How to be a great yoga teacher trainer: the activation principle

Want to be a great yoga teacher trainer?

Here’s one of those sneaky skills that you can use in the classroom to help elevate the quality of your students’ learning. It may seem obvious, but unless you’re thinking about it, you may miss doing it.

It’s called the Activation Principle.

Learning is promoted when learners activate relevant cognitive structures by being directed to recall, describe, or demonstrate relevant prior knowledge or experience.

So what does this mean?

It means that learners learn best when the content is related to something they already know. It tells their brain how to plug the new knowledge into what’s already in their heads. (Sort of like it’s easier to remember a name when the person in front of you reminds you of Uncle Jimmy, and J is next to K in the alphabet, so surely it’s obvious that this guy’s name is Kevin.) Making links with prior knowledge helps us to remember new stuff.

Some ways you can easily do this:

• relate the topic at hand to their experience as a yoga practitioner (“have you ever been to a class where…”, “how does it feel when…”)
• relate information to stuff you’ve already studied
• ask them to think about examples from their own lives (“has this ever happened to you…”, “think of a time when…”)
• ask them for personal examples
• have them do a journal reflection
• organize the knowledge clearly, so they know how to connect the dots

Learning is personal, and each person will relate to the new information in a different way.

Part of your job as a yoga teacher trainer is help each student create a mental breadcrumb trail between what they already know – and the new information you want them to learn.