Home | Articles | Workshops | About | Updates

One of the simplest steps you can take as an instructor to improve your classes - whether they’re short 1:1 lessons, weekly group instruction in your club, or workshops at event - is to make them coherent. The class should be focused on a specific topic or idea and everything within the class should support that idea. It’s very similar to writing an essay: you pick the thesis that you’re writing about and make sure that you’re only writing about that topic.

So what does this mean in practice? There’s a few useful rules I’ve found to help make sure my classes are coherent for the students:

Identify your topic. Seems obvious, but can be surprisingly uncommon. You should be able to express the key topic of your class in 1-2 sentences at most. This is great for putting on the workshop list at an event. Even if you never tell it to anyone, it’s still useful to think about and have a clear idea for yourself about what the topic of this class is.

Consider your scope. Is your topic too general? What knowledge or experience do the attendees need to already have? That second question is very common for workshops, but normally it’s approached in a general way: beginner/intermediate/advanced”. What specific knowledge is required - do people need to know the mechanics of your personal interpretation of an action? If you’re working on classes for your club, do you allow newbies every week - and if so, how will your class plan work with a new fencer without prior experience?

Pick relevant exercises. There are a lot of good exercises for learning about fencing. However, just doing a series of good exercises doesn’t make for a good class. Each exercise in your class needs to help with conveying the overall point of the class. For example, if my class plan is focused entirely on thrusting actions, it’s probably not very useful to do an exercise that helps practice cutting mechanics - while that may be a great exercise, it doesn’t help students get better at the objective of the class itself. Replacing it with an alternative exercise that’s more in line with the class topic will probably make for a stronger class even if that replacement is a weaker exercise.

Stay on message. How you talk/act as the instructor is at least as important as the exercises you pick. Keep your advice and encouragement focused on the topic of your class. If students try to drag things in an alternative direction, with “what about…” type questions, politely but firmly drag them back on message and offer to answer that question in a future class (or in the bar later). If you’re delivering a 1:1 lesson about attacking, don’t comment on the student’s parries, just file away in your mind that you’ll need to work on improving those at a later time.

Like any guide to teaching, these aren’t completely ironclad rules. You can disregard or adjust them as required for the tone of your club, the style of your teaching, etc. But I’ve found this approach helps a lot with my students getting the point of what I’m trying to teach - both in my club where I’m attempting to deliver a curriculum and in one-off workshops at events where I want to convey something useful in a single interaction.

I welcome questions, comments or feedback on this article. You can reach me by email:

tea at fechtlehre dot org