Search Snowboard Manual
Table of Contents
Using, Adapting and Creating Progressions explores the different ability levels of students that instructors regularly teach, along with tools and tactics for how to use the progressions within this resource and even create progressions from scratch.
Creating Progressions
Experienced instructors sometimes speak of their “bag of tricks” when referring to the number of teaching tools they have stored in their memory. Whilst having a memory bank packed with tools and tasks is certainly beneficial, the ability to create new progressions is a much more valuable skill. This is especially useful for refining skills (e.g. exploring the differences between retraction and terrain unweighted turns) or adding new elements to existing skills (e.g. grabbing indy on a frontside 360).
This gives instructors the ability to adapt quickly and adjust for conditions/needs, and new motivations that arise during a lesson or session. It also helps to move beyond stock progressions that may not be ideal for the terrain available or with a recently discovered physical or mental limitation.
When creating new progressions it is vital that each step has a logical increase or decrease in difficulty and that all the steps build towards the same end goal.
Identify-Isolate-Implement
A useful formula when creating progressions is with Identify-Isolate-Implement:
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IDENTIFY the skill(s) to be worked on, being very specific with body parts and phases of the turn/trick, and ensuring the student has a solid understanding of this.
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ISOLATE the identified body parts, and/or phases of turn/trick, into a series of tasks that initially decrease in difficulty to help build cognitive awareness, then increase in difficulty based on the students’ performance. Each task should be used to isolate either a body part / movement or a phase of the turn/trick.
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IMPLEMENT the new skills back into the student's regular riding, based on performance. Look for indicators for when the student is moving from the cognitive to associative stage of learning.
Fluidity and real-time observation is absolutely key when creating progressions on the fly. The Activity-Analyse-Adapt cycle will help with this fluidity.
