On Saturday July 19^th

We had a very large group of our Central Illinois Shotokan, ASKA certified black and brown belts attend the American Shotokan Karate Alliance’s summer Black Belt Development Clinic in St Louis. Our area karate students that participated Saturday ranged from 4^th kyu colored belts, up through 5^th Dan black belts

Hosted by Sensei Randall G Hassell, ASKA Chief Instructor, at our ASKA Headquarters dojo (St. Charles, MO), the day included hourly classes on advanced black belt development, concluding with Dan Testing at the completion of the clinics.

At the clinic, the main focus featured the development of advanced, Dan-level training and teaching skill sets, including Kumite (sparring), Kihon (basics), and successful teaching methods for current and future karate instructors. The average class size was 25-30 so it was excellent training and with great student- instructor interaction. Black belts and other students from several Midwest states trained together in a very friendly productive learning environment. It was great to see old friends and make new ones while training together in good traditional Shotokan karate!

Several of our very own senior instructors taught. The first session of Kumite was taught by Sensei James Hartman, 5^th Dan. It was the second part of a 2-part series of sparring tactics and strategies presented by Sensei Hartman. It included a wide variety of partner-training sparring drills. He incorporated his own brand of “attacking zone” tactics, similar to what he teaches police officers at the Peoria IL Police Dept. (Where he teaches Defensive Tactics and Firearms Tactics)

In afternoon instructor training classes Sensei Hassell divided a group of about 30 prospective instructors, all the way up to 4^th dan, into groups of three. He assigned each group a technique or major karate concept to teach at each of three levels: beginner, intermediate, and advanced. He gave them all 20 minutes to prepare a lesson for their assigned technique for all three levels of students.

Each “instructor” taught the entire class with their “karate lesson” changing accordingly to whether their target audience were beginning, intermediate, or advanced karateka. At the completion of each, Sensei Rick Brewer and Sensei Carl Hartter evaluated each and every presentation, giving each participant immediate feedback and pointers for improvement of their teaching methods and strategies used. This is a critical skill for karate instructors to have because you have to teach according to the level of student in front of you. Karate instructors need to be able to “reach” the level of student they are teaching. Students are different ages, sizes, skill levels, and the like. Knowing only one way to teach a technique and then start counting is not good karate instruction, and certainly NOT highly effective karate teaching. Often you never know which students will show up in class each night, so you have to be able to teach them all.

“Highly Effective Karate Instruction” was definitely the theme of the day. In fact, it’s a bench mark, a goal that we train and strive for in all of our Central Illinois Shotokan Karate programs. Continual growth and improvement is what we expect of our black belts. As always, our ASKA Black Belt Development program participation last Saturday proved to be highly challenging and productive. After all, the future of karate-do depends on the quality of instructors out there, trying to “pass on” Master Funakoshi’s karate “straight and well.”