Blending Teaching Methods
By OSJJ
Open Source Jiu-Jitsu
THE CURRICULUM SERIES ยท PART EIGHT
Blending Teaching Methods: The Most Effective Way to Reach the Whole Room
Two pieces on the methods, one on how to run the reps. This one answers the question underneath all of them: why use more than one method at all. The answer is not the one most coaching content gives, and the difference matters.
Justin Hall / Co-Founder, Open Source Jiu-Jitsu
The Teaching Methodologies laid out nine teaching methods. Practice Design went inside them, into the dials that govern how the reps actually run. Both pieces ended by pointing here, because there is a question underneath them that neither one answered. If there are nine methods and they all work, why would a coach use more than one? Pick the best, get good at it, run it. That is what a majority of academies do, usually without ever having decided to. Blending happens inside a single lesson. The lesson itself is the next piece, and the last one on the way down. This piece is the reason there is more than one method in it, and it is going to take a detour through an argument that sounds right and is not, because the wrong version of this case is everywhere and it will get you to the right behavior for the wrong reason, which does not last.
One thing to be clear about before any of it. This is not an argument that blending is the only right way to teach, and it is not a claim that a coach who runs one method is doing it wrong. It is narrower than that. If the goal is to reach the broadest spectrum of students who walk through the door, blending is the approach with the highest probability of doing it. If you run one method, know what it reaches and what it does not, and are fine with that, then that is your academy and there is nothing wrong with it. The problem this piece is aimed at is not single-method teaching. It is single-method teaching by default, by a coach who has never seen the tradeoff and so has never actually chosen. It cannot hurt to be aware of it, and some are not.
The argument that sounds right
Here is the version you have heard. People have different learning styles. Some are visual learners, some are auditory, some are kinesthetic, some learn by reading. Match the teaching to the style and the student learns better. So a coach should use several methods in order to hit each style in the room.
It is worth stopping on what that claim actually says, because it is more specific than it sounds. It says that each person has a stable, identifiable style, that the style can be measured, and that teaching matched to the style produces more learning than teaching that is not matched. In the research this is called the meshing hypothesis, and it is the part that has been tested. The test is simple to describe. Sort learners by their supposed style, teach some of them in a matched way and some in a mismatched way, and see whether the matched group learns more. Done properly, with the same material and a real test of learning afterward, the matched group does not reliably learn more. That result has now been found across dozens of studies and several large reviews over nearly twenty years. The idea survives anyway, because people genuinely do have preferences about how they like to be taught, and a preference feels like it must be telling you something about how you learn. It mostly is not. Preferring a demonstration over an explanation does not mean you learn more from demonstrations, any more than preferring dessert means you are nourished by it.
So the learning-styles argument fails, and it fails in a way that should bother a coach, because it fails on the exact question we care about: does matching the method to the person produce more learning. If that is the whole reason you blend, your reason is gone. Which raises the real question. If the styles do not exist, why does a room of twenty students still react so differently to the same demonstration?
What is actually different about the people in the room
Because people do process information differently. That is not in dispute. What the learning-styles research shows is that the differences are not the ones on the poster. They are not fixed channels, visual or auditory or kinesthetic. They are differences in how a brain takes in, holds, and attaches new information, and they vary person to person for reasons that have nothing to do with a style label. A few of them matter enormously on a mat.
What the student already knows. This is the single biggest difference between two learners, and it is the one with the clearest research behind it. The amount of prior knowledge a student brings determines how much of a new technique they can hold at once, because a brain with a scaffold already in place has somewhere to hang the new piece. The brown belt and the week-three white belt are not watching the same demonstration, even though they are looking at the same thing. One sees a variation on a shape they own. The other sees a shape. That is why the layering method from Practice Design works across a mixed room, and it is why the question of which method to use has no single answer: the method that gives a beginner exactly what they need gives an advanced student almost nothing, and the reverse. This effect is well documented enough that it has a name, the expertise reversal effect: instruction that helps novices, with structure and explicit guidance, can actually slow more experienced learners, who do better with less guidance and more room to work it out. That alone is a reason the coach cannot run one method. The room is never at one level.
