00:23:43.759 --> 00:23:46.079
I'm not like, oh, am I not good enough?
00:23:46.240 --> 00:23:48.079
Do they know skills that I don't know?
00:23:48.400 --> 00:23:51.039
Because I know that I'm offering integrative pedagogy.
00:23:51.279 --> 00:23:55.839
I know that I'm bringing in the layers that most people don't get the opportunity to learn about more deeply.
00:23:56.160 --> 00:24:04.000
I'd be comfortable with a teacher with more experience than me coming into the program, not because I know more than every aerial teacher out there.
00:24:04.319 --> 00:24:11.519
I deeply believe that every single aerial instructor has unique insight perspective and experience.
00:24:11.759 --> 00:24:16.480
And we all become smarter when we talk about these things and share them.
00:24:16.720 --> 00:24:31.680
But really what makes me so confident in the value I can offer teachers, even who have taught much longer than me, is that I have done the work to bring together all these different areas of research along with my very deep technical knowledge.
00:24:32.000 --> 00:24:33.680
And that's been a lot of work.
00:24:33.839 --> 00:24:40.079
Honestly, it probably would have been a lot easier to build an aerial teacher training that was just skill level based.
00:24:40.400 --> 00:24:45.039
And just kind of like, here's level one, two, three, here's how I teach these skills.
00:24:45.359 --> 00:25:01.279
I've definitely not chosen the easier path in building a teacher training, but the results I've gotten for my teachers, the conversations we're having inside Bloom makes it so clear that it's worth it and that it is changing teaching practices.
00:25:01.359 --> 00:25:03.599
It is deepening and refining our craft.
00:25:03.920 --> 00:25:07.200
And there's still so much for all of us to learn.
00:25:07.279 --> 00:25:08.720
And that's really exciting to me.
00:25:08.960 --> 00:25:14.880
If you've made it this far, I just want to say that I really appreciate you taking the time to think this deeply about pedagogy.
00:25:15.599 --> 00:25:23.039
It's not easy to think about teaching Ariel for all of the reasons we've talked about today.
00:25:23.359 --> 00:25:31.359
Uh, there's not as much containment and structure and universal checklists that we might like there to be.
00:25:31.599 --> 00:25:35.440
But once we get comfortable with that, that's where it's really fun.
00:25:35.759 --> 00:25:40.079
We see how much freedom and flexibility, independence, autonomy there is in it.
00:25:40.240 --> 00:25:51.759
Uh while keeping things really safe, really structured for our students, know what we're doing, know what we're talking about, and really engage with this as the craft that it is.
00:25:52.000 --> 00:25:54.559
The fall session for Bloom is enrolling now.
00:25:54.720 --> 00:25:56.319
We start October 4th.
00:25:56.480 --> 00:26:01.440
If this sounds exciting to you, if this resonates with you, I've included the link for info about that below.
00:26:01.599 --> 00:26:03.440
I hope you've enjoyed our conversation today.
00:26:03.599 --> 00:26:06.319
Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you on the next episode of
00:00:09.119 --> 00:00:10.640
Welcome back to the podcast.
00:00:10.880 --> 00:00:12.320
So good to be here with you.
00:00:12.480 --> 00:00:22.239
There is a really big difference between knowing how to teach and knowing how to teach a specific set of skills.
00:00:22.719 --> 00:00:37.679
And there are some very respected aerial teacher trainings that are built around skill lists saying, okay, well, you'll teach you exactly how to build and progress and technically understand these skills, and you'll be signed off on those skills.
00:00:37.920 --> 00:00:41.359
And that is one way to go about it.
00:00:41.920 --> 00:00:45.039
But it was never the model I wanted to build.
00:00:45.200 --> 00:00:50.320
And honestly, it wasn't the model I wanted when I was looking for aerial teacher education.
00:00:50.560 --> 00:01:00.320
So the standard idea for building a teacher training is here is level one, and here are 10, 15 skills inside level one.
00:01:00.560 --> 00:01:04.079
And there might be all kinds of other pedagogical things that are built into the training too.
