How to Practice: Brilliant Video of John Burmeister

Had a pretty amazing day in Chicago on Wednesday, talking teaching with a group of (mostly) MLS professional soccer coaches who are enrolled in US Soccer’s new Pro License course. The group includes guys who I admire as coaches and who I followed as players. I was a little bit star struck… but I got over that fast because the conversation was so rich.

Interestingly, we didn’t watch any footage of soccer training. We watched classroom footage and applied the principles to teaching during training.

The closest we got to watching “practice” was an amazing video of music teacher John Burmeister (who I’ve written about before) working with an upstate New York youth orchestra. His session is a master class on having a clear and specific goal and breaking the session up into rounds of progressive challenge, each with a single piece of feedback to focus on and execute.John does an amazing job of watching carefully, relentlessly for mastery and acting on it when kids don’t get there–Checking for Understanding, that is. And his tone is outstanding. His expectations are high; he is relentless; but he is totally positive, makes it safe to struggle and never blames his students. Instead he gives them small pieces of technical feedback and helps them get better.

Read more and watch the video here:

https://teachlikeachampion.com/blog/practice-john-burmeister-accelerates-learning/