How much the student can hold. Working memory capacity varies between people, and it is not a matter of intelligence. Some brains comfortably hold five moving pieces of a technique at once, some hold three, and a demonstration that puts seven on the table overloads the second group while the first is still fine. The student who glazes over at step two of a complex pass is not failing to pay attention. They ran out of room. For that student, part practice, layering, and backward chaining are not alternative flavors, they are the difference between learning the technique and not.
What gets the student's attention in the first place. This is the one that matters most, and it is the one single-method teaching misses completely. Nothing is learned that is not attended to. Attention is the gate, and a brain decides what passes through that gate largely on whether the thing in front of it is interesting, novel, or relevant to something it already cares about. People differ sharply here. Some students will sit through a long, careful explanation and hang on every word. Others are gone forty seconds in, not out of disrespect but because an explanation, for them, does not open the gate. Put the same student into a game with a problem to solve and a partner trying to stop them, and they are fully there, because a live problem opens the gate that the explanation did not. It is the kind of thing anyone who has taught kids knows without being told. Children attend to what interests them and nothing else, and the lesson that does not catch their interest simply does not happen. It is less obvious with adults because adults have learned to look like they are paying attention. But the gate works the same way. Interest and novelty are not decorations on learning. For a large part of any room, they are the condition for it.
This is where neurodiversity belongs in the argument, and it is worth being exact about how. A reasonable estimate is that around one in five people is neurodivergent in some way, and that is before you count the other four, who are not identical to each other either. The point is not that a particular diagnosis learns in a particular way, because there is no research that establishes that for anything we do on a mat, and I am not going to pretend there is. The point is simpler and does not need any of the clinical vocabulary: the brains in the room differ, by a lot, in what catches their attention, how much they can hold, and what they need to see before they can feel it. Some people light up in an exploratory, game-based, constraints-led setting and visibly dim in a lecture. Some are the reverse. That is an observation any experienced coach will recognize, and it is my observation too. It is not a map of who needs what. Nobody has that map. But you do not need the map to know that a room this varied is not going to be reached by one approach.
The coach is not the room
Here is the part of this that is about the coach, and it is the part that I think is actually the root of the problem. The majority of people teaching Jiu-Jitsu were never trained to teach. They got good at the art, they started running classes, and they taught the way they themselves had learned, because that is the only model of teaching they had. If they learned from a coach who demonstrated and explained, they demonstrate and explain. If they came up in a room that played games, they play games. Either way the method that worked on them became the method, and it was never a decision, it was an inheritance.
The quiet assumption inside that inheritance is that everyone learns the way the coach learned. Nobody says it out loud, because said out loud it is obviously false. But it is the operating assumption of single-method teaching, and it is a form of self-centeredness that has nothing to do with ego in the usual sense. Perfectly humble coaches do it. The fix is to take yourself out of the equation and ask a different question. Not how do I learn, which you already know, but how do the people in front of me learn, which you have to find out, and which has more than one answer.
There is a tell for when this has not happened. It is the shrug. "Sometimes it clicks, sometimes it doesn't." Said as though it were weather. What that sentence actually describes is a method reaching the part of the room it reaches and missing the rest, class after class, with the misses written off as the nature of the students. If a lesson is not landing for the majority of the room, and that was not the plan, the students are not the variable to adjust. The question is what am I doing wrong, and the honest answer is often: I am doing one thing, and one thing reaches some of them.
Underneath all of this is a distinction that is simple to state and hard to argue with. Becoming a better practitioner and becoming a better instructor are two different goals, and they are built by two completely different learning processes. One does not produce the other. Everyone who has spent time in academies has seen the evidence from both directions: the person who walks through the whole room on the mat and cannot teach any of it, because they never learned to communicate it or to translate what they do into something another body can use, and the instructor who cannot roll anymore, or who was never that good competitively, but understood the art from the inside and understood how to get it across, and became a great coach. The two skills are separate to a large degree. Some people have both, and that is the goal. But having the first does not grant the second, and treating a mat skill as if it were a teaching skill is how a great deal of ordinary instruction gets made.