00:01:04.159 --> 00:01:09.359
There might be anatomy, uh, there might be group management stuff, there could be all it totally depends on the training.
00:01:09.519 --> 00:01:18.799
What's nice about that is it's it's very structured, it's very replicable, and it gives teachers boundaries, like I'll teach this, but I won't teach that.
00:01:18.879 --> 00:01:20.640
So that can be very reassuring.
00:01:20.879 --> 00:01:30.560
But when I looked at trainings like that, I kept thinking, well, I already know how to teach a lot of those skills, and actually, I teach some of them differently for very specific reasons.
00:01:30.719 --> 00:01:35.280
And sometimes I saw explanations that just left a lot to be desired.
00:01:35.439 --> 00:01:43.120
Um, you know, not every program, but there was definitely things where I was like, okay, I have a lot more technical nuance than this teacher.
00:01:43.280 --> 00:01:47.120
So this is not somebody that I would learn technical nuance from.
00:01:47.280 --> 00:01:57.280
And very specifically, very important to me, I did not want to feel like I got that teacher's permission to teach skills one through ten.
00:01:57.840 --> 00:02:10.319
It was very important to me that I have autonomy and that my capability of teaching skills was not defined by having learned one person's way of doing it.
00:02:10.479 --> 00:02:11.919
That didn't resonate with me.
00:02:12.080 --> 00:02:13.680
I wanted more independence than that.
00:02:13.840 --> 00:02:18.719
Now I see how that could be useful, particularly if you're brand new to teaching Ariel.
00:02:19.280 --> 00:02:23.680
But at the same time, here's what I really want for an instructor at any level.
00:02:23.759 --> 00:02:31.280
And I've worked with instructors who have done multiple trainings, who have taught for many years, and I've worked with instructors who have not started teaching yet.
00:02:31.599 --> 00:02:58.639
What I want for each of those people, and everyone is capable of this, is the ability to know how to break down skills, build progressions, critically and creatively think about those skills, and know when they don't have the information they need to teach it, and to proactively seek that information, information, whether that's coming to me or going to another teacher.
00:02:58.879 --> 00:03:00.319
I don't know every skill.
00:03:00.479 --> 00:03:02.400
I can't do every skill.
00:03:02.639 --> 00:03:08.479
And so I can't provide information about every single skill to the students who come through my program.
00:03:08.719 --> 00:03:11.039
Uh, nobody knows all of the skills.
00:03:11.120 --> 00:03:21.759
Uh, so it never made sense to me that I would just spend this, you know, spend people's investment telling them, here's how I teach this skill, here's the cues, here's the breakdown.
00:03:21.919 --> 00:03:34.080
I wanted them to walk away being like, I have tools for doing that myself and having that independence and autonomy and knowing when I'm out of my depth and I need more support and understanding the skill.
00:03:34.240 --> 00:03:44.319
So when I imagined building Bloom as something like, here's skills one through 100 and how I teach them, it just kind of felt unsatisfying and it felt kind of tedious to me.
00:03:44.400 --> 00:03:47.759
And it's not because the details of different skills don't matter.
00:03:47.919 --> 00:03:48.879
They absolutely do.
00:03:49.039 --> 00:03:58.879
And there are amazing intricate things that happen at every level of skills that deserve our attention and need to be understood before teaching.
00:03:59.120 --> 00:04:05.120
Um, but I just didn't want Bloom to be a big catalog of skills and how I teach them.
00:04:05.280 --> 00:04:13.439
I'm like, if you need to see my demo of every single skill to be able to teach a skill, then I have not, I have failed you.
00:04:13.680 --> 00:04:24.480
I have not prepared you to be a professional aerial instructor who can innovate, who can create, who can uh see a skill and figure out how to break it down, right?
00:04:24.560 --> 00:04:26.879
I want you to have those core skills.
00:04:27.040 --> 00:04:31.600
If you have those core skills, it takes you so far.
00:04:31.839 --> 00:04:41.040
If you need to know somebody's way of teaching every single skill, then you have a really, really long chore list.
00:04:41.519 --> 00:04:45.120
And I don't want anybody to feel like learning to teach Ariel is a chore.
