You Have Classes Not a Curriculum
By OSJJ
Open Source Jiu-Jitsu
THE CURRICULUM SERIES · PART ONE
You Have Classes. You Do Not Have a Curriculum.
Walking in and asking what everyone wants to work on today feels advanced. It is quietly one of the biggest reasons your students leave. The case for having a plan, before we ever talk about which plan.
Justin Hall / Co-Founder, Open Source Jiu-Jitsu
The question that gives it away
Be honest for a second. Do you walk into class with a clear plan, or do you sometimes look around the room and say, what do you guys want to work on today?
Maybe you throw it open for questions. Maybe you read the room and improvise based on who showed up. It feels technical. It feels advanced, like a coach who knows so much he can teach anything on demand. And every so often, it is exactly the right call. But when that is how most of your classes begin, you do not have a curriculum. You have a series of classes, and the difference between those two things is quietly one of the biggest reasons students leave your academy.
I want to be clear about the scope of this before we start. This is not the article about which curriculum to run, linear, rotational, or some hybrid of the two. That is a real conversation and it has its own article. This one is more basic and more important, because it comes first. This is the case for having a curriculum at all, whatever shape it eventually takes.
A curriculum is a path, not a list of techniques
When I say curriculum, most owners picture a long list of moves. That is not it. A list of techniques is inventory. A curriculum is a path, and the difference is that a path answers questions a list never can. For every student in your room, a real curriculum answers three things: what am I learning right now, where am I going next, and how will I know when I am getting better.
That is the whole definition. A structured plan that takes a student from where they are to where they want to be. It can be flexible. It can evolve. You can adjust it as you learn what works in your room. But it exists, it is written down, and it is intentional. The opposite of a curriculum is not chaos that looks like chaos. It is chaos that looks like freedom: whatever I feel like teaching today. And that can genuinely work for a tiny group of die-hard hobbyists who would train in a parking lot. It does not work if you are trying to build a stable, growing academy full of ordinary people with jobs and families and one hour to spare.
A quick word on how people actually learn
Before we get to retention, it is worth spending a minute on the thing underneath it, which is how human beings learn a physical skill at all. This is not my native field, but it is close to home. My wife holds a master's in education and curriculum development, and I spent years teaching undergraduates while I was in graduate school, so learning and how to structure it has been dinner-table conversation in my house for a long time. None of what follows is complicated. It is education at the introductory level, and once you see it, you cannot unsee it on your own mats.
The first idea is that the brain learns new things by attaching them to things it already knows. A new technique is not stored on its own. It gets hooked onto the related things a student already understands, which is why a move that builds on last week's material sticks and a move that connects to nothing evaporates by the next class. This is the actual mechanism under the old line about building on sand. When you teach in a sequence, every lesson gives the next one something to attach to. When you teach at random, half of what you show has nothing to hold onto and quietly falls out of the student's head on the drive home.
The second idea is that skills consolidate through spacing and return, not through single exposure. Nobody learns an armbar escape by seeing it once. They learn it by meeting it, losing it, meeting it again a couple of weeks later, and gradually keeping it. A curriculum is, among other things, a system for bringing the important things back around on purpose. Winging it turns that to luck: the positions you personally like show up constantly, and the ones you find boring may not return for months, so your students master your preferences and stay shaky everywhere else.
The third idea is the one owners break most often, and it is about cognitive load. A beginner has almost no spare working memory on the mat. They are thinking about their breathing, their grips, where their hips are, and the person trying to flatten them, all at once. Drop an advanced technique into that and you have not been generous, you have overloaded them, and an overloaded person does not conclude that the material was too advanced. They conclude that they are not cut out for this, and they leave. Meeting people at the right level is not lowering your standard. It is the difference between teaching and merely performing in front of them.
Put those three together and you have the entire case for a curriculum in one line: people learn when new skill is connected to old skill, revisited over time, and delivered at a level they can actually absorb. A curriculum is just the delivery system that respects how learning works. Winging it fights all three at once, and then we blame the student for not sticking around.
Why students actually quit
Here is the thing most owners get wrong about retention. They assume students quit because the Jiu-Jitsu got too hard, or because they got tapped too much, or because life got busy. Life getting busy is real, but it is usually the reason people give, not the reason they go. Most students do not quit because the techniques are too hard. They quit because they do not understand the journey.
A student who cannot tell whether they are improving assumes they are not. A student with no map cannot see the difference between a bad week and a plateau, so every hard stretch feels like evidence that this is not for them. They are not failing at Jiu-Jitsu. They are failing to see their own progress, because nobody ever showed them what progress was supposed to look like. And an invisible journey is one people wander off of quietly, usually blaming their schedule on the way out.
A curriculum fixes this by doing three specific things, and this is the heart of why it matters to the business.
• Direction. The student can see there is a plan. They are not collecting random moves and hoping they add up. They know this block is about passing, the next is about escapes, and there is a road that leads to blue belt and beyond. Direction is what turns a hard night into a step on a path instead of a reason to doubt.
• Progress. People stay where they can feel themselves getting better. When the curriculum is clear, you can show a student what they have already covered, what they are working on now, and what is coming next. That visible motion, I could not do this a month ago and now I can, is the single most powerful retention force you have, and winging it hides it completely.
• Trust. When a student sees you have a structured plan, their trust in you as a professional goes up. You stop being a talented grappler who happens to run a room and become a coach with a system. That trust compounds into loyalty, and loyalty is measured in years of membership.