The elite competitor is the sharpest version of this. Elite competitors frequently make ordinary instructors, and the reason is not that they lack knowledge. It is that everything about becoming an elite competitor runs in the opposite direction from teaching. A competitor spends years narrowing. What works for my body, my length, my timing, my game, against the people I have to beat. The whole project is to make the art smaller and more specific until it fits exactly one person. Teaching is the reverse project. It is not about you anymore. It is about reaching a room full of people who have different bodies, different sizes, different speeds, different amounts of experience, different ways of taking in information, and different reasons for being there. A competitor handed a class has to make a jump that nobody trained them for, from "what works for me" to "what works for each of them," and the ones who never make the jump teach their own game to a room that mostly does not have their body.
What makes a great instructor, more than anything else, is a kind of practical empathy: the ability to put yourself inside a student's body and mind, and from there to work out the most efficient way for that person to learn the thing. Not a vague warmth toward students. A specific, repeated act of imagination, done for each person, that accounts for how they process, what they already know, how they are built, and what opens their attention. It is a skill, and like any skill it is built by doing it. That is why the better instructors so often turn out to be the ones who came up assisting, helping the blue belts and purple belts while they were still blue and purple themselves, because they spent years watching other people struggle with things that had come easily to them and learning to see the struggle from the inside. And it is why we recommend that a new instructor teach kids before adults. A child will not pretend to understand. If you cannot get inside how the child is seeing it, the lesson does not happen, and you find that out in the first five minutes. Kids force the empathy that adults let you skip.
So why blend
Now the real case, in three parts, in order of how much weight each can carry.
Because the room is varied and no method is neutral. This is the argument the last two sections built. Every method has a slice of the room it reaches well and a slice it does not. Direct instruction reaches the student who needs to see the answer, and loses the one whose attention does not open for explanation. A constraint game reaches the one who needs a live problem, and frustrates the beginner who does not yet have any tools to solve it with. Guided discovery is where the self-starter comes alive and where the student who needs structure quietly drowns. Run one without knowing that, and you are teaching a slice and calling it the room. Run several across the class, and each student gets at least one part of the hour that is built the way they learn.
Because coming at the same thing from several directions builds it deeper in everyone. This is the stronger argument and the one with the evidence on its side, and it is not about reaching different people at all. It is about reaching the same person more than once. A student who meets the scissor sweep by failing to solve it in a game, then sees it demonstrated, then drills it under a constraint, then finds it in live rounds, has not been given four chances to catch the one that fits. They have built the sweep four times from four directions, and the four versions connect. That is the Practice Design argument, varying how you present one technique, run at the scale of the class. Showing the sweep from five angles builds the sweep rather than one picture of it. Teaching the sweep through four methods builds the sweep rather than one path to it. The same principle, one level up.
Because the alternative is guessing. If a single method reaches a slice and you do not know which slice, you are guessing with every student that your method is their method. Some of the time you will be right. The shrug is what it sounds like when you are not. Blending is the only approach that does not require you to have read every brain in the room correctly before class starts, because it does not bet the hour on one reading.
The business case, for anyone who needs one
Everything above is an argument about teaching, and some owners will read it and think, fine, but I am not running a school of education, I am running a business, and as long as the room is full I do not much care whether every student was reached. That is a real position and it deserves a real answer, so here is the same argument from the other side of the desk.
Look at when people leave. In a majority of academies the heaviest churn sits between month two and month six. Someone signs up, makes it past the first few weeks, and then quietly stops coming somewhere in that window. There are many reasons that can happen, and the culture of the room, the schedule, the price, and the structure of the program are all worth looking at. But one variable belongs on the list every time, and it is the one owners look at last: the class itself, and the way it is delivered.
