Constructive Feedback: KEEP STOP START

Keep Stop Start

In my yoga classes, I want to emphasize student expectations by accepting feedback in the keep, stop, start format.

Your presence, your emotions and your contribution to the world are a projection of your acquired experiences and memories. This is fact. Your interactions with the people around you are affected by reciprocal expectations. Sometimes, however, expectations are misunderstood, miscommunicated or not communicated at all. The expectations between two parties must be clearly expressed and understood by both. This is true for professional relationships, romantic relationships and is also applicable in the relationship between yoga teacher and student.

When I step on to the mat at the helm of a yoga class, I am presenting a series of ideas that are based on my previous experience of learning and practicing yoga and on my memories of classes that I have attended. My expectations are that the students who come to my classes will be open to listening to my ideas and trying the poses which I suggest. Conversely, and this is the part that I often forget, my students arrive on the mat with experience and memories of their own. Their contribution and presence in the class is as essential as my own and I want to clearly understand their expectations.

A technique I learned to effectively convey expectations, praise and constructive criticism is as follows:

KEEP___________________STOP________________START_________________.

For example: keep starting the class with pranayama, stop doing backbends without warming up the quad muscles and start doing balancing poses earlier in the sequence. (An extrapolation of some recent feedback I received).

I want to be the best yoga teacher I can be. We all want to be the best partner we can be in professional and romantic relationships. Please use this format to offer feedback on my teaching and I urge you to try this format when changes are required in your professional and personal life.

We all bring our experiences and memories with us every day and sometimes we forget about the value of the experience of those we interact with. I want to make a change in my teaching and begin placing more value on the experience and expectations of my students.