Dealing with Larger Classes

I recently started offering 4 classes per week at my Vancouver Jiu-jitsu dojo, whereas before I was only doing 3. The change was prompted by the fact that I have a second instructor who is teaching 2 of the classes for me. This is nice for me because on the days he teaches, I can train alongside my students, allowing me to work on my own skills and vice versa.

With the extra day, I decided to open up my roster to take on a few more students. I decided to still allow students to unlimited classes per week for their membership, going on the assumption that the numbers would generally distribute over the 4 days.

Now that I have the 4-day week in place, I'm finding that occasionally I'll get one big class of 14+ students, usually with a span of 4 different colour belts represented. Both the number of students and the need to teach 4 different curricula are big time eaters. As a result, I found that sometimes I wasn't getting through everything I wanted to teach like I used to and I sometimes couldn't provide as much individual guidance for the students as I liked.

To solve this problem, I decided to make some minor adjustments on days when I get that kind of turn out. If there is a 4-belt span, I'll split the class into 2 groups during curriculum demonstration and have my other instructor teach one group while I teach the other. This will speed up the demonstration process. If there are more than 14 students on the mat, both instructors will circulate to help out the students rather than having one of us train while the other teaches.

The purpose of these minor adjustments is to ensure that the students still get quality instruction and guidance, as well as adequate training time on days when we get that big a big turn out.