Engaging students in group discussions: a dojo guide.
Group discussions in the dojo are a great tool to engage the students with their realities. If you create the space for them to bring their situations and dilemmas into the room, then you and their peers can walk out the problems and challenges of daily life to help them to be safer and healthier. It also builds community and trust between your own students, helping reinforce the strength of the club too. It’s brilliant!
Some instructors feel nervous about using this kind of teaching because it might not look like martial arts, and it might feel that the usual ways of managing the room are not available.
A few teachers who have followed the Animal Instincts courses have asked about this topic so I thought it would be a good time to map out some good ways to do this. These are not the only ways, but just a starting point for your own creativity.
Whole group discussions
If you have the whole group sitting down, then you need to be alert to engage all the students in order to balance the discussion. There are bound to be a few students who like to contribute a lot – some are oblivious if they are dominating the chat and may need reminding that, with limited time, it is really important to share the space. For this reason, it can help to scaffold the discussion so that everyone can contribute and be invited to engage. I would never force this, but I try to make it easy and fun to join in with an initial binary question or a vote on something. Let’s work a few examples here…
Level 1 Question: is the most important safety device your phone – yes or no?
Most students will be willing to contribute at least a yes/no on this and many will be prepared to add a ‘because’. Limit the students to one ‘because’ otherwise you will get a monologue from someone, and others might disengage.
Level 2 Question: what is the most important safety device you can have? This is a much more open discussion, and you will probably get a whole range of items which can be quite interesting to consider. There will probably be someone who raises the idea of a weapon – possibly in a really illegal or inappropriate way – so this is a good chance to educate around the law in your area. When your group is more confident with discussions, this type of question will bring you a lot more information from the group so can be more valuable overall than the simple binary which is more of a ‘starter’ option.
Level 3 Task: In groups of 4-5 list all the things you carry with you that are useful for keeping you safe. This type of system takes longer to set up, and works best if you have large sheets of paper for them to write and draw their ideas so also needs a big pack of marker pens in a range of colours. The colours really help them be creative, as does the permission to use illustrations and mindmaps rather than just words. Give them 5 minutes to work on this in groups and then ask the groups to have someone feed back to the whole group. (Do this with one new idea at a time from each group so that the other groups don’t switch off while one group lists 150 things, many of which are duplicated on everyone’s sheet!).
This is great for creating engagement from those who don’t want to speak out in front of everyone, as they will often be happy to add things within the group. This method can often uncover important information or misconceptions.
Level 4 Task: Similar to 3 but there are endless variations. Give each sheet a theme then rotate students to add to other sheets. With a very shy group, you can split the groups to feed back to each other rather than to the whole room.
Managing these discussions is an important active listening mission for the instructor. You need to be welcoming of ideas but prepared to deal with opinions you might disagree with, and some serious factual errors. It’s fine to correct factual errors sensitively and refer to sources on law (or science!) that the student might want to use outside of class to verify the information. If your discussions are not producing some occasional dodgy, toxic or controversial opinions from the group then you might be shutting down discussions or being overly talkative/opinionated yourself. The students will definitely have evolving thoughts about important topics and need to walk through the consequences with active discussion rather than rapid judgement. It’s down to you to create a space where this is possible! Start small, build a culture where the students are not allowed to interrupt each other … that’s important as a lot of these chats get very lively and need curating carefully. With persistent interrupters I do sometimes resort to sanctions such as losing a turn to contribute or even sitting out of the group to remember that turn-taking and sharing the discussion time is important and that the quiet people do also have the same claim on the time… introvert opinions bring a valuable perspective to the group.
However you manage these chats – from short and simple with accessible questions through to deep philosophical discussions – the benefits to the students are vast because it helps them build on what they know about their area, their own risks and their own personal responses to challenges. A valuable tool for your instructor toolbox!
Mary Stevens/Animal Instincts October 2024
Pictures featured in this blog are from my VPAM work with Chris Webb in the UK and with the FairFight self defence instructor trainees in India
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