Last Updated23 April 2024

Structuring Lessons and Sessions covers the ways that you can structure, deliver and prepare for lessons. Learn how to put together activities to develop new skills, structure presentations and deliver information. Understand how to create longer teaching sessions to explore the mountain and continue to develop skills.

Lesson Structure

One of the first things that instructors need to develop is the ability to structure a lesson and then tailor it towards the students in the lesson. Every lesson will differ in some way, be it the students being taught, their ability, their motivations, as well as many other variables such as weather, snow conditions etc.

Every successful lesson will be comprised of three main areas. These being:

The setup of the lesson is where a meaningful connection between student and instructor is created, expectations are set and a direction/goal for the lesson is agreed. Learning and experiences is the main body of the lesson where instructors facilitate the students’ journey towards their goals. Lastly is the lesson summary, which reviews what was learnt and previews what’s next for the students.

Lesson Setup

The lesson setup is where instructors get to know the students and their previous experience, start to create a positive learning environment that is safe and supportive, which jointly creates a direction for the lesson. All the steps listed as part of the lesson setup quite often overlap or happen at the same time during this period. The lesson setup is normally at the meeting point, during a warm-up, or when the students are revisiting what they have already learnt or can do. It is always a good idea in a lesson to take students on a journey from the known to the unknown.

Introduction

The introduction sets the tone for the lesson. The initial meeting between the student(s) and instructor is where the instructor can create a lasting impression. It’s important that this is a positive encounter and provides a basis for a good student/instructor relationship.

Below are some practical tasks that will start to establish rapport and create a positive learning environment:

Introduce – yourself clearly and courteously.
Names – ensure that everyone in the group knows each other.
Lesson Product – how the lesson will be organised, the time frame and confirm the finishing place.
Concerns – ask the students if they have any immediate concerns before heading away from the meeting area.
Equipment – should be checked ensuring that it is suitable for the level and the size of the student and in safe working order.

To facilitate a positive learning environment:

Using a positive and professional approach will begin to establish rapport and trust.
Your body language and tone of voice are important elements. Positive body language should include smiling, being open and relaxed, making eye contact, and using active listening skills (see lesson considerations for more detail).
Create a safe, fun, open and supportive learning environment. The sooner the student feels at ease and you gain their trust, the sooner learning will begin.

Skier Profile

To create a great learning experience the instructor needs to know what level the student(s) are at and why they are taking the lesson. Without the “what” an instructor will not know where to start; without the “why” an instructor will not know where to go with the lesson. The two basic ways to assess a student is to watch them ski and ask them questions.

What
What is the student’s current level (includes speed, terrain and comfort level)? What are the skis doing on the snow? What are the movements of the body that create this? Includes the movements of the body and how they blend and coordinate together. What is the student’s current understanding of skiing?

In addition to looking at what the students are doing technically, you are also finding out information about what the students’ past experiences, fears, previous injuries and general background are that will help create a clearer picture. This will help guide you in the decision-making process during the lesson. This information will also enable you and your students to negotiate and establish an achievable and desirable goal for the lesson. This decision-making process will continue throughout the rest of the lesson.

Why
Why has the student come to the lesson? What do they want to learn? This assessment enables you to produce a lesson focused on the student’s wants and needs at any level. Assessment must be a continual process as the needs and wants will likely change over the course of the lesson. For the lesson to be successfully student centred, keeping the ‘why’ in the forefront of your mind is essential.

Negotiating Goals & Managing Expectations

For a lesson to be successful, an initial goal or direction for the lesson should be agreed upon. A goal is the aim, intention, objective or purpose of a person or group of people. Effective lessons need goals to make the direction of the lesson clear. Goals must be negotiated, not prescribed, to be relevant to the students. Determining goals is a blend of what the student wants (motivations) and what the student needs (movements and understandings); both are assessed through the skier profile.

Be mindful that goals can be continually adapted throughout the lesson depending on a number of factors. Levels of success, fatigue levels and changing weather conditions are just a few examples.

