Video/Book Reviews
by Ed Kane
Pathways to Superior Snowboard Lessons the “TinyBubbles” Approach. This 16 page article by Randy Price, AASI Team Coach, is available for order from the PSIA National Website for $9.50 plus postage. This approach of distributing educational material is intended bring this material to the membership on a more real-time basis while it is still relevant. It is intended to provide information that builds on the material contained in the AASI Snowboard Manual and provides some rather useful approaches that will help in constructing lesson plans prior to and while working with your classes. The approach is pretty unique and innovative and contains guidelines that should be useful to instructors who are at the entry level and above.
The concept is to visualize the “Y” model as a champagne glass filled with the bubbling liquid. When one watches the bubbles rise to the top not all start from the base near the stem and not all take a linear path to the top of the glass. With this picture in mind the instructor can relate this to the student skill set and then relate their needs to the approach used to help them progress. Some students will need help with their foundation (bubbles rising from near the stem) and others will need help with some of their developed skills (bubbles rising from the sides). Within this concept he discusses progressions which are not necessarily linear pathways (just like the circuitous pathway of some of the bubbles). He suggests that there are 4 levels of movement effort that can be employed to progress toward goals. These consist of Basic, Simple, Complex and Ride. Basic or fundamental movements vary depending on the skill set possessed by the student. Simple movements combine some of the fundamental movements at the same time and Complex movements results from adding several of these together. Ride is, well, riding to develop experience (otherwise known as Adventure).
The bulk of the article contains some examples of the application of this approach and the concepts noted above. These examples help put the more general context into some specifics that can serve as a basis for developing your own organized approach to more effective teaching. All in all the material in this document is quite valuable and presented in straight forward, non-technical language. It provides a broad base for developing effective lesson plans both prior to the lesson and should help the instructor during the lesson if the principles described are used during the lesson. It is a very nice addition to the above mentioned manual and should be added to each instructors’ library.