00:04:45.279 --> 00:04:48.160
It doesn't mean this is a bad way to teach.
00:04:48.240 --> 00:04:56.560
And you can teach somebody how to become critical and creative thinkers by uh using skills as the material, right?
00:04:56.639 --> 00:05:04.079
Okay, like here's how we handle this skill, here's how we handle it, and then you start to see the patterns, assuming that you're being shown what those patterns are and not just memorizing.
00:05:04.160 --> 00:05:11.439
But it definitely wasn't a method that I wanted to spend my trainees' time, money, and energy on.
00:05:12.079 --> 00:05:15.040
Now, I want to be very explicit about this.
00:05:15.279 --> 00:05:20.399
I am not saying that the order that you teach skills doesn't matter.
00:05:20.879 --> 00:05:35.120
It is incredibly important, and I am very, very passionate about making sure that our curriculum is designed in a way that is realistic for the level and especially foundational curriculum.
00:05:35.199 --> 00:05:41.040
I'm going to talk more about that in a moment, but our introductory curriculum, it is so critical.
00:05:41.199 --> 00:05:43.120
It is like so, so important.
00:05:43.360 --> 00:05:50.000
And that's where we do need to be very meticulous, and we need to be very intentional about the order we teach things in.
00:05:50.079 --> 00:05:52.879
Uh, there's still flexibility within that.
00:05:53.040 --> 00:05:58.560
And I think that's the thing that overwhelms aerialists who want to become instructors or are instructors sometimes.
00:05:58.639 --> 00:06:00.560
It's like, what's the right order?
00:06:00.800 --> 00:06:08.639
And there are certain things that should definitely come before certain other things for logical reasons, safety reasons, and motor learning reasons.
00:06:08.800 --> 00:06:13.680
There's a lot of logic that goes into that, but there is no one right order.
00:06:13.839 --> 00:06:16.959
Skill one to 20, 1 to 100, whatever.
00:06:17.279 --> 00:06:18.639
That's not real.
00:06:18.959 --> 00:06:22.560
People have decided ways that they do it and they share that.
00:06:23.600 --> 00:06:29.199
But Ariel is so much more open-ended than that.
00:06:29.600 --> 00:06:34.720
And our students don't come in with one kind of body or brain.
00:06:34.959 --> 00:06:37.680
Students might need adjustments to curriculum.
00:06:37.839 --> 00:06:46.879
So even though I am building out a formal foundational curriculum that I will be licensing to studios, I will be very explicit.
00:06:47.120 --> 00:06:51.680
Look, here is your structure, here is all of the foundation.
00:06:52.160 --> 00:06:59.759
I still want you to be looking at how you might need to adapt this for the individual, for the class you're working with.
00:07:00.079 --> 00:07:07.199
I never want anybody who works with me or uses my resources to feel like they're in a box.
00:07:07.439 --> 00:07:16.000
I want them to feel like they have excellent guidance and excellent, you know, resources, but not that this is the one singular only way.
00:07:16.160 --> 00:07:20.319
There will be a few things where I come in and I say, absolutely do not do it this way.
00:07:20.480 --> 00:07:21.040
Just don't.
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Like, here's a way better way to do it.
00:07:23.199 --> 00:07:24.720
And I'll be very clear about that.
00:07:24.879 --> 00:07:35.759
And I hope that nobody ever creates the standardized curriculum of aerial silks or hoop or whatever, and claims that it is the one way.
00:07:36.000 --> 00:07:47.360
We have to be comfortable with the reality that aerial is not that rigid and humans are not that rigid, and we're not having the same students or the same class makeup every day.
00:07:47.519 --> 00:07:48.959
So here's how I solved the problem.
00:07:49.040 --> 00:07:58.160
Like, okay, we need to, we need teachers to like engage with skills and know how to teach skills, but I don't want to give them a list of 50 skills and here's how to teach them.
00:07:58.240 --> 00:08:00.000
Now show me that you can teach them just like that.
00:08:00.079 --> 00:08:02.399
I was like, this is like that's a chore.
00:08:02.560 --> 00:08:04.399
This is not the best pedagogy.