Hot Tip

When facilitating the creation of an initial goal it's good to ask yourself these questions:

Is the goal specific enough to allow for effective decision making during the lesson?
Is the goal clear enough to allow the student to measure their success towards it?
Is the goal attainable in the given lesson duration?
Is the chosen goal relevant to the wants and needs of the student?
Is there a time frame set for achieving the goal?
Will there be more than one goal set for the lesson?

Learning & Experiences

The teaching cycle is a tool to help guide an instructor on how to build a positive learning environment based around the unique student(s) in any given lesson. It can help to structure communication, facilitate and utilise feedback, to guide student practice, and help make decisions on what happens next.

Activity

Understanding & Doing
The simplest way to think about activity is it’s whatever someone is doing or attempting to do. Every time students start skiing it is another activity. This could be a simple activity like a first-timer putting skis on for the first time or it could be a more complex activity like a dynamic medium radius parallel turn where all four movements are being used to direct balance through the centre of the outside ski during the control phase of a turn.

To be able to perform an activity successfully, the student must first have a clear idea of what success is. This could be in how the instructor has communicated a new activity or created a clearer understanding with the feedback from a student’s previous attempt.

Instructors Role – Activity
Ideally look to a skiing approach whenever introducing a new activity. Facilitate the creation of a clear picture of the ideal outcome through the use of effective communication. This clarity can be achieved by:

Create and communicate an understanding of what-why-how so the student understands what it is they are trying to do, why they are trying it and how to do it.
Communicate understanding using talk-show-feel structure. This is so the student can understand what success is, what it looks like and what it feels like.
Presenting information that is technically accurate, clear, concise and delivered in an organised manner that the student/learner understands.
Ensuring the pacing and amount of information are driven by and adapted to the student’s capacity to receive it.

Analyse

Reflection & Feedback
Once an activity has been attempted by a student, the instructor’s role is to help them analyse their performance. This analysis can be broken into three areas: firstly, what happened while the activity was performed; secondly, how this compared to the ideal or intended outcome; and, lastly, why did this outcome happen?

When attempting a new activity (be it the first attempt, during a period of practice, a drill, or skiing in a new situation for the first time) initially the instructor is likely to be the primary source of awareness for the what, how and why something happened. For a student to learn, progress and become skilful the aim is to create self-awareness in the student so that they can take ownership of this analysis process and eventually self-analyse their own performance. A powerful way to create this awareness is through the instructor’s use of questioning to guide the students to discover the answer for themselves.

Instructor Role – Analyse

Observe or record performance (video).
Facilitate feedback which is specific, positive, concise and communicated in a way the student understands.
Provide initial feedback once students have tried the activity for the first time. This allows the student to create a picture of whether they were successful or not. An example of this would be as simple as “That is awesome, when you turn your legs for longer you are able to control your speed!”
Provide or facilitate more detailed feedback as required. Ideally, this would include what happened, how it compared to the ideal outcome and why it happened.
Guide students to self-analyse their own performance through questioning.

Hot Tip

Be aware that quite often there are other factors behind students not being successful at the activity. It isn’t always an issue with technique! Fear, fatigue, the student’s body alignment, and injury can all play a factor in their ability to perform an activity successfully. Other factors which are often outside of our control could include the equipment that the student is using, the snow conditions and weather conditions. These will all play an important factor in the decision-making process that follows.

Adapt

Decision Making
When the student’s performance has been analysed a decision needs to be made about what they should do next. There are a number of factors to consider when making this decision. A simple one being was the student successful or not? For each one of these, you can narrow down the choices to some of the options below.

Instructors Role – Activity
Decisions need to be made about how to adapt the activity. These decisions will be based on the Analysis step. Some decisions might be led by the instructor, explaining to the students what to do, but most decisions will be guided by the students.

Just like in the Analysis step, to be effective an instructor needs to actively listen to and watch the students, and then make the student a key part of the decision-making process. Recognising what stage of the learning process the student(s) are in will guide an instructor into making good student-centred decisions. Below are some examples of the choices an instructor has depending on if the student was successful or not.

