I was just reading a fascinating post on the Medium.com site, The Trouble with Teachability by Jane Elliott, 11-23-2023, about a built-in bias when teaching things: teachability. Teachability is basically the ease by which things can be taught. You...
I was just reading a fascinating post on the Medium.com site, The Trouble with Teachability by Jane Elliott, 11-23-2023, about a built-in bias when teaching things: teachability.
Teachability is basically the ease by which things can be taught. You probably have seen books or magazine articles along the lines of “Windows 10 in Easy Steps,” “How to Clean Your Room in 10 Easy Steps,” and “Control Diabetes in Six Easy Steps.” Of course, the steps are always “easy” and few in number. But is this the best way to teach complex tasks? What about processes like archery which involve a lot of feel?
The bias in “teachability bias” is that methodical step-by-step processes are easier to teach, but they may not be the best way to learn something. As a teacher of many decades I almost automatically look to break instructions down into steps, because they are easier to learn. I still do this out of habit.
So, is this a good approach for us archery coaches? It certainly is not how many things are taught. (I remember a TV cooking show way back, The Galloping Gourmet, in which the host, Graham Kerr, encouraged his viewers to not depend so much upon measuring instruments, to the point that in one show he took the decorative measuring cups off the wall and jumped up and down on them until they were flat. Recipes are for amateurs, and archives for restaurants in case their chef leaves.)
I recall an article written by Darrell Pace about his process. (Darrell Pace, for those of you who are younger, was America’s greatest Olympic archer. He won two individual gold medals and would have won three if the U.S. hadn’t boycotted the Russian games in 1980 . . . plus a silver team medal and also back-to-back world championships that had never been done before.) He wrote about how his parents would drive him to the archery range on a Saturday, early in the morning, and then come back at sundown to pick him up, rinse and repeat. The bow will teach us how to use it if we just listen.
Art is a more organic human function than engineering. Archery is part art and part science, so are we doing enough to encourage our students to learn as they learn best, using what is already inside of them or do we just break everything down into steps and teach the steps?
Postscript I have written before that coaches who break down, say shot sequences, into more and more steps seem to be more and more knowledgeable about shooting, but there is no limit to how finely we can do just that. It seems that the closer a student gets to elite status, the closer he/she gets back to the simplicity of the first shot sequence ever recorded: “Standing, knocking, drawing, holding, loosing whereby cometh fair shooting” (Toxophilus by Roger Ascham, 1544). Maybe the pattern is we make things complex and then consign much of it to subconscious processing, whereupon they become simple again.