Nobody has to train. They are paying to do something they want to do, for fun, for engagement, to be interested in something. The moment it stops being interesting, the reason to keep paying is gone. Kids who are bored leave. Adults who are bored leave, and when there are three other academies within ten minutes, they leave fast. And a student who is not getting it does not stay confused for long, because confusion turns into boredom and boredom turns into a cancellation. Run one method, and you are reaching the slice of the room that method reaches and boring the rest, class after class, for months. Some of those people stay anyway. A meaningful share of them do not, and they land in the two-to-six-month churn with every other reason, indistinguishable from it.
Boredom is one exit. Frustration is the other, and it is the same mechanism from the opposite side. A student who is not getting it does not need to be bored to leave. They need to look across the mat at the person who started the same week and is getting it, and ask why that person and not me. Some of that is just the nature of a room. In any academy of a couple hundred people there are a few students who, as hard as they try and as hard as you try, are never going to get it, and there are a few phenoms who would have been great if you had taught them nothing at all. Neither group tells you much about your teaching. The middle does. If forty people are in the room and three or four are struggling to progress, that is the expected shape of a room. If ten or fifteen of them are, that is not the room, and it is not a loss to accept without knowing you are accepting it. The art is built to be learnable by almost anyone. When a third of the people who showed up to learn it are not, and nobody decided that was fine, the first place to look is the mirror, and the first thing to ask is whether the way it is being taught is reaching only the students who happen to learn the way the coach does.
You will not find this in an exit interview. A few people will say it, but most will not, because "I was bored" and "I never connected with the way you teach" are awkward things to say to someone's face, so they say schedule, or money, or life. The number is where it shows. If churn is running at five percent a month or under, the room is probably being reached. If it is running past ten, something is wrong, and the way the class is delivered is one of the few causes an owner can change next week without spending anything.
So blending is a retention tool as much as it is a teaching philosophy, and if the second does not move you, the first should. A class that reaches more of the room keeps more of the room. Every student who gets at least one part of the hour built the way they learn has a reason to come back for it, and the ones who would have drifted out in month four because nothing in the hour was ever for them now have a part that is.
Where blending lives, and where it must not
The lesson plan is next, and before you build one there is a decision to make that the next piece assumes you have already made: how you are going to present the material, given everything the series has laid out so far. That decision has two halves, and they do not work the same way. Blend is a word that can do a lot of damage if it is applied one layer too high, so let me put the boundary exactly where it goes.
Curriculums and Systems separated the curriculum, which is what you teach and in what order, from the system, which is the connective logic that makes the techniques one thing instead of a list. The Constraints-Led Approach piece added the third axis, the teaching methodology, which is how a technique gets from you to the student. Blending lives entirely on that third axis, and on the practice-design dials inside it. It does not touch the first two.
Your curriculum does not blend. You pick one of the four types from The Four Types of Curriculum, linear, rotating, flow, or positional, and you run it, because a curriculum that changes shape week to week is not a curriculum, it is the problem the series opened with: classes, with no spine. Your system does not blend. The connective logic has to be stable or there is nothing to connect to, and a student who is handed a different organizing idea every month has been handed none. Those two layers are the structure. They are supposed to be fixed, and they are what makes everything above them possible. What varies is the delivery. The same technique, from the same curriculum, inside the same system, presented through a method chosen for the people in the room, with the reps run through dials set for where those people are. Vary the how. Never the what. A coach who blends the what has no curriculum, and a coach who refuses to blend the how has one method and a room that is only partly in it. So the decision before the lesson plan is really two decisions of different kinds. The curriculum and the system are pick one and commit. Choose the curriculum that is right for your academy, choose the system you believe in, and stick with them. The methodologies and the practice-design dials are the opposite. They are not a pick-one-and-run choice, for every reason this piece has given, and the work ahead of you is to start thinking about how you will intermix them, inside each lesson, to reach the most students you can.
The four layers, and the same room two ways. Structure above the line is fixed. Delivery below it varies. The dot counts are illustrative, not data.