00:08:04.639 --> 00:08:08.319
Like, that's not going to get the best learning outcomes for my teachers.
00:08:08.639 --> 00:08:15.279
And I want them to be engaging on a more deep level that allows them to see patterns, think critically, and all that.
00:08:15.439 --> 00:08:26.560
So, first, how we handle this in bloom is we get really, really crazy, nerdy, precise, specific about foundational movement.
00:08:26.959 --> 00:08:28.800
It's very technical.
00:08:29.040 --> 00:08:36.799
It's looking at what are the actual movements and body positions and apparatus placements that make the skill work.
00:08:36.960 --> 00:08:38.480
What are the common mistakes?
00:08:38.720 --> 00:08:41.440
What are the common incorrect cues?
00:08:41.919 --> 00:08:47.200
So, for example, I feel like I always use this example because it's like such a good one.
00:08:47.440 --> 00:08:52.480
Um, when we're slipping in a knee hook on silk, they'll often say like grip harder.
00:08:52.720 --> 00:08:56.879
Well, we also need to look at the rotation of the hip.
00:08:57.039 --> 00:09:04.159
We need to look at the positions of the hip, and we need to see how the shoulders are organized as well.
00:09:04.720 --> 00:09:16.320
The rotation of the shoulder that is holding on, for example, when we're reaching for catchers, if it's internally rotated, you're gonna have a really hard time holding on, no matter how much of an iron fist grip you've got going.
00:09:16.559 --> 00:09:31.759
So we look at the building blocks of movement on hammock, silk, hoop, and we build deep knowledge on that because all the movements you see in Ariel are variations on foundational body positions and movements.
00:09:31.840 --> 00:09:51.279
So there's some pretty unique things that can come up in different skills, but for the most part, we are working with a set, a finite set of body positions, engagements, what what is healthy, how do you align your shoulders, how do you bring the ribs and the pelvis together, and then how do we interface with the apparatus in all of these little ways?
00:09:51.440 --> 00:10:06.960
If you go back on my Instagram, I'm really excited about this technique tip uh about hip key roll-up, where using the outside leg to propel the movement does nothing and actually makes it harder, and that keeping the straddle open makes the dynamic movement much cleaner.
00:10:07.120 --> 00:10:13.919
And it's like these really nitty-gritty details that we need to start to recognize and see.
00:10:14.000 --> 00:10:16.639
Like, okay, learn to look for that.
00:10:16.879 --> 00:10:20.399
Uh, there's a lot of different ways to think about skills.
00:10:20.559 --> 00:10:28.080
You could be looking at the position of the hips in hip key roll-up, you could be looking at how the torso is twisting relative to the position of the pelvis, right?
00:10:28.240 --> 00:10:30.879
There's so many conversations we can't have them all.
00:10:31.120 --> 00:10:40.320
I love having Instagram because it's basically a place where I can just keep popping in more observations and technique research that I find really engaging and fun.
00:10:40.399 --> 00:10:41.840
And sometimes other people do too.
00:10:42.000 --> 00:10:43.279
Sometimes other people don't.
00:10:43.440 --> 00:10:48.320
Uh, but I always think it's worth understanding the mechanics of the skills and personally just fascinating.
00:10:48.480 --> 00:11:03.360
So in Bloom, we look at foundational skills and we look at them very deeply because looking at them deeply helps to reveal all of the principles and patterns that are going to come up again and again in future more advanced complex skills.
00:11:03.600 --> 00:11:10.720
Uh, another way I approach this in the Blue Mariel teacher training, and even if you don't take my training, I highly encourage you to do this.
00:11:10.879 --> 00:11:16.879
Uh you don't you won't have access to the full template and everything with the prompts, but it's called the Skill Super Expert Project.
00:11:17.039 --> 00:11:36.320
And for this assignment, the teacher chooses a skill and then follows my list of prompts and explorations to basically like surgically dissect the skill and experiment with the skill and understand it at a much deeper level than most people would ever get to.
00:11:36.480 --> 00:11:39.519
And this is a replicable assignment, right?
