Me in my first years of instructing. The Hart Highlands Winters Club posts it regularly.
I want to take a moment to talk about my first interaction with a teaching pedagogy. In 2017 I became a certified snowboard instructor through The Canadian Association of Snowboard Instructors. Because I taught snowboarding so often for many years, the understandings about learning that come from CASI’s instructor training inform some of my understanding about teaching generally. I’m always open to change and new ideas of course, but it’s interesting to consider the CASI pedagogy and see just how much it aligns with much of the current understanding of best practices. Snowboarding can be dangerous. Casi has a simple process for taking manoeuvres like stopping, turning, and even sliding rails, using the S.A.F.E. model.
Safe stands for Static, Active, Free, Experimentation.
Static references learning skills like rotation while standing on flat ground, removing the increased risk that comes with momentum.
Active involves doing movements, drills or manoeuvres that use the skill. This stage requires thoughtful terrain and situational awareness to match the student to a safe place to learn the skill.
The Free Stage is all about mileage and practice. Essentially this is the part where the student repeatedly attempts or refines the skill. The Free stage is usually a time of frequent formative feedback using a “Plan to Try Model” which boils down to, you did X well, this time try adjusting Y.
Finally, Experimentation involves changing terrain or situations to cha;;enge the skill or bring the new skill back to the students’ learning progression.
At this point in my journey through the program it’s hard to see a set of 4 anything and not consider 4 point rubrics, specifically the Emerging, Developing, Proficient, extending model. At first this seemed daunting but now that I’m a little more familiar I think I’ve been doing this for years. When I meet a new snowboarding student I usually try to understand their goals and where they’re at. The nice thing about snowboarding, like any skill, is there’s always possible improvement. For snowboarders learning to turn, making sure they can do basic rotation on flat ground, even before they attach their feet to a snowboard, is a common static exercise. This snowboarder is an emerging turner. They understand the way rotation moves their snowboard and how to make it happen, but they’re missing other important parts and they’ve yet to complete a turn. For an Emerging learner in math, what they need is a simpler exercise to ensure they have the knowledge to keep moving toward proficiency. Maybe this looks like simpler questions, or returning to addition before trying to understand multiplication. The active stage in snowboarding lines up with the developing stage of learning. The student has some understanding but they need practice and formative feedback. Proficient learners and Free stage snowboarders are both able to demonstrate the skill most of the time and are even able to demonstrate it in different situations or examples. Experimentation and extension are both what happens when a skill is learned, and the key idea is that learners can now bring these skills further, or into other areas. Â
