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Finland: The future of the Snowsports industry and Snowsports education.

This indoor lecture started with a run down of the local grassroots snowsports education program. An add-on to the local high school curriculum aimed towards providing students with knowledge, tools and certifications to prepare the for work experience inside and outside of the snow industry. They started the lecture off with a survey that we all did to give us a baseline idea of what this was going to be about. We will provide the link at the end of this summary.

They then ran us through some inactive and collaborative workshops that helped form discussion points that they then used as feedback to help improve their programming.

Key take always:

  • Snowsports as a professional career path isn’t seen as a valid way to create a living.
  • Environmental concerns in terms of sustainability
  • Large part of the market is based on consumerism
  • The industry helps build life long communication skills that are translatable
  • Early integration of our youth into the environment will help build a more solid sustainable base
  • Learn to live like an athlete
  • Snowsports industry can help build and develop a love for nature and our environment when youth is introduced at a young age. Eg: going to places with no cell reception being “unplugged”

Here are some of the thought provoking slides that where presented.

Here is the survey please feel free to fill it out with your own thoughts, they will be collecting data until the end of April.

https://response.questback.com/isa/qbv.dll/bylink?p=YxY_ild4Sfpf9otzbYxzKgRc3KgbU_OmW5Vh2kUowy_xj-8QAbulJuetWmAKvUiB0

James Hyland, Adam Gardner

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K.S.I.A. — Team Korea

I made turns (and took breaks) with the Korean snowboard delegation all morning. They’re not running or really attending clinics because of the language barrier and that was how my morning went: not much talking. Lots of pointing, posing and demonstrating.

This was my morning:

Angulation.

It was awesome.

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Argentina optimal freestyle learning

In this session, we learned how Argentina uses two different methods for presenting freestyle lessons.

First method

The Global method

Global method uses 3 different avenues for improvement/development. One is using a simple explanation followed by student trial. Second is focusing on a specific part of the trick and working on that. Third is changing variables to help improvement. Examples being terrain, equipment ect…

Second method

Analytical method

Essentially this is a more building block approach breaking down the maneuver into small components. They use very specific explanations to help improve understanding.

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USA (Ski) – Decision Making for Learning

This afternoon the snowboard sessions were a little thin and the team already had all the topics covered, so I thought I would take the oppurtunity to see what the skiers were talking about. I had heard from Tony of the AASI (American snowboarders) that they share all of their methodology between all disciplines, so I opted for the American ski pedagogy session about decision making throughout the lesson.

The Americans use the ODA (Observe, Decide, Act) model to help lead their decision making during a lesson. They try to avoid coming into lessons with pre-planned structures and techniques and instead use questions and guest-led goals to decide lesson content and structure. The ODA model helps structure what information the questions are searching for, as well as how to approach next steps with the acquired information. Everything from guest mentality to snow conditions is considered in making teaching and technical decisions.

This kind of teaching relies heavily on experience to work, as only time can help in accounting for all these various factors. However, the ODA model gives a good basic framework to help accelerate the acquisition of this key decision-making skill.

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Czechia

Snowboard freestyle. Benefits of freestyle in Level 1 and 2.

In this session we covered how the Czechia use freestyle manoeuvres to enhance instructors technical riding skill.

Use of range of movement helps instructors create awareness of how to dynamically balance on the snowboard.

Maneuver we used : Ollie, Nollie , nose tail press with rotation and without. Sliding 180 in a turn plus sliding 360.

All of those maneuvers where used to help build movement patterns for the turning progression.