00:11:39.600 --> 00:11:56.240
You can do that with any skill, but what happens when you go really, really deep is now you understand, we have all this list of prompts, you understand how to do this without somebody telling you how they do the skill.
00:11:56.399 --> 00:11:59.840
You're learning how to dissect a skill.
00:12:00.080 --> 00:12:07.360
You're the surgeon, you are breaking the thing down into its parts and then asking the questions that help you understand.
00:12:07.440 --> 00:12:09.200
And you can do that with any skill.
00:12:09.360 --> 00:12:12.480
So we use one one skill as a case study.
00:12:12.639 --> 00:12:21.279
And then so that the trainees who go through my program have access to more examples, I give them access to my entire Arial Silks online library.
00:12:21.360 --> 00:12:44.159
So a year membership is included with the Bloom Aerial Teacher Training, and that's where every single tutorial on there, except there's probably a few that need to be updated, but there is uh like prerequisites, what to warm up, common errors, related skills that are linked to, and list of cues, theory, technique, modifications.
00:12:44.320 --> 00:12:47.679
And yes, I I seriously built my tutorial library like that.
00:12:47.759 --> 00:12:50.399
So if you're not in there already, highly, highly recommend.
00:12:50.480 --> 00:12:52.960
You don't have to join Bloom to get access to that.
00:12:53.039 --> 00:12:56.240
Uh, it's$35 a month or less, depending on your plan.
00:12:56.720 --> 00:12:57.039
Okay.
00:12:57.600 --> 00:13:11.039
But then they're seeing over and over again how I am analyzing and breaking down the skill, noticing like what makes it safe, what uh what are the risks, what is something that's critically important that you need to be aware of that could go wrong.
00:13:11.200 --> 00:13:16.080
This is my whole philosophy is I don't want you to memorize my hundreds of tutorials that are on there.
00:13:16.240 --> 00:13:29.919
I want you to develop your method for analyzing troubleshooting, problem solving, breaking down, because that empowers you to teach any skill uh except for skills that you know you need deeper instruction on.
00:13:30.080 --> 00:13:33.679
There are definitely skills that I would go learn how to teach.
00:13:33.840 --> 00:13:52.000
Like if I wanted to teach people probably like anything, anything powerful on straps, I would want to work with somebody who knows those skills very intimately because you might not think of something kind of nestled into the details of that.
00:13:52.080 --> 00:13:57.200
And there's a higher risk of inner injury when we are working with very powerful dynamic movement.
00:13:58.000 --> 00:14:09.600
There can always be something hidden that you're not aware of, and that is also why it's important to really get familiar with the skills you are teaching and cross-reference.
00:14:09.759 --> 00:14:18.480
Talk to people, watch how other people teach it or do it, uh, build, build a more sturdy foundation of experience around that skill.
00:14:18.639 --> 00:14:39.759
And then another way that I handle the problem of like, how do I make sure people know how to teach the skill in Bloom is that's where the one-on-one mentorship comes in really handy because the teachers can specifically bring me skills that they are working on as a student or a researcher or as an instructor, they want to bring it into their curriculum, but they have questions about it.
00:14:40.000 --> 00:14:50.240
And a really important parameter on all of this that I emphasize in the Bloom Arial Teacher training is acknowledging what you don't know and where your scope is.
00:14:50.559 --> 00:14:58.000
So it's not like you do my program and you're like, yay, now I can teach anything in all of aerial arts.
00:14:58.480 --> 00:15:01.120
I want it to feel like I completed Bloom.
00:15:01.279 --> 00:15:15.919
I now have a systematic way to assess my readiness to teach a skill, to understand what I necessarily need to know and understand about a skill, and then I can say, do I have that information or do I not?
00:15:16.159 --> 00:15:17.279
Do I know the safety points?
00:15:17.440 --> 00:15:18.720
Do I know the points of contact?
00:15:18.879 --> 00:15:20.399
Do I know what can go wrong?
00:15:20.559 --> 00:15:31.600
And am I prepared to prevent any of those things from happening and communicate with students so that they are not thrown into the deep end and I'm now surprised by what's happening.
