~ Play As The Way ~
A Different Way of Teaching Children Martial Arts |
A typical martial arts class for children will have rows of children standing in lines throwing punches and kicks in the air. A clean, regimented format where discipline is stressed and etiquette strictly observed. If there are games, they are games to reinforce physical chracteristics (strength, dexterity and the like) or to simply eat up class time. Techniques are taught as if they were being taught to adults, just smaller adults with less attention span. And this is the way martial arts have been taught to children for the past thirty years or so.
The Play as the Way method (PAW method), pioneered by One Dragon Martial Arts school in Florida, takes a radically different approach to teaching children how to process and adapt to new information. Using play to present martial arts, children are much more capable of performing and repeating the desired results.
Children like to play. They like it a lot. They will play any time they get the opportunity. The PAW method takes advantage of the natural instincts of children and allows them to work hard at playing; something they’ll want to do regardless of the reward or consequence. These natural instincts are evident in the animal kingdom as well. For instance, when lion cubs play, it involves stalking, pouncing, wrestling – all things required for the animal to learn to hunt as an adult. Similarly, young deer at play learn evasive maneuvers by racing and practicing zig-zag patterns to avoid predators. Therefore, play for children is not just mindless fun, it is a way in which they achieve the means to thrive in the adult world. Through play, children learn to follow rules, cooperation with others, communications skills, and a host of other necessary life skills to excel as a successful adult.
However, the play ethic looks so radically different to adults that it is hard to put aside preconceived notions of what a martial arts class “ought” to look like – which is precisely the point. If the children’s class looked like a class that adults would like it, then the class wouldn’t be structured for children!
Famous child psychologist Jean Piaget, a pioneer in research of child development, gave the world great insight into the way children relate to and view the world around them. His methodology has made its way into classrooms the world over -- every classroom that is, except the martial arts class room. Because martial artists are, very rightly, fiercely protective of tradition, there is a strong reluctance to change the traditional methods by which children are taught – even if the new methods have mountains of scientific evidence to back them up. There is a saying that we have here at KMAA, “We seek not only to follow in the footsteps of those who came before us; we seek the same things as well.” With this saying in mind we look past the traditional methods that we were raised with and see through to the idea that creating martial artists is the ultimate goal; the goal that great men like Kano, Ueshiba and Funakoshi envisioned.
Tying together Piaget’s model of how children think, KMAA & the PAW method firmly believe in the work of BF Skinner, a renowned child psychologist and father of behaviorism. Behaviorism, in a nut-shell, means that children will act in such as way as to achieve their desired consequences. For example, little Joey might throw tantrums if he’s learned that tantrums will get him whatever he wants or Suzy might practice the piano very often if her parents continuially praise her for her efforts.
A cornerstone of this behaviorism theory is the concept of delayed gratification. Delayed gratification is the ability to forego small and immediate rewards for larger rewards in the future.1 As children get older, their ability to delay their gratification grows. Punching the air isn’t fun, even if it means I’ll get a new belt in a month. Standing at attention isn’t fun, even if it means that the teacher will be happy with me. Children, especially in our Little Warriors class have wildly varying levels of the ability to delay gratification. So, instead of external rewards for behavior, the PAW method encourages an instrinsic reward for external behaviour.
Getting belts and being praised are external rewards, because they exist outside of what the child feels. Having fun is an intrinsic reward because the reward for the activity is the activity itself. Imagine if eating chocolate was healthy for you and helped you lose weight, like celery; the intrinsic reward of eating the chocolate (because it tastes so good) would outweight the health benefits regardless of what they may be.
And so, again, the PAW method turns traditional martial arts thought on its head. Standing at attention is fun, because it’s a game, so the reward for standing at attention is standing at attention. Punching and kicking are fun, because they are games. A classic example of this is how many of our kids want to say “yes sir” and “no sir” or “yes ma’am” and “no ma’am” – because they think of it as a game! In fact there are times we have to tell them to quit saying “yes sir” so much; a very good problem to have in my opinion.
