The first blog of the 5-part series on Tips for Teachers explored how to process and collate what you learned from your Teacher Training program. In Part 2 & 3, we explore what it means to find your 'voice' and message and taking that further into developing your own authentic content.
2. Understand your voice and message
It’s about discovering and fostering a style of your own. As teachers, how we communicate to our students is absolutely paramount; equally as important as what we communicate. Voice, class structure, pacing and point of emphasis are all part of what makes you and your class unique, effective and desirable. If you look at most successful yoga teachers today, you will notice that they all have their own unique voice, both in the details of the yoga they teach and emphasize and in their style of communication. Now style, is a somewhat subjective term in a yoga context as what one student might feel as too detailed and rigid, another may find it informative and structured. My advice here is to decide what you are trying to breakdown, relay and instill in the students and communicate it in a way that feels authentic to you.
3. Develop your own content
Integrate what you’ve learned with who you are. This is a big one. After all our hard work, a completely natural post-training impulse is to seek to integrate everything we learned into our own classes. But it quickly becomes obvious that it is far too hasty—and maybe recklessly so—to implement so much material without affording ourselves adequate time to work with it in our own practice. The content and ideas I repeat and emphasize in class over and over again earned their place through my own experiences—through trial and error, by feeling things in my own body, by observing students up close—and because I believe in their value for myself and my students. This is something we all do, both consciously and subconsciously, and this post-training phase is a crucial time to be particularly deliberate in what you’re integrating into your classes.
We all, as teachers, whether communicated beforehand to students or organized in our minds, have a ‘plan’ of what we are going to teach for that day, week or month. New teachers can find themselves succumbing to the self-inflicted pressure to excite, wow and please students with uber-creative flows, intensity for the sake of intensity and an ever-changing class-to-class theme. I know this, as this was me post-200hr YTT and an experience many of my peers have felt and had to work through. Ad-hoc one-off classes and re-inventing the wheel lesson-to-lesson is not only exhausting for you but ultimately does not support the growth of the student. As one teacher reminded and emphasized, yoga is a discipline, a subject matter, and should be treated similar to how one would teach any subject at school. Did I feel comfortable with trigonometry after one or two lessons? Nope. Students like repetition and consistency, and it will make your job as the teacher a lot more manageable, leaving room and energy to be creative where appropriate.