Winging it has a cost, and here is who pays it
Let me be fair to the improvised class, because used as a tool it is a good one. A questions-and-answers session now and then, a special deep dive before a tournament, a class built around a position the room is genuinely stuck on, those can be some of the best classes you teach. The problem is never the occasional improvised class. The problem is when improvised becomes the default, when every class starts with any questions, or what do you guys want to do.
The moment that becomes your system, you are no longer leading the room. You are reacting to it, and reacting quietly breaks things in ways that take months to show up in your numbers.
• The loudest students steer the class. The blue belt with the leg-lock obsession asks about heel hooks, so the room does heel hooks. The quiet white belt who needed to drill an armbar escape for the third time never says a word, because new and nervous people do not raise their hands. So the people who most need a plan are the ones a questions-based class serves worst.
• There is no progression. One day it is leg locks, the next it is takedowns, then a lapel guard somebody saw online. Every class might be good on its own, and the sequence still adds up to nothing, because nothing builds on anything. Your students are busy, not stupid. They can feel the difference between motion and progress.
This is also where I need to draw a line that trips up a lot of owners who think they are already covered. Some associations hand their schools what they call a curriculum: a set of eight or ten lessons released every month for everyone to teach. If you are receiving something like that, you are ahead of pure improvisation, and I do not want to talk you out of using it. But be honest about what it is. When the set of lessons chosen for a given month is itself more or less arbitrary, disconnected from what came before it and what follows, that is not a curriculum. It is a monthly lesson plan. The lessons may be excellent one at a time and still add up to no path, because a curriculum is defined by the order, not just the quality of the pieces. A stack of good lessons in no particular sequence has the same problem as winging it, only better disguised: the student still cannot see where the road is going, because there is no road, just a pile of well-made bricks. If your monthly material does not build deliberately from one month to the next toward a defined destination, you have a lesson plan, and you still owe your students the curriculum around it.
And this is not only an affiliation problem. Plenty of owners plan their own lessons, for the day, the week, sometimes the whole month, and still have exactly the same gap. Planning a lesson is not the same as building a curriculum. You can walk in every day with a well-prepared class and still have no deliberate progression from one class to the next, because the plan covers what happens today, not how today builds on last week and sets up next month. The real test is where the progression lives. If the throughline exists only in your head, as a general sense of what the room needs and where you are roughly steering it, then it is not a curriculum yet, no matter how good your daily plans are. It is improvisation with a lesson plan stapled to the front. And it fails the same way winging it fails, because a plan that lives only in the coach's head cannot be seen by the student, cannot be handed to an assistant, and disappears entirely the day you are not there. A curriculum is the moment that path comes out of your head and onto paper, where a student can see it, a coach can teach it, and it survives you being gone.
• It cannot be handed to anyone. This is the one that traps you personally. A room that runs on your improvisation runs on you, specifically, being in it. There is no system to hand an assistant coach, no way to open a second location, no way to take a week off without the quality of instruction dropping to whoever is covering. You have not built a curriculum you own. You have built a job that cannot exist without you standing on the mat.
Questions are a great tool. They are just not a curriculum, and when you let the tool become the whole system, these are the bills that come due.
What a curriculum says about your academy
Step back from retention for a second, because a curriculum is also a statement, and it is speaking to three audiences at once whether you intend it to or not.
To your students it says: your time matters, I value your progress, and I have a plan for you. To your staff it says: this is how we teach here, this is what we focus on, this is how we keep quality consistent no matter who is on the mat. And to you, the owner, it says the quiet thing you most need to hear, that this is not open mat with auto-pay. It is a professional academy people can trust for years.
There is a duty buried in here, and I will say it plainly because it is true. When a student hands you their money, their time, and their body twice a week, they are trusting you to have a plan for their development. Imagine paying for any other school or course where the teacher walked in each day and asked the class what they felt like covering. You would wonder whether anyone was actually in charge. We would never accept it anywhere else, and our students deserve better than for us to accept it on the mat. Not out of guilt. Out of respect for what they have handed us.
A quick test
You do not need to overhaul anything today. You just need to know honestly where you stand. Answer these about your own room.
• If I asked three of your white belts what they are working toward right now, would they give the same answer?
• Could a competent assistant coach run tonight's class from something written down, without you in the building?
• Can a student point to something they could not do two months ago and can do now?
• When you walk in tonight, is the class already decided, or will the room decide it for you?
• If your best blue belt moved away and a new student took their place, would the new student walk the same path the blue belt did, or a completely different one?
If those answers are shaky, that is not a mark against you. It is the single highest-leverage fix available to you, because it improves retention, progress, professionalism, and your own freedom all at once, and it costs you nothing but the decision to write the plan down.
The bottom line
If you have mostly been winging it, this is not about shame. You already care about your students, you already put your heart into teaching, and that is the hard part to teach and the part you already have. A curriculum is simply how you translate that care into a system that serves them when you are tired, when an assistant is covering, and when a student is quietly deciding whether to stay.
Your students deserve to know where they are going. And you deserve the stability that comes from students who can see it, because that is what keeps them, and keeping them is the whole game. Do not just walk in and wing it. Lead them with a plan. They will thank you in the way that actually matters, by staying.
What that plan should look like, linear, rotating, flow, or positional, is Part Two of this series, The Four Types of Curriculum. This was the one that had to come first.
Open Source Jiu-Jitsu
Open Minds. Open Mats. Open Source.