Teaching a backflip in one hour
Happy Friday, everyone.
Check out this amazing video: a one minute montage of an instructor (Bob Reese) working with a boy of perhaps 12 or so years old, teaching him how to do a backflip over the course of an hour. (You may have seen it before; it currently has 50 million YouTube views and who knows how many on other platforms. It’s worth rewatching!)
As you watch it, pay attention to the educational process: what do you notice about the instructional technique, and the boy’s learning process?
Wow.
The two things that jump out to me are:
How fast and effective the learning is. Again, wow.
How much work went into the instructional design. Clearly there’s been a deep analysis of breaking down one fluid motion, the backflip, into a bunch of subtasks. And there’s also been work done in figuring out how to scaffold the practice of each of these subtasks—and their gradual reintegration into the backflip—before someone is capable of practicing the backflip as a whole.
This actually is my favorite example of instructional design, because it makes it so obvious what instructional design is and why it matters.
There are many important parts to an education. Two big ones are the relationship between the educator and the student—connection, coaching, etc.—and the culture of the educational environment—a culture of friendliness with failure, of empathy, or in our unique parlance, a “culture of work” and a “culture of knowledge”. We often hear about connection and culture topics in mainstream discussion of education, and for good reason, because, again, they are critically important.
A third part, less often talked about but no less important, is instructional design. It’s specific support offered for learning a specific objective.
It looks something like the steps in the above video. There’s been, first, an analysis of the requisite skills involved in achieving some more complex learning objective—in this case, “doing a backflip”, but it could be something even more involved like “being literate”. An educator has thought about what this objective really is, what it means to do it, why people do it, and what people need to learn in order to be able to do it. And, second, there’s a tremendous amount of thought put into how to systematically convey all of this to a student. How to learn each step, how to motivate each step, how to make sure each step actually adds up to the desired learning. Very often this involves, at least in part, carefully prescribed, repeated practice. It can also involve choices, less artificial exercises and practice, and sub-games, mini-mysteries, and micro-challenges that keep it interesting throughout.
In its most successful forms, this support is highly refined and carefully engineered, to be astonishingly efficient and consistently joyous.
Montessori was the greatest instructional designer in history. I don’t think that’s hyperbole. She did task analyses of fundamental learning problems, including hard skills like literacy and mathematics and “soft skills”, or values, like work ethic and humanism. She then engineered curricular and pedagogical steps to systematically teach each step of the analysis, to students younger than had ever been attempted in history. And she succeeded—to such an extent that we can still use her techniques for many things, virtually unmodified, in virtually any cultural or learning context, over a century later.
I’ve written about how this works with Montessori’s approach to literacy, to dressing oneself, and to imparting more abstract values like the capacity to love one’s work.
But I’m also curious to hear about your favorites. Recall the brilliant instructional design around doing a backflip in the video above. What’s something that you’ve seen like this, in your life, or with your children, or in one of our classrooms? Can you think of an example of teaching that was not just empathic, not just exciting—but also meticulously designed and astonishingly effective?
Reply or comment if you have any relevant stories! I’ll share out good examples that I get next week.
Have a great (Father’s Day) weekend,
Matt Bateman
Executive Director, Montessorium