Class schedules

[J. Pickard]

Just curious to know how others run their class schedule. Im always looking for ways to improve.

Our school runs 6 days a week. Beginners Monday and Tuesday, intermediate and advanced colored belts Wednesday and Thursday. Black belt Friday and Saturday. Black belts are also allowed to attend any other class during the week (perks of achieving black belt). We also run a cardio kickboxing bag workout class mon, wed, fri and a young 5&8 year old "martial focus" class Thursdays.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

Just curious to know how others run their class schedule. Im always looking for ways to improve.

Our school runs 6 days a week. Beginners Monday and Tuesday, intermediate and advanced colored belts Wednesday and Thursday. Black belt Friday and Saturday. Black belts are also allowed to attend any other class during the week (perks of achieving black belt). We also run a cardio kickboxing bag workout class mon, wed, fri and a young 5&8 year old "martial focus" class Thursdays.

The school I teach at (not my school - I’m a guest) has kids classes 3 days a week, with adult classes after them two days, plus the yudansha class on Saturday (rotated among 4 local schools). I teach Aikido there on Sunday mornings, possibly adding another class when the pandemic is over.

 

[dvcochran]

Just curious to know how others run their class schedule. Im always looking for ways to improve.

Our school runs 6 days a week. Beginners Monday and Tuesday, intermediate and advanced colored belts Wednesday and Thursday. Black belt Friday and Saturday. Black belts are also allowed to attend any other class during the week (perks of achieving black belt). We also run a cardio kickboxing bag workout class mon, wed, fri and a young 5&8 year old "martial focus" class Thursdays.

Two evening classes Mon-Wed-Fri. One evening class Tues-Thur. Morning class Tues-Thur-Sat. Classes are open to any rank and age. We work it out in class. We seldom have over 40 in a class. It gets a little busy when this happens. I have never been a fan of isolated classes but get the logic if instructors are an issue.

 

[WaterGal]

Just curious to know how others run their class schedule. Im always looking for ways to improve.

Our school runs 6 days a week. Beginners Monday and Tuesday, intermediate and advanced colored belts Wednesday and Thursday. Black belt Friday and Saturday. Black belts are also allowed to attend any other class during the week (perks of achieving black belt). We also run a cardio kickboxing bag workout class mon, wed, fri and a young 5&8 year old "martial focus" class Thursdays.

IMO, it's better to alternate days, to give people some time to recover between classes. So instead of having a beginner class Monday and Tuesday, you could have it something like Monday/Wednesday, and your advanced color belts Tuesday/Thursday.

 

[Monkey Turned Wolf]

The schedules all whacky still because of COVID.

But something that I always looked for and could almost never find-weekday morning classes. Most schools offer morning classes on saturday/sunday, but very few offer the option during the weekday. Myself (and others who shared night schedules with me) have hated it, because it means we can never get to a class, and that ended up being the key thing I looked for when trying to find a new dojo. Eventually had to give up, and just go to classes on only my days off.

It's something that, if you/one of the instructors doesn't have a separate job during the week, offering/advertising that you've got adult morning or afternoon classes may get you business. Or it might not. But worth a shot.

 

[dvcochran]

The schedules all whacky still because of COVID.

But something that I always looked for and could almost never find-weekday morning classes. Most schools offer morning classes on saturday/sunday, but very few offer the option during the weekday. Myself (and others who shared night schedules with me) have hated it, because it means we can never get to a class, and that ended up being the key thing I looked for when trying to find a new dojo. Eventually had to give up, and just go to classes on only my days off.

It's something that, if you/one of the instructors doesn't have a separate job during the week, offering/advertising that you've got adult morning or afternoon classes may get you business. Or it might not. But worth a shot.

It gets tough to offer daytime classes until a school gets a nucleus of good BB's and instructors. I opened our school in 1986. Yes that is an 8. Our town did not have that many companies/plants with shiftwork. Most all of it came from hospitals and such. About 5-6 years later we had 6 large plants running 3 shifts. We did demos at each location and even did classes at one location for a while. I did not expect the return we received from it and enrollment jumped significantly. I started getting a lot of queries about daytime classes but we were still limited on teachers. After several months two more people came on as instructors and we started offering morning classes Mon-Wed-Fri along with the Saturday class we already had.
All that to say if you have the quality instructor(s) available daytime classes are a must have for a commercial school. IMHO

 

[WaterGal]

Even if running the school is the instructor's full-time job, it can be tough for them to offer daytime classes. We tried for a while, but driving 40 minutes to the school, teaching the 2-3 adults who wanted a morning class and then the 2-3 kids who wanted a home school morning class, and then driving 40 minutes home.... was a lot. So we stopped.

More recently, we had an assistant instructor who worked the graveyard shift and wanted to teach a weekday morning adult class, and that was pretty cool... except that every 4-5 classes he'd have to call out for one reason or another, and then we're back to the same issue, just less frequently.

 

[Gerry Seymour]

The schedules all whacky still because of COVID.

But something that I always looked for and could almost never find-weekday morning classes. Most schools offer morning classes on saturday/sunday, but very few offer the option during the weekday. Myself (and others who shared night schedules with me) have hated it, because it means we can never get to a class, and that ended up being the key thing I looked for when trying to find a new dojo. Eventually had to give up, and just go to classes on only my days off.

It's something that, if you/one of the instructors doesn't have a separate job during the week, offering/advertising that you've got adult morning or afternoon classes may get you business. Or it might not. But worth a shot.

The school I trained at for many years had a weekday AM class. It usually had 2 students, and eventually died out. Unfortunately, they are difficult to keep going.

 

[J. Pickard]

Thanks for all of the replies. A lot of good insights here. We have tried AM classes, advertised them for months and nobody showed up. I live in an area where most jobs are factory/manual labor jobs so not many adults want to spend their leisure time training unfortunately. we used to separate by age instead of rank but then we started getting more families that wanted to train together so we went to training by rank so families can train together.