00:15:31.840 --> 00:15:42.799
With a critical caveat, and this is really important for the philosophy of all of this, you still can't predict what weird things your students are going to do.
00:15:43.039 --> 00:15:46.960
You cannot anticipate every risk.
00:15:47.360 --> 00:15:58.240
It's not possible because there's infinite variations, maybe it's not infinite, very, very large number exponential of possible things that a student can do that you weren't expecting.
00:15:58.480 --> 00:16:03.519
And that's why being a very perceptive, critical thinking teacher is safer.
00:16:04.240 --> 00:16:16.879
And this is what's really important if you think you're prepared perfectly because somebody showed you everything that can go wrong in a skill, it it's a false sense of security.
00:16:17.039 --> 00:16:18.960
And you might let your guard down.
00:16:19.919 --> 00:16:24.879
There are still things students can do that are going to introduce risk.
00:16:25.200 --> 00:16:30.879
And a student can do a skill perfectly, but something went wrong internally in their body.
00:16:31.120 --> 00:16:35.120
So the technique of the skill is good, but now something has slipped in their shoulder.
00:16:35.360 --> 00:16:37.279
That's nobody's fault.
00:16:37.600 --> 00:16:42.159
The risk doesn't go away because you had perfect cues.
00:16:42.320 --> 00:16:47.279
And I think that's something that might not be comfortable to acknowledge.
00:16:47.600 --> 00:16:52.720
We want to feel like I know everything, so nothing can ever go wrong.
00:16:52.960 --> 00:16:56.080
We never have that security as aerial instructors.
00:16:56.320 --> 00:17:10.240
And frankly, that ties in perfectly to my last episode about how much we are handling and why our role is a serious profession and deserves to be taken seriously, and why aerial instructors should be paid reasonably.
00:17:10.400 --> 00:17:12.319
Again, a bigger economic conversation.
00:17:12.480 --> 00:17:17.680
There are problems that I don't know how to solve, but there is a risk that you take on as an instructor.
00:17:17.759 --> 00:17:22.400
And you can't be perfect, you can't be so perfect that nothing ever goes wrong.
00:17:22.640 --> 00:17:24.880
I would never lead my trainees to believe that.
00:17:25.039 --> 00:17:28.079
And when you don't know a skill, that's not a failure on your part.
00:17:28.240 --> 00:17:29.599
Why would you know every skill?
00:17:29.839 --> 00:17:40.319
It's not a failure, it's a professional responsibility to then say, okay, I'm either not going to teach that, or I'm gonna go to someone who knows how to teach that or research it deeply before I introduce it.
00:17:40.559 --> 00:17:51.599
I'm going to make sure that I'm not just throwing myself and my students into the deep end, and I'm also not going to be hard on myself because I don't know every skill in the world, or I can't do every skill in the world.
00:17:52.240 --> 00:17:53.680
No teacher can do everything.
00:17:54.160 --> 00:17:57.039
Let's just leave that, leave that behind.
00:17:57.200 --> 00:18:03.759
And then here's another reason where Ariel, it's just much less contained than our brains would like it to be.
00:18:03.920 --> 00:18:28.640
Uh, our brains might want a clear-defined list of skills, but while foundations can be quite structured and more uh contained in what is logical progression, there's a certain point of skill level that you reach where basically the options branch out in so many different directions that are all equally valid.
00:18:28.880 --> 00:18:38.799
And students might have different interests, they might be interested in drops, they might be interested in sequences, dynamics, skills that favor flexibility, spinning.
00:18:38.960 --> 00:18:41.839
There's there's like a lot of a lot of options.
00:18:42.000 --> 00:18:45.119
There's a lot of possibilities after a certain point of skill level.
00:18:45.279 --> 00:18:49.200
And so it didn't make sense to be like, okay, now the intermediate skills are these ones.
00:18:49.279 --> 00:18:58.000
And like, no, there's like a set of, there's hundreds that you could choose from that are all very reasonable to teach after those foundations have been established.
00:18:58.319 --> 00:19:11.039
So yeah, that's why it never made sense to me to structure things around levels in that way, and that the focus and emphasis on foundations is really where the important stuff happens.
