Planning What To Teach

The benefits of a curriculum are two fold:

1. Students have a resource to review what has and will be shown
2. Instructors have a defined guide for what to show that they can use for class planning

Historically I haven’t really taught to a curriculum. The basics have been the basics in terms of fundamentals class and I fundamentally believe a competition class should be geared toward positional drills rather than rote technique practice. As I review all of this instructional content, I’m starting to feel like I need more guidance for both of these classes though. I’m starting to put together a curriculum for fundamentals class that I’ll post here as I work through it, and I’m going to try to do better planning of comp class based on USA Wrestling’s practice planning tools. That’s further off, but I’ll probably post some practice plans with evaluations of how they went once we can get back on the mats.

I’m also thinking of finding videos or filming videos of the basics that I can use to make reference material for new students. Enumerated techniques can have specific video links so that they can see the details I show to remind themselves or even catch up on a missed class if they have the frame of reference for what I showed already. I’m not a black belt, I don’t expect to provide top of the line content covering all of the nuances, but I think having a freely available curriculum with videos would be good for fundamentals.