Practice and Performance on the Mountain

by Andy Rubesch, Alpine DCL

Do you ever find yourself in a rut with your lessons moving from drill to drill without getting in a lot of “real” riding? Or do you find yourself wrapping up your favorite exercise, then drawing a blank on what to do next with an hour left in the lesson? When structuring lessons or learning segments, I find it very helpful to follow a simple rule of alternating between “practicing” and “performing.” This expands my bag of tricks by helping me keep exercises fresh for the students as I use them in different situations. When I use practice and performance segments to structure my lessons, I find it easy to identify one skill or movement, then teach the skill in depth using an engaging variety of activities that allow students to explore something new and leave the lesson with a sense of accomplishment.

We are all familiar with the terms “practicing” and “performing,” but we don’t always think about the specific ways that they are different. Practicing involves exploring and learning new movements while performance involves applying practiced and learned movements to situations on the mountain. Students grow and develop their skills in both practice and performance situations. When practicing, growth and learning comes from trying something new and unfamiliar. When performing, growth comes from trying to meet a set standard or being evaluated and receiving external feedback. Mistakes are a part of learning and developing new skills in any situation. During practice, mistakes are welcomed and are used as learning opportunities. During performance, we strive to avoid mistakes and to accomplish a task at the highest level possible. In developing a skill, assessment is a constant process. Practice allows opportunities for student self-assessment and evaluation that can be immediately applied to the practice. When performing, the student is demonstrating skills at his highest level to be evaluated by the instructor or coach.

What defines practice?

A practice mode of learning is not just doing something over and over until it gradually gets better. It is a specific mind set which allows for movements to be tried out, explored and thoughtfully refined. This is a time for the introduction of new movements and targeted development of specific aspects of learned movements. The instructor demonstrates new movements, allowing the students to try them out, see what a movement feels like and ask clarifying questions. The students and instructor break down skills into smaller movements and get picky about things to refine. A good way to guide practice topics is to identify a weakness or mistake that was identified in a performance setting and work that skill before returning to the performance setting. Efficient practice stays focused on one particular movement or skill.

Practice is most effective when there is not an expectation of getting anything “right” and the student can try things out in different ways to experiment with movements. There is a lot of “what happens if I do this?” or “what does it feel like when I try this?” Students have time to explore different skills and discover what movements are efficient and what are inefficient. Time to repeat a particular movement is very important. Allowing an open ended practice time lets the students repeat movements or tasks without being distracted by thinking, “I have GOT to get it right this time!” This sort of thinking forces students to start performing instead of practicing. In practice, mistakes are going to happen and students need time to do tasks over and over. Learning efficient movements will require many repetitions. Of course, if an inefficient movement is being made many times in a row, the student is practicing the mistake, not the correct movement. The instructor needs to be actively involved in a student’s practice to ensure that the student develops and correctly reinforces a movement with each repetition, gradually refining the movement. Just giving students time to try something out several times without giving feedback or without setting the students up to self-assess is not effective practice.

Practice is a great time for students to self-assess their movements. They can focus on what they feel going on in their body or what they see the instructor doing and make changes to their movements as they learn what efficient and inefficient movements feel like. The instructor should give feedback in a way to facilitate and shape the student’s understanding of the movement, helping the students make more accurate selfassessments. The language the instructor uses in this feedback should be chosen carefully to avoid value judgments of right/wrong or correct/incorrect as those judgments put the student into the position of “performing” for the instructor.

Some of the language that an instructor can use to set up practice situations includes, “Try this . . .” or “Experiment with this movement and see what it feels like” or “Now that I have given a demonstration, let’s all do it 10 times. Pay close attention to . . .”

What defines performance?

In a performance situation within a lesson, a student is demonstrating known and practiced movements. This is a time to take skills that a student practiced and apply them to a skiing or riding situation. Both the instructor and student have an expectation of student achievement and it is okay for the student to feel “on the spot.” That achievement can be meeting a particular standard (leaving a clean arc in the snow) or successfully completing an assigned task (making it to the chair line without falling). While the instructor is responsible for setting the students up for success in performance tasks, the tasks should be challenging enough that success is not a sure thing. High level performance on a task that is too easy will not give much sense of accomplishment, just as a low level performance on a task that is too difficult will be demoralizing.

Within a lesson, a performance situation is still a learning situation. If you simply assign a task to your students and then give them yes/no type feedback after the task is performed, there will not be a whole lot of learning going on. As an instructor, you are responsible for making sure that the students understand the performance goal and for designing performance tasks that reinforce practiced skills. To do this, identify a specific practiced skill from the lesson and apply it to a situation on the mountain. State to your students how and why they should use the skill in the situation. Describe to your students what will be accomplished if they excel at the task. Also describe what it will look or feel like if they are less than successful at the task. This creates a rubric for the students so that they can make sense of your feedback after the task and your students will be more able to identify what they need to practice and improve before returning to the performance situation.

When students are performing they need to be focused on applying skills and not distracted by making selfassessments during the task. Here is where the instructor earns their money by giving the students clear, concrete feedback about their performance on the snow. Students expect feedback from the instructor and often won’t feel as though they have anything to take away from the lesson without this performance feedback.

Thinking about performance settings may take you back to one of your certification exams, but performance situations don’t always need to be formal call-down tasks. Simply saying, “Why don’t you go first” will have a student performing because they know they are going down the mountain in front of the instructor and are being watched. Other language that sets up performance situations includes, “Show me your best turns,” “I’ll watch you this run and give some feedback,” or “This one is for the money.”

How do you use practice and performance?

Successful teaching involves active use by the instructor of both practice segments and performance segments of a lesson. Students learn and develop new skills best in a practice mode but need and want to show off the new skills in a performance setting where they are evaluated by the instructor. Just keeping practice and performance in mind is a great way to expand the depth of drills and tasks when you are on the hill with a class. Introduce the task in a very comfortable practice setting and give the “Practice” students lots of time to explore the task and really ingrain the movements. Then move around the hill looking for reallife riding situations where the students can perform the task for you and their peers. Pretty soon, you will find yourself focusing on one particular skill for an entire lesson, but within a variety of activities and situations so that it does not get stale for you or the students. d Andy teaches for Skibacs Ski School at Summit Central at Snoqualmie.