Become an expert and share your knowledge.

Become an expert and share your knowledge.

That’s really what we are doing as yoga teachers.

I had the best teacher when I was in the 7th grade, His name was Mr. Oldenziel. He made everything fun. I never forgot how inspiring he was and I learned so much from him.

I’ve tried to copy Mr. Oldenziel and make everything fun in my Shiva Yoga® 200hr Teacher Training program. We learn so much when we are playing games, or roleplaying, and when we are being creative.

This picture is from an exercise where each student had to become an expert and then had to teach their team what they had learned. We then randomly drew names and whoever got drawn had to teach the entire class one of the things they had learned from one of their expert teammates. The topic was also randomly drawn and the first expert “teacher” was assessed based on how well their “student” presented and taught the entire class. This exercise is always a lot of fun! We’ve got another one of these coming up this week! Are you ready, trainees? Are you ready to become an expert and share your knowledge?

Maybe yoga studios could start assessing teachers this way? Instead of looking at the teacher’s ability, or how many students showed up to take their class — maybe we could assess the students and judge the teachers based on how much their students are learning!