00:19:11.279 --> 00:19:31.920
And you can use any skill as case studies, and you can use multiple skills as examples to talk about um, you know, how to teach and principles of aerial movement and where everything's like pretty normal, pretty expected, and then, oh, and then this one skill has this funky thing where we do this weird thing with our leg that we don't really normally do in other skills.
00:19:32.079 --> 00:19:35.039
And it's not like a complete free-for-all, it's not total chaos.
00:19:35.200 --> 00:19:42.000
There are some skills that, yeah, wouldn't be the smartest choice for an intermediate level or the next intermediate level.
00:19:42.079 --> 00:19:49.839
And there's some skills that you can put progressively because they have progressively more complexity or difficulty in them with similar patterns.
00:19:50.000 --> 00:19:59.839
Um, so it's not totally random free-for-all, that's not what I'm saying, but it it does get quite a bit more amorphous than those in the introductory curriculum.
00:20:00.000 --> 00:20:01.119
So here's my philosophy.
00:20:01.359 --> 00:20:09.119
I don't want to create teachers who know a list of skills and got checked checked off on each skills.
00:20:09.279 --> 00:20:25.920
I wanted to develop teachers who know how to think about skills responsibly, creatively, critically, intelligently, and so that they have autonomy and independence as an instructor developing a curriculum that might not look exactly like mine.
00:20:26.240 --> 00:20:34.240
I care a lot about what comes first and what comes later, and I especially care a lot in foundations and introductory curriculum.
00:20:34.480 --> 00:20:39.039
But I care even more that a teacher understands why they are making the decisions they are making.
00:20:39.200 --> 00:20:54.799
And to me, that's the difference between delivering somebody's curriculum and actually becoming a deeply engaged teacher who is creating and adapting and innovating along the way.
00:20:55.039 --> 00:21:10.000
And then this ties into the whole bigger picture of teaching and what I think is critically missing in the industry and why I built Bloom and why I brought in all the different layers I did is the skills are important.
00:21:10.160 --> 00:21:14.400
They are crucial, they are what we do, and we have to understand them.
00:21:14.640 --> 00:21:19.920
And I take my students into that deep, detailed technique because that's the core of what we do.
00:21:20.079 --> 00:21:30.240
But if we are only thinking about curriculum as okay, level one is you can teach these skills, level two is you can teach those skills, level three is you can teach these awesome other skills.
00:21:30.480 --> 00:21:34.720
There is pedagogy that doesn't come in levels.
00:21:34.960 --> 00:21:36.559
You either know it or you don't.
00:21:36.640 --> 00:21:38.240
You either use it or you don't.
00:21:38.559 --> 00:21:48.240
And so that is the more holistic part of teaching that might be thought of as extra or the professional development layer, but it's not.
00:21:48.400 --> 00:21:52.880
It is also core because it directly affects learning outcomes.
00:21:53.039 --> 00:21:59.680
It directly affects safety, it directly affects your success as a teacher and your student success, retention, and student.
00:22:00.319 --> 00:22:02.480
Really having a chance at an aerial journey.
00:22:02.720 --> 00:22:26.079
When you know how to work with nervous systems, when you are making conscious choices around cueing based on the motor learning stage your student is in, when you have the anatomy, when you have real answers for students with physiology and know how to incorporate uh different elements into your warmup based on, like if you're going to be doing spinning or inversions, it it directly affects the physical skills.
00:22:26.400 --> 00:22:40.640
So we don't need to be weighting the physical skills more heavily than these other skills in teaching Ariel, because some of these other skills could be the thing that prevent the injury, could be the thing that prevent a student from quitting, and that matters.
00:22:40.880 --> 00:22:45.359
Knowing how learning works is not a bonus add-on.
00:22:45.519 --> 00:22:50.720
It is what you are working with in the flesh in class, but it's beneath the surface.
00:22:50.880 --> 00:22:54.880
You might not be seeing it explicitly or working with it intentionally.
00:22:55.039 --> 00:22:58.799
The ethics of working with pain and fear, these are real.