What a blended hour looks like
Take an ordinary hour-long class with the scissor sweep as the technique of the day. This is a lesson, and the next piece takes it apart as a unit. For now, just watch the methods move through it.
The warm-up is not jumping jacks. It is movement that belongs to the sweep, run the way a constraint game runs: hip movement, the leg positions, the grips, set up as small problems with a partner rather than as a demonstration. A student who comes alive in an exploratory setting is awake from the first minute, and the body has already done the shapes it is about to be asked for. The instruction block is direct. The sweep is shown, in silence first, then in layers, and the room drills it. The student who needs to see the answer gets the answer, clean and explicit. Then the drilling changes shape. Instead of forty more identical reps, the sweep is broken into a constraint: the top player gets to do one specific thing to stop it and the bottom player has to solve that. Or it is opened up across angles, three or four configurations of the same sweep, so the student who was lost at ninety degrees finds it at forty-five. Then positional games, the sweep live inside a narrow situation with a win condition, which is where the student who learns by solving finally gets the whole problem. Then free rounds, where the sweep has to survive on its own.
Walk back through that hour and count. Constraint-based, direct, constraint or variable again, game-based, live. The student who learns from a clear explanation got a clear explanation, and knew when it was coming. The student whose attention only opens for a live problem got three of them. The student who needs to see the shape before anything else got the silent demonstration, and the student who already had the shape got layers four and five. Nobody was taught one way and told that was the way. And the sweep itself, from the same curriculum, inside the same system, arrived four times from four directions in sixty minutes.
Keep the pattern
One more thing, and it is practical. A blended class should have a recognizable shape that repeats. Not the same techniques, and not the same games, but the same sequence of kinds of work, so that the student knows the structure of the hour before it starts. Warm-up problems, then instruction, then constrained drilling, then games, then rounds, in that order, most classes.
The reason is in the attention section above. A student who knows that the game is coming can sit through the instruction, because they know their part is on its way, and a student who knows the instruction is coming can tolerate the game, because the answer is going to be given. Predictable structure lowers the cost of the parts of the class that do not fit a given student, and it is well established in education that routines reduce the load on a learner and reduce the anxiety that comes with not knowing what happens next. That is true for the whole room and it is especially true for the students whose attention is hardest to hold. The novelty, which the gate needs, lives inside the pattern: the technique changes, the games change, the constraints change. The container stays put. Variety inside a stable shape is the whole design.
What blending is not
It is not rotating methods at random to keep things fresh, which is just single-method teaching with a different method each day and the same slice missed each time. It is not teaching every technique five ways in every class, which would take all week. It is not a retreat from direct instruction, which remains the fastest way to hand a student an answer they are ready for and belongs in nearly every class. And it is not a claim that every student needs everything. Some students would thrive on one method alone. The point is that you do not know which students, and the class has to work for the room, not for the students who happen to match you.
Where this leaves the descent
This is why the piece sits here, before the lesson and not after it. The lesson plan is where all of this gets assembled, and you cannot assemble it until you have decided what you are assembling it from: a curriculum you have committed to, a system you believe in, and a way of presenting the material that is chosen for the people in front of you rather than inherited from the way you happened to learn. Make those decisions with the whole room in mind and you are building toward the instructor who reaches the most students, teaches the most efficiently, and helps the most people. Make them on purpose and they are yours to make either way. Make them by default and you are building toward the shrug. The only real mistake in any of this is never making the decision at all. That completes the delivery layer. The Constraints-Led Approach found the third axis. The Teaching Methodologies mapped the methods that live on it. Practice Design went inside the methods to the dials. This piece is the reason you use more than one of them, and the boundary that keeps blending where it belongs, in the delivery and out of the structure. What is left on the way down is the smallest unit the whole series has been descending toward: one lesson, understood as the place where a curriculum, a system, a set of methods, and a set of practice-design decisions all meet for a single hour. That is the next piece, and it is the bottom. After it, the series turns around and starts to build.
Open Minds. Open Mats. Open Source.