Spotlight on Tyler Gouvea

WingChun is something you can take anywhere.

My job is my joy! I feel lucky that we have attracted such great people to our WingChun family. By this I don’t just mean diligent students but genuinely amazing individuals who I look forward to spending quality time with several days a week. If you’re a friendly, pragmatic person, please join us!

Tyler is one such unique member of our training community. He is respected for his outstanding skills and loved for his enthusiastic personality. I have complete confidence in his capable, approachable and sovereign expression of our system. For these reasons, I trust him to assist me in teaching classes.

It is my hope that his potential be fully actualized through the practice he is well on his way upon both as a practitioner and instructor of the art. Tyler is a positive example to others and a helpful inspiration for me. Please read on as he shares his experience below: Continue reading

Feed, Read, Deed (Part 1 of 4)

The process in action.

Anyone can do WingChun. Almost. Perhaps I will write about certain caveats in the future. But beyond the fact that we offer a widely accessible system, I am keenly focused on how students can learn quicker and better.

Are there more useful teaching tools I can create to reliably achieve that outcome?

I’d like to share one such model that is simple to understand and implement. In each class I like to show a specific situation (Feed), what to recognize about it (Read) and how to respond (Deed).

All applications have these three elements to be meaningful. Here is a brief description of each, which we will elaborate upon in Parts 2-4 of this article: Continue reading

Teaching to Learn, Learning to Teach

My best students are teachers.

Sifu told me that several years ago during some post-lesson relaxation on my balcony. We spoke about how students best make progress. I mentioned noticing an improvement in student comprehension after grouping them as threes, rather than pairs, where one leads the others.

This formation of triadic, rather than dyadic, relationships was beneficial both to the group leader and followers. One learned by teaching two. Continue reading

Polling on WingChun Teachers

Vote below and view results.

In the IAW, certified WingChun® teachers are called Sihing or Sije (male or female instructors, respectively) that have attained a minimum of the 9th Student Level (SL) Graduation and have at least completed the Assistant Degree (AD) Program.

Currently, there are about 25 worldwide who lead, or help teach at, an IAW Group or Academy. They have the responsibility to spread the WingChun® system according to IAW standards. That means they must continually maintain their own quality of training, as well as the consistent progress of their students.

Besides these objective professional requirements, what specific personal qualities do you most appreciate in a WingChun® teacher? Please choose three from the list below. Thanks for your contribution, which will help us optimize our teacher training program: