Teaching Tips
4. Looking after the band
Keep your ringers ringing
Your new ringer has learned to handle a bell and is now ready to ring rounds with others.The next stage of their learning experience will be very different. The teacher and new ringer have been working together intensively on a one to one basis, with the ringer at the centre of the teacher’s attention. Now the learning curve will flatten out. As the ringer progresses towards elementary change ringing they will have to wait their turn to ring on practice nights and progress often seems hard to achieve, leading to frustration. Interest and motivation often wane...
Keep ALL your ringers ringing
Every activity wants to keep the numbers of participants as high as possible and keep people involved for as long as possible. Ringing is no exception – we want to retain the ringers we recruit. What is the best way of retaining and motivating developing ringers?
Are we giving our ringers what they really, really want?
Do our ringers come ringing purely for the pleasure of the ringing itself? The likelihood is that most of them do not. You might think that it will depend on the standard of the ringing they are involved in but it is not that straightforward.
What type of ringers do you teach?
Specific types of ringers need different coaching approaches. Accepting the fact that as a ringing teacher you are unlikely to be able to become an expert coach for all of the different groups, how do you cater for the various coaching requirements of different types of ringers?
Improving retention and extending performance
The latest research shows that more people stay actively involved if their training changes with the developmental stage they are at, and the different rates of progress ringers make. This creates a larger pool of people who remain actively involved, and from whom high-end performers and experts can emerge over an extended period.
Why do ringers lapse?
Alison Smedley has carried out a piece of action research as part of a BA course in Charity and Social Enterprise Management with Anglia Ruskin University in which she identified bellringing as: 'A voluntary activity which seemed to have a particular problem with retention of its participants is that of bell ringing'.