Posts Tagged ‘six max coaching’

I’ve never been a professional teacher, but I’ve done a lot of teaching, in a wide variety of settings, and I’ve observed and worked with a lot of professional educators. I’ve come to believe that there’s a lot more to teaching than being smart or even being able to explain things very clearly. Teaching is also about empathy. It’s about understanding where your students are coming from and presenting material in a way that guides them toward greater understanding. I think this is what people mean when they talk about “getting through” to someone.

This is especially important in one-on-one poker coaching, because it is a highly critical process. That is, I teach by criticizing, hopefully in a very constructive way, the play and thought processes of my students. Unlike my experiences teaching debate, where I was often dealing with audiences who would be the first to admit that they had virtually no prior knowledge of what I was teaching and so no pre-conceived notions to cling to or defend, when coaching poker I am dealing in a subject in which my students are already well-versed. My job is not to teach them something entirely new so much as to refine and in some cases correct things they already know or think they know.  Read the complete post...