Private Lessons and Big Data: Turning Sticks into Trendlines!

Estimated reading time: 6 minutes

Before discussing my data experiment, I apologize for the month-long radio silence due to being (a) buried in work and (b) having a family get-together. That said, I’m happy to blog again!

After a private lesson with Rosh, the owner of ABS Training Centre, we started discussing coaching and teaching. It’s part of a long conversation that has spanned a couple of years about teaching. Let me tell you, if Rosh and I were to discuss this topic without any time constraints, we’d probably talk for 3 or 4 hours delving into all aspects of teaching and coaching.

On this particular occasion, we veered into how we can use AI to help us teach. Rosh told me that he’d like to set up a process where he would track the number of repetitions for each core gymnastic exercise he teaches and use AI to analyze the data.

Huh.

His theory is that the students who perform more repetitions of his core exercises will be superior to others. I have the same theory for the practice of martial arts.

I’ve never taken a data-driven approach to teaching. That said, I do have some data, but it’s pretty basic. The current data tracks the number of lessons I’ve taught in a given month or year. I do keep track of what I teach my private students.

“Okay, I taught Johnny Lawrence flow drills 1 through 6 the last few lessons. Time to teach him flow drill 7.” But I’ve never tracked what I’ve specifically taught through spreadsheets.

So I’ve decided to take a very basic dive into data-driven teaching.

Fortunately, I have Modern Arnis material that is amenable to data analysis. Twenty flow drills and 7 left vs. right tapi-tapi sequences are perfect material for this project.

For starters, I’m familiarizing myself with Apple Numbers, the Apple version of Microsoft Excel. Right now, the focus is on which flow drills and left-hand material I’m teaching each student. There is a spreadsheet for each private client and one for myself.

I haven’t progressed to the point of counting repetitions for each flow drill yet. Remember, I’m just getting started on this project at age 60. In other words, I’m an older dog learning new tricks! 🙂 Tracking the number of repetitions for each flow drill will be important, and I want to do it correctly. Also, I need to figure out how to do this in spreadsheet form.

Anyway, here’s what I have so far in my spreadsheet:

The number represents the number of times I covered a flow drill in a private lesson. For example, I covered flow drills 1 and 2 in 16 private lessons from March 1 to April 30.

Below is a bar graph representation of the above:

I have similar spreadsheets for each client. It’ll be interesting to see how their statistics look at the end of the year.

As mentioned above, the next step is to track the number of repetitions of each flow drill. To that end, I need a standardized approach to monitoring repetitions. I have decided that the absolute minimum for each flow drill will be ten repetitions. If the student performs a drill well, we will move on to the next one. If the student is either learning a new drill or performing substandardly by the 10th repetition, the minimum will be twenty repetitions.

The repetition collection phase of my project starts today, May 1st.

But wait! That’s not enough!

Rosh pointed out that I need to grade the quality of those repetitions as part of the project. To that end, I will use a simple grading scale as follows:

A = 4 points
B = 3 points
C = 2 points
D = 1 point.

Let’s say that Johnny Lawrence has done 100 repetitions of Flow Drill X, in blocks of 10. Each block has an assigned grade. Further, let’s say that after 100 repetitions, his GPA for that drill is 2.3 and is lower than his performance in other flow drills. What does that indicate to me?

The grading aspect of the project also begins today.

Is this data-driven approach overkill? Perhaps. What do I have to lose from this experiment? I know what I see in terms of quality of movement, but it would be nice to support that with data.

To be clear, this is not analytics for the sake of competition, as in basketball, football, baseball or hockey. It’s not about grading a student, but about identifying what they need to work on. I want to improve my teaching, and I think this experiment may help me do so.

Post Lesson Debrief

I applied the above to a private client’s lesson today. It so happens that he used data quite a bit in his job before he retired and made a couple of helpful suggestions.

First, he suggested that the student and I each grade the flow drill and average the grades.

I mentioned to him that Rosh suggested that I grade folks on their retention of the flow drills. My client suggested that the retention grade be applied to the session rather than to each flow drill. For simplicity’s sake, I’m going with that.

Lastly, I realized, as a result of today’s session, that I need to refine the grading scale for the flow drills. Stay tuned!

Suggestions from anybody? I’d like to hear them!

Other Stuff I’ve Written

• The Age of Open Source Information
• How Hard Do You Really Train?
• The Third Lockdown
• Mixing It Up!
• Video of the Week 16: Get Off The Couch!

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