While at the Whitewater Symposium last weekend,Kent Ford and I had the opportunity to sit down and talk a little bit about instruction and education. As we were discussing fear, Kent said something that I thought effectively demonstrated the shear power that fear can have on a learner.

“Fear,” Kent said, “closes the pigeon-hole of learning.” As he said this, Kent was making a small hole in front of his eyes with his left hand that he then covered with his right to demonstrate the point. As I processed the Symposium, revisiting the presentation I gave and exploring the notes I took in the presentations that I attended, I found myself routinely returning to this conversation. It took me a while to figure out what it was that kept bringing me back here.

The presentation that I gave was entitled “Bridging the Gap Between Instruction and Education.” While finishing my masters in Education, I had the opportunity to spend a good deal of time researching a variety of educational theories ranging from fairly simple, concrete models of how people retain information such as Edgar Dale’s “cone of learning” to heady epistemological treatises on the nature of knowledge. All the while, I was in a 7th and 8th grade classroom full time. This was a period of my life in which I was completely immersed in education! As I completed my course work, I immediately began preparing for an instructor certification course that I was teaching with Dartmouth College’s Ledyard Canoe Club. I had been planning and leading instructor courses for about seven years at this point, so I had a system in place that I found to be effective. However, as I reviewed my plans I noticed that some of the theoretical work that I had been exposed to could benefit my instructor candidates. After making some changes to the curriculum for the course, the positive experiences that I and that I saw my studnts having were the first clue that these ideas needed be shared with the whitewater community, and the presentation was born.

At the symposium, I presented an interactive lecture that covered Maslow’s Hierarcy of Needs, Bloom’s taxonomy, Edgar Dale’s Cone of Learning, and Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development. The value of bringing these theories into whitewater instruction was made immediately apparent by the rich conversation that arose between people who had been instructing at the peak of the sport for decades. As I presented, listened to what everyone in the room had to say, and considered Kent’s quote, I began to realize the full scale of the role that fear plays in instruction. While exploring this idea in full is too much for a single blog post, and still a developing thought on my part, I do want to put something out there in hopes of stimulating a little thought/conversation.

In his Hierarchy of Needs, Maslow indicates that all humans strive to meet a set of needs in the following order (with paddling specific examples): physiological needs (air), safety and security needs (learning to roll in order to avoid dangerous situations), belonging (finding a stable, supportive paddling community), esteem (concrete benchmarks that indicate ability-first class III run for example), self-actualization (leading class IV for the first time, or planning an executing a successful trip without the help of an instructor of guide), and finally peak/transcendent experiences (bringing others in, remote exploration, developing new moves and techniques). Having said this, I would offer up the idea that the way we evaluate ourselves as whitewater instructors should be based on the number of our students that ultimately go on to become self-identified “paddlers.” With this in mind, I would further suggest that the single most important aspect of effective whitewater instruction is the management of fear. I would go so far as to say that all of the hard skills teaching that we do should be viewed as the method by which we go about this. For example, the goal to teaching the wet-exit must not be to  ensure that everyone in the group can effectively demonstrate the skill; instead, the goal must be to ensure that each student has become so comfortable upside down, under water, and in a boat that he/she has no concern for his/her basic needs, and is beginning to meet his/her safety needs.

The primary mission of Adept Descents is to push whitewater instruction forward, and in doing so aid in the development of instructional techniques that put learners first. In doing this, the hope is that through exposure to these conversations, ideas, and theories whitewater kayak instructors (myself included) will become more effective at creating programs that help students become paddlers. How can you help? Comment, question, become an active part of the conversation, apply what you learn to your teaching, bring back feedback, repeat.