I’ve got a shoulder injury, so I watched a karate class today instead of training in it as I usually do. One child, who had quite a short attention span when he started a few months ago, concentrated and worked continuously for at least 45 minutes. His mother was watching with me and was amazed at his progress after such a short time.
I work in a school and also teach some karate classes of my own, and I’m continually struck by how well a typical karate class fits the accepted criteria of excellent teaching practice.
The public perception of karate extends little further than people dressed in white suits and coloured belts, looking and sounding aggressive, striking peculiar poses and making odd noises. The truth, I think, is much more interesting than that.
Apart from karate competitions, and individual practice, the vast majority of karate takes place in organized classes. In other words, karate is primarily an educational activity, with the most of the time spent actually learning and training in formal classes. While it is certainly fun to do, there doesn’t seem to be such a thing as social karate as there is in tennis, nor do you usually learn to do karate as an activity in itself. For most people, ‘doing karate’, is actually attending a class and ‘learning karate’.
Karate has a fairly standard teaching structure. It takes place in a dojo, typically a school hall or gym. Students arrive before the start of the lesson, bowing as they enter. If available, the students lay mats on the floor. The instructor may be present from a previous class, or may arrive just before the class begins, and bows on entering the dojo.
The instructor calls the students to line up, and they do so facing the instructor in order of seniority. The instructor invites the class to kneel, and together they may observe a short period of silence or mokuso. They then exchange bows from the kneeling position, and all stand.
The class perform warmup exercises, unless the students have arrived early and done their own warmups.
The lesson then typically consists of three parts: kihon (basics), kumite (sparring or other paired activity), and kata (individual choreographed sequences of moves).
Kihon is the foundation of karate- the study and practice of stances, strikes and blocks either individually, or in sequences called by the instructor.
In Kumite, students working in pairs learn the range and timing needed to strike an opponent, and to defend against attacks. Beginners are taught strictly choreographed sequences, where both partners know each move that is to be made by the other. As they progress, more freedom is allowed, until free sparring is practiced, with appropriate safety equipment and rules of engagement.
Kata are traditional, named sequences of kihon. The performer visualises encounters with a number of opponents, and uses techniques to deal with a variety of attacks. Kata functions as an archive of coded information about the use of combinations of techniques, which is retrieved by students during practice.
These three main topics can take up a third of the lesson each, or the instructor can choose to vary the emphasis on any one part.
The lesson ends with another line up, at which point the instructor may talk to the students about particular points covered, or give advice to students as to what to practice for the next lesson.
The class then kneels, perform mokuso again, exchange bows. If the mats are not needed for the next lesson, they are put away, and students leave the dojo, turning and bowing as they reach the door.
Karate is a mix of many things: art, performance, culture, self defence. So, while kata is officially and explicitly not a dance, it is certainly aesthetically impressive, and it is practiced as a performance. Karate is a martial art. The students learn (albeit a westernized subset) something of Japanese culture, and especially the oriental tradition and rituals of mutual respect between teacher and student. And underpinning it all, is the physical development of fitness and fighting skills.
Parents watching their children in a karate lesson will often remark on the good behaviour, the depth of knowledge being taught, the ease with which students of different skills and ages work together, and the length of time the students will stay focused.
The curious thing is- all of these observations are well founded, karate lessons do feel different to ordinary school lessons- and yet as a teacher, karate feels both deeper and easier to teach than an ordinary school lesson.
When teachers in conventional subjects plan lessons, they have checklists (such as the following) of things to consider.
WALT: We are learning to… In karate, there is both the statement of the obvious: ‘We are learning to do karate’ and the functional ‘we are learning a martial art for self defence and for other things’. Within each lesson, any aspect of kihon, kumite, or kata is similarly easy to explain- the objective is always to do some technique better so that one can respond to an opponent’s physical attack.
WILF: What I’m Looking For… In karate, the instructor acts as an exemplar. The techniques are demonstrated, and the students are asked to copy. They are always working towards some way of moving, or some sequence of techniques, or to win in a competitive sparring situation.
TIB: This is because… Put your weight behind the kick /punch etc. This is because… you want to hurt someone who wants to hurt you, and you want to do it better. Or, keep your posture upright, because if you don’t, you’ll fall over when you turn. There is, or should be, an explicit reason for anything that a karate instructor asks for.
Assessment: Teachers have to be able to assess the learning of students. In karate, this is done by formal grading tests, when students demonstrate their knowledge and skill in front of their instructors and or external examiners. Success in these gradings result in the award of coloured belts, which are worn during subsequent lessons.
Differentiation: The students are always dressed in karate uniforms, or gis, which are held together by the belt achieved at the student’s last grading. Classes line up in belt order, and the instructor teaches the lesson either as mixed ability or differentiated according to the requirements at any time. For example, Kihon can be practiced as a whole class activity. Techniques are performed simultaneously by all students as they are called out by the instructor. Classes can easily be divided into groups of students according to belt level and taught different kata appropriate to their level. At any time, the instructor knows what to expect from each belt level and can vary the instructions accordingly. Because all techniques or kata require practice, all groups can be instructed to practice what they have just been taught while the instructor moves on to teach something to another group. The impossibility of perfection means that students never actually ‘finish’ a task, even if they achieve obvious and measurable improvement.
