Trust Exercises

What:
I had an usual teaching week because of snow days and late starts, so my reflection this week has to do with what I did with the color guard team I coach. We've been focusing on fundamentals during our winter clinics, and one of the keys for this is what we call 'staying in the toaster.' This is a term that reminds students to keep their flags in the correct plane and angle as they move them around their bodies. The term comes from the idea of standing inside a toaster and not wanting to touch the hot sides of it. For this particular exercise, we also incorporated some team building trust exercises. Students lined up at a two step interval and had to perform several sets of the technique without bumping the person in front of them with the flag.

So What:
I recorded the exercise, and had students watch it back on the big screen. This allowed us to watch for inconsistencies- often it is easy to think that you are right on with counts and watching the playback helps students to self evaluate, diagnose and prescribe. We repeated this exercise from several different camera angles.

Now What:
Students did improve slightly on this exercise. This is something that we will repeat, varying the speed and the spacing. The hope is to create the muscle memory needed to perform the skill in unison.


Comments

  1. AnonymousFebruary 10, 2019 at 2:41 PM

    You used a mix of metaphors, exercises, and reflection to continue working on an essential skill. You noticed that this particular activity helped your students keep their flag close to their bodies. In what ways could the use of more exercises like this benefit the team?

    ReplyDelete

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