Want to become a better yoga teacher? Try assisting in someone else’s class. As a teaching assistant, you gain valuable insight into teaching styles, student responses, and classroom dynamics—all without the pressure of leading.
If you want to be a better yoga teacher, be a teaching assistant.
Once you are comfortable offering manual assists, or even just quiet verbal cueing and demonstrating in a large beginner class, offer to assist in a friend’s class, or your primary teacher’s class. This affords you a chance to look at what’s happening at some remove. You can observe the teacher without needing to follow their cues, which gives you insight into language, energy, tone, and pacing. You can see which cues land and which don’t. You can also observe the students both as a whole and as individuals without being in charge of the entire room at once.
Then after each class you assist, make notes as you would for your own class. List the sequence and, if relevant, the theme; detail who was in the room; note roses, thorns, and buds, or keeps, drops, and adds.
This will help fast-track your development as a teacher. And it will get you exposed to a broad range of students who will then recognize you—and eventually come take YOUR class.