Group work: As techniques are always in some way related to self defence, there are many choreographed or free exercises that require partner work. There is also a form of competition called team kata, where three competitors perform synchronized kata in a team.
Behaviour management: Behaviour management in a karate class is taken for granted, because of the nature of the subject. The message is that because students are being taught to do nasty things to other people, it necessary for them to work cooperatively with each other and to follow instructions exactly in order to prevent injury. Further, the formal oriental atmosphere in the dojo provides an ‘other worldly’ environment that encourages students to leave any behavioural issues outside. Bowing in the dojo is the approximate equivalent of a handshake, and is performed before and after any interaction. Something is being taught at all times, and the students are always under instruction to do something. Apart from water breaks, there is always something that they are supposed to be doing, so there is no downtime for mischief to fill.
Motivation: A black belt in a traditional Japanese / Okinawan martial art is one of the most respected and well known educational qualifications in the world. I have achieved top grades in GCE O level and A level examinations, graduated from a respected university as a BSc with honours, and been awarded a PhD. As I have progressed through the academic system, and then through various steps in my career, I have found the earlier academic achievements fade in significance. I consider the work and perseverance required, and the knowledge and skills gained in achieving a black belt in karate to be greater than in any of my other qualifications. The belt system supported by regular formal testing acts as excellent motivation for all students, and the eventual achievement of a black belt is an unforgettable life event.
Curriculum and Syllabus: Karate styles have defined knowledge and performance levels for each belt, which may or may not be published. In any case, students always know, or should know, what they have to achieve in order to pass their next belt. The answers are known in advance- the challenge is to perform them at the grading. Many schools also require written essays or dissertations at advanced levels in order to show that the student has gained the desired background knowledge of the art.
Lesson Planning: Conventional teaching demands a plan for every lesson. Karate instructors never need written lesson plans, because the categories of teaching are fractal in nature. The concept is quite peculiar. Karate works at different levels- from the strategy of self defence, through the decoding of passages of kata to extract encoded meanings, to the precise ways of moving that serve to execute techniques while retaining balance and proper posture. The instructor can take any subject and expand on it at any level that suits the class or suits his preference on the day. No resource preparation is needed because all teaching can be done by exemplification and role play. Inexperienced instructors can simply teach a third each of kihon, kumite and kata, while experienced instructors can vary the mix in order to suit the class, or simply to break up routine.
Cross Curricular benefits: Karate offers many cross curricular benefits. The good behaviour in karate classes can be leveraged in other lessons. Increased fitness and performance psychology has clear benefits for PE. The performance of ritual feeds into religious studies, because it demonstrates the use of ritual and formal behaviour in atmospheres of respect in a non-religious setting. This helps the student to understand the belief component of religions separate from the contribution of ritual. Kata performance trains stage skills and has benefits for public speaking and other performance subjects. Perhaps most subtly of all, the long term nature of the endeavour, with the emphasis on hard work and excellence, builds an understanding of things that can only be achieved by perseverance. There are no shortcuts to fitness, nor to the understanding of physical and violent interactions between people, nor to the ability to perform kata to competition standards. Such achievements cannot be plagiarized from the internet.
Which brings me to the point of this post. When I started karate, I asked my instructor whether he would like me to help with the club website, and to post videos and other enhancements. I was quite surprised by his negative reply. His opinion was that karate is at least in part an activity in which we learn to learn directly from another human being. The tradition and practice of the art is that the interaction is face to face, limb to limb. I believe he is right, and that karate is probably best taught as I have described here. I can’t think of a way of automating it, creating web resources for it, or using computers to substantially improve its teaching and learning other than a simple web presence that tells students dates and times, competition results, perhaps glossaries of Japanese terms. The vast bulk of the teaching and learning, I believe, is best done in the traditional manner because the instructor is conveying an entire art with depth and meaning in each topic. In all of this I realize that I may be completely wrong. But that’s the problem. A teacher who teaches any subject in a school, when faced with an expectation from their school to introduce significant IT into their lessons, could quite reasonably think that IT won’t help in their subject in the same way that I feel about karate. With my karate experience I cannot say with any conviction that all subjects benefit from ‘modernisation’ using IT. I see IT making huge contributions in music, visual arts, languages, etc, but not necessarily so much in other subjects.
I genuinely wonder whether, in twenty years, when teachers will all have had exposure to IT in their own school years, whether IT will genuinely be completely pervasive in all subjects, and if so whether the teachers of the day will wonder about why it should be so. I wonder whether the education of the students of that time will have improved, and if so if it will have improved by an amount proportional to the money spent on the IT used to teach them. I know that if I’m still alive and mobile, I’ll still be able to teach karate to twenty or so people, in a simple room with no furniture and no IT at all, and keep them completely focused for an hour and a half. I hope the teachers of the day will be OK in a power cut.