And what do the children learn from all the game play? We could use big child psychology words like sociocognitive conflict growth or intermittent reinforcement, but what we’re really trying to express is that children learn everything that an adult would learn from martial arts – they just learn it in a method more appropriate to their level of understanding.
For example, an adult might practice a double leg takedown a hundred times. Adults will persevere in the face of discomfort and failure. We will keep working after we have started panting hard and lathered up a good sweat. We keep working because in the end we know that it will be worth it to have mastered a skill (or because the activity itself is *gasp* fun). For children however, especially if they lack a great deal of the ability to delay gratification, once the fun wears off from the first few novel attempts, the desire to repeat the behavior wanes as well. So instead, we might play the bear virus game or we might play leap-frog – the physical skills being learned are the same (get low, drive through, explode up), only the method of delivery is different.
Similarly, if an adult wants to have a powerful jab-cross combination they’ll spend many, many hours hammering away at focus mits and heavy bags until their form is spot-on with much more power. Kids, on the other hand, would respond much better to robot races or jab soccer or any number of other games – again the skills developed are the same, just the method of internalization is different.
All of this is well and good if we are developing physically capable martial artists, but what happened to respect, self-confidence and discipline? How does the PAW method at KMAA address these intangible qualities? The primary method for delivering these “moral” qualities is through a healthy dose of external-to-self purusits. To quote Dr. James H McMillan (professor of Educational Studies, Virginia Commonwealth University), “By focusing outside themselves, children learn respect for others and an objective reference for aquiring stable and meaningful sense of themselves.” 2
“But wait a second,” you might be thinking, “didn’t you just get done telling us about all the benefits of intrinsic motivation? The sort of motivation that comes principally from inside a child?” Yes, in fact, we did just get done extolling the virtues of intrinsic motivation, however being motivated to do something and having an external-to-self judge of the results of those motivations are two different things. Our students want to play the games because they are fun, but that doesn’t necessitate that they will win the games. The processes of trial and error, success and failure test the student. The following of the rules forces them to discipline themselves; because if they don’t, they won’t have fun and no one will want them on their team (thereby being intrinsiclly and extrinsically motivated).
This brings us to a very important part of the PAW method, one that is most unsettling to many parents: what happens when a child fails? In many team sports, failure is met with a great deal of heartache but there is rarely little personal guilt or shame. This is the exact opposite of failure in “solo” sports, such as martial arts. When a person fails at martial arts, the failure rests solely on oneself: I wasn’t strong enough, I wasn’t fast enough, I wasn’t skilled enough.
Given the exacting nature that many parents rightfully expect from their children, this sudden failure of a seemingly minor event is taken to be earthshattering by the child. The single most common coping mechanism is to feign injury, often including very real tears and cries. Injuries help lessen the blame and shift the focus away from the student and towards circumstances out of their control; i.e., “I would have won that game if I hadn’t injured my toe!”
During these periods of coping with failure, it is important to strike a balance between being supportive and not giving too much attention. Not being supportive could be taken to mean that failure, failure of any type, isn’t acceptable; such a perspective is not realistic, failure is a part of life. However, being too attentive to the injury will encourage the child to repeatedly respond with crying and tears. A healthy balance between failure and success is what brings about the healthy sense of “respect for others and an objective reference for aquiring stable and meaningful sense of themselves” as Dr.McMillan puts it.
Finally, what is the end result of all this play? Success. Provable, verifiable success. Specifically, this success translates to competitions, but more generically the numerous successes lead to an increased sense of well-being. The PAW method pioneered at One Dragon Martial Arts School has brought them numerous championships in Brazilian Jujutsu, Boxing and Kickboxing as well as adult Mixed Martial Arts victories. Closer to home, our play method of instruction for teenagers and adults has garnered winning results and we look forward to continuing that success in all of our classes.
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1. Childhood Development and Education , by McDevitt and Ormrod. Pearson Custom Publishing, 2002
2. “Self-Oriented Self-Esteem Self-Destructs” by McMillan, Singh and Simonetta. Educational Horizons, 1994.