Effective Teaching Series 2: Games and Motivation in Swim Lessons

This is the second in a series about how to teach swimming effectively. You can use these emails to run your swim lesson program, or to go about creating your staff training. Our first email last week was about two key points:

1. Fill your practices/lessons with really good stuff that works on something specific.
2. Your participants should have intent and a goal for every action they do during lessons/practice.

Saying those two things seem really simple and easy to do, but in actual practice it is very difficult to maximize your time and effort. An even bigger challenge is how do you get 3-7 year old swimmers totally engaged? I think that is one of the most difficult things ever!

Fortunately we've spent a lot of time teaching lessons, going to training sessions, and learning about HOW to learn. This is the second part of a series in how to teach swimming well. We had a sports performance consultant come to our program and let us know what we did well, and how we can improve. Here are some more highlights.

Session 2

Play games to get results

Let's connect #1 from last week, "Stuff your practices with juicy awesome" to today: Romp with games to learn something new. When we play games and sing songs during swimming lessons or at swim team, we're not just wasting time to create a fun experience with the swimmer. It is not some nebulous hippy feel good action. We are not wasting time with our games. Every game and song provided in the SLI swim program on thelesson plans, the workbook, and the website are all designed with a purpose and a goal.

One of the biggest swimming instructor challenges is to find and create games that work well to teach a specific swimming skill.

You can use our swim lesson plans to do this thinking for you, or if you want to try something new, follow these four steps to creating your own exciting and purposeful exciting swim games:

Motivation moves bodies

Why do we play games? and how do we actually produce mindful practice. Aside from engaging your creativity to invent a new and exciting purpose driven game, the most difficult thing to do when teaching is tomotivateyour participants. The best way for someone to learn or get better at something is for that person to WANT to do it, and to be internally motivated to actually work hard at practicing something. Our goal as swim instructors and as swim teachers is to give and produce that motivation within our swimmers. Playing games are a good way to create momentary sideways motivation. Generally participants want to succeed in challenging games. Most people want to do well, and if we craft our games in an interesting, challenging, yet appropriate and achievable way, our participants will be motivated to do well in them.

We can motivate our participants a few ways:

To recap:

1. Fill your practices with goal minded activities.
2. Every action in practice/lessons should have a clear goal.
3. Play games to teach.
4. Motivate your participants to get results.

If you want to have high quality purpose driven swim lessons, check out our swimming lesson tools.