00:22:59.200 --> 00:23:03.599
These sound abstract, but they are manifesting in bodies and brains.
00:23:03.759 --> 00:23:06.640
And they are informing the decisions that your students make.
00:23:06.799 --> 00:23:10.640
They are informing the safety of your students' bodies and their psychology.
00:23:10.799 --> 00:23:13.680
And that is why I've included those layers in Bloom.
00:23:13.839 --> 00:23:14.640
It's really fun.
00:23:14.799 --> 00:23:16.079
It's really exciting.
00:23:16.240 --> 00:23:22.799
It makes it so that what you see in class suddenly sparks all these connected dots in your head.
00:23:22.880 --> 00:23:25.680
You're like, I know exactly what I'm looking at.
00:23:25.920 --> 00:23:30.559
Or I have a procedure for how I respond to this kind of challenge.
00:23:30.799 --> 00:23:39.519
Or I'm not just going to throw more cues at the student who isn't getting it because there's a few things I want to understand better before offering a solution.
00:23:39.680 --> 00:23:43.680
And all of this is why I feel completely comfortable when advanced teachers come to me.
00:23:43.759 --> 00:23:46.079
I'm not like, oh, am I not good enough?
00:23:46.240 --> 00:23:48.079
Do they know skills that I don't know?
00:23:48.400 --> 00:23:51.039
Because I know that I'm offering integrative pedagogy.
00:23:51.279 --> 00:23:55.839
I know that I'm bringing in the layers that most people don't get the opportunity to learn about more deeply.
00:23:56.160 --> 00:24:04.000
I'd be comfortable with a teacher with more experience than me coming into the program, not because I know more than every aerial teacher out there.
00:24:04.319 --> 00:24:11.519
I deeply believe that every single aerial instructor has unique insight perspective and experience.
00:24:11.759 --> 00:24:16.480
And we all become smarter when we talk about these things and share them.
00:24:16.720 --> 00:24:31.680
But really what makes me so confident in the value I can offer teachers, even who have taught much longer than me, is that I have done the work to bring together all these different areas of research along with my very deep technical knowledge.
00:24:32.000 --> 00:24:33.680
And that's been a lot of work.
00:24:33.839 --> 00:24:40.079
Honestly, it probably would have been a lot easier to build an aerial teacher training that was just skill level based.
00:24:40.400 --> 00:24:45.039
And just kind of like, here's level one, two, three, here's how I teach these skills.
00:24:45.359 --> 00:25:01.279
I've definitely not chosen the easier path in building a teacher training, but the results I've gotten for my teachers, the conversations we're having inside Bloom makes it so clear that it's worth it and that it is changing teaching practices.
00:25:01.359 --> 00:25:03.599
It is deepening and refining our craft.
00:25:03.920 --> 00:25:07.200
And there's still so much for all of us to learn.
00:25:07.279 --> 00:25:08.720
And that's really exciting to me.
00:25:08.960 --> 00:25:14.880
If you've made it this far, I just want to say that I really appreciate you taking the time to think this deeply about pedagogy.
00:25:15.599 --> 00:25:23.039
It's not easy to think about teaching Ariel for all of the reasons we've talked about today.
00:25:23.359 --> 00:25:31.359
Uh, there's not as much containment and structure and universal checklists that we might like there to be.
00:25:31.599 --> 00:25:35.440
But once we get comfortable with that, that's where it's really fun.
00:25:35.759 --> 00:25:40.079
We see how much freedom and flexibility, independence, autonomy there is in it.
00:25:40.240 --> 00:25:51.759
Uh while keeping things really safe, really structured for our students, know what we're doing, know what we're talking about, and really engage with this as the craft that it is.
00:25:52.000 --> 00:25:54.559
The fall session for Bloom is enrolling now.
00:25:54.720 --> 00:25:56.319
We start October 4th.
00:25:56.480 --> 00:26:01.440
If this sounds exciting to you, if this resonates with you, I've included the link for info about that below.
00:26:01.599 --> 00:26:03.440
I hope you've enjoyed our conversation today.
00:26:03.599 --> 00:26:06.319
Thanks for listening, and I'll catch you on the next episode of
