The Two Core Reasons Why You Need Education to Teach Jiu-Jitsu

TL;DR: This post highlights the two fundamental reasons why being a seasoned Jiu-Jitsu practitioner or competitor does not inherently make one a good instructor. It emphasizes the importance of educational training to bridge the vast experiential gap and to acquire essential teaching tools.

The Gap Between Expert and Novice

There are two major reasons why a professional within a field is not necessarily a good instructor. This is especially true for someone who has been in a field for a long time. In the context of Jiu-Jitsu, consider the example of a black belt and a competitor. If you have been training Jiu-Jitsu for 20 years, competed extensively, and earned a black belt, there is a significant distance between your level of understanding and that of someone brand new to the sport.

Your tools, understanding, and muscle memory can actually work against you when you try to teach. To grasp the sport at the level of a black belt, you must integrate many elements into your subconscious and take them for granted to progress. The stuff you’re learning today is based on what you learned last year. Over time, you have to take some things for granted to improve further. It is these deeply ingrained aspects that you must teach to people who are brand new. The further the distance between you as the teacher and the student, the harder it is to relate to their situation.

For instance, things that are normalized in Jiu-Jitsu, like having a stranger between your legs or wrapping your legs around a stranger, can be extremely alien to someone in their first Jiu-Jitsu class. As instructors, we might have done this for decades and consider it completely normal. There are countless examples of such concepts that are hard or impossible to think about before you hear them. The only way to understand these is to hear the student’s perspective, and you cannot always expect students to be transparent about their fears and problems with the instructor for various reasons.

The Need for Pedagogic Tools

The second aspect relates to the tools needed for teaching. The pedagogic tools required for instructing have nothing to do with expertise in the field itself. If you are an expert in a field and want to write a textbook or just a normal book on that subject, there is a variety of tools you need to acquire to write effectively. Having expertise within a field doesn’t mean you will be a good writer, and the same is true for teaching. To teach, you need a different set of tools from those of your field of expertise.

The more distance you have between you and your student, the more tools you need to bridge that gap. You might have picked up some tools from how you were taught, but those might not be the best or most effective for you. There are general tools that work for everyone and specific tools that might work for your instructor but not for you, and vice versa.

To turn your Jiu-Jitsu knowledge into something scalable, meaning you want to spread your knowledge to others, you need to bridge the gap between your expertise and their level of understanding. The only way to acquire these tools is by taking a teacher education.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the path from being a Jiu-Jitsu expert to becoming an effective instructor is not straightforward. It requires recognizing and addressing the significant gap in understanding between you and a beginner. Additionally, it demands acquiring a set of pedagogical tools tailored to teaching, distinct from the skills of the sport itself. Education in teaching methodologies is essential for anyone aspiring to be a proficient Jiu-Jitsu instructor. It is through this education that you can effectively translate your expertise into valuable, comprehensible knowledge for your students.