Successful

Practice time. Practising the same activity allows the student to consolidate and solidify skills. Have you ever heard the saying to do something right once is just luck, twice is luckier still and a third time’s the emergence of skilful behaviour? Sometimes the hardest thing for an instructor or teacher to do is to do nothing but encourage and allow the student to practise.
Use of exercises/drills to challenge and develop a student’s skill. This could be to challenge the timing, or movement pattern or to exaggerate something.
Adjustment to difficulty. Make the activity harder to challenge a student. Note that this is a good tool to use in a group lesson where students are progressing at different rates and so you can’t move on to the next step of a progression but you want to keep a particular student engaged and challenged. A great way to achieve this and to empower the student is by giving them options of difficulty and letting them choose the level of challenge.
Slight variation to activity. This is to promote and develop skilfulness. An example of this could be to adjust the movements the skier makes using DIRRT: the speed the activity is performed at, the number of turns made, and the duration the activity is performed for.
Move on to a new activity or focus. For example, the next step in the beginner pathway or a new or adjusted goal or outcome such as “let’s take these short turns off the groomed trail and into some bumps”.

Not Successful Yet

Clarify student’s understanding. Potentially the activity might need to be re-presented or more information added to what has already been communicated. The student may require more clarification and understanding of the activity before they can become successful at performing it.
Attempt the activity again after the student has received feedback. This is so that the student can act on the feedback they have received. This might be because they are now aware that they were unsuccessful and have a new or adjusted intention of what the activity is to be attempted.
Adjustment to difficulty. If the student is unsuccessful they may require an adjustment to the difficulty of the activity to allow them to be successful. This option is a great way to allow the student to see success and keep them engaged and enjoying the learning process.
Break the activity down. You can think of this as a sub-activity or ”part”. This could be by simulating the movement/s whilst stationary. This could also be done by breaking the activity down to focus on the student’s intention in a particular timing or phase of the turn.

Hot Tip

When teaching, you may have an initial lesson plan and find it useful to have planned a progression in advance of the lesson. This is especially true as a lesser experienced instructor or when teaching certain levels, e.g. First Timers. However, it is important that you are able to adapt your lesson plan based on how your students are doing. Making decisions on how to adapt your lesson plan to suit your students may depend on how you planned your lesson in the first place. For example, if you planned to take a Whole-Part-Whole approach to your lesson, then even if your students don’t get the “whole” on the first go you might still decide to move on as you plan to break the activity into parts. But if you had planned your lesson to be “chaining”, where each part of your progression develops and builds on the next, then you might decide to try the activity again and give more practice time as you know the students need to “get it” before you move on to the next activity.

We have talked about the importance of you as the instructor and student(s) negotiating a goal during the setup of the lesson. This shouldn’t mean that once this has been done the goals are set in stone. Every time the student is taken through the adapt step there is potential for the overall goal to be adjusted or changed depending on the progress and motivations of the student(s). There are endless factors that might lead to this. A few examples are the student’s rate of progress, time restraints, a change in student wants, and their level of fitness/energy level.

As an instructor the more you can engage and include the learner in this decision-making process the more they will be motivated to keep doing it once the lesson finishes.

Lesson Summary

The summary of the lesson normally happens as a lesson is coming to an end. It might happen over the last run of the lesson, when you and the student are back at the ski school meeting point or wherever you are going to leave your students (restaurant, lift etc.).

The summary is your opportunity to review what has been achieved and preview what is to come in future lessons.

Review

Review the lesson starting with the goals and the steps that students have taken to reach their current performance. This part of the lesson structure becomes particularly important when varying teaching styles are used because the steps taken may not be immediately obvious to the students.
Reinforce any changes in terrain and/or situations and the focus areas to handle those changes.
Offer guidance on how and what to continue to practise independently, including terrain and snow conditions. This will allow your students to safely repeat and continue the development they made during the lesson.

Preview

Preview of the next step in their development. This could be a technical step or the terrain they can progress to next.
Highlight future lesson options available. It is important for you, as an instructor, to be aware of all the current ski school products.