There’s science about how to teach mathematics and other stuff. What do we know about teaching go?
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We probably need a definition for the word “effectively”.
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I mean it in a broad sense of the word (at least for now).
How can one teach go? Is too open as a question. I’m not interested in answers like: If you have a heavy board and heavy stones, you can teach underwater.
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Teaching is a subtle art. Myself I follow some safety lines like don’t overflow the student mind, give the most appropriate help and not more as that. Maybe 2 or 3 things at most in a review. Be careful to not go into complexity, try stay at what your student need to practice yet, not later. That’s quite a common failure to overflow, because we are tempted to say the most possible and that’s completely inefficient. The place you leave for your student to do himself the reading is crucial, it’s better if somehow he discover by himself more as by listening.
How to teach depends on the student personality too. That can be difficult to handle. Underline the pleasure linked to the reading for someone lazy which rely too much on intuition or insist on the global picture for someone full of jealousy…
It’s important to point as much good as bad things which happened. Only teach what hurt yourself in your student choices, don’t teach if you’re not convinced by what you want to say. Appreciate the opinion of your student. Try play moves which will underline what you detected to be a wrong line of playing. Put the stones and your teaching will be a success if you don’t need many words more.
There is surely more, that’s just what comes now to my mind.
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I’m curious about scientific results on teaching mathematics. Could you please elaborate a bit more?
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Scientific studies about go in general is not well developed. The department of Baduk studies in Korea is the only academic place which promotes research about go, and there are many topics other than “teaching go effectively”, so I doubt that there are convincing studies on the subject. Teaching is at present more an art than a science.
Conversely many people have worked on didactics of mathematics. But it still doesn’t mean that teachers have become more efficient. For instance, why do many students, who are otherwise intelligent, think that the solution to the equation 2x=0 is -2 (or 1/2, or 2, or -1/2), no matter how well the teacher explained? I’ve seen a few explanations, and I don’t know which ones are correct:
- Students noticed that generally, when the equation changes, the solution changes. For instance (2x=12 → x=6), (3x=12 → x=4), (4x=12 → x=3). However, (2x=0 → x=0), (3x=0 → x=0), (4x=0 → x=0). The solution is always the same, this can’t be right.
- Their immediate motivation is to find the correct answer to the teacher’s questions, not to understand why the answer is correct. Guessing the answer by using the numbers in the problem and applying a random operation works most of the time. A large majority of students are satisfied with this strategy, while a small minority really want to be sure of their answers.
- To find the correct answers to tests, they tend to use algorithms shown by the teacher, without understanding them. The algorithms are quickly forgotten, or applied in wrong contexts.
- Students are expected to provide an answer, even if they don’t know, so that encourages them to guess, instead of accepting the fact that in math, you can’t find the answer to every problem, but when you do, you must make sure that it is 100% correct.
Beyond those observations, teachers still don’t succeed in preventing their students from saying (2x=0 → x=-2).
We could certainly find go analogies to the above. Ordinary players are satisfied with applying josekis without understanding them, guessing that a group is alive/dead/connected, play the shape move because it often works, without checking, etc. Probably better teaching methods can improve results, but will never bridge the gap between students who have the correct mindset from the very beginning, and those who don’t.
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In France we created a teacher of go qualification (like a diploma).
I’m curious if there are similar ways in other countries and I sincerely have no feedback on this formation here too.
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Also a very interesting and for most of us more important question is:
How to learn go effectively?
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Teaching go is easier in comparison with mathematics and other stuff. To learn go practice alone is enough. Non stop playing is a good method for learning go.
I think it might depend a lot on the age of the student as well as their level.
First maybe we can assume the person is already interested in learning, we don’t have to worry about trying to convince them to be interested in Go.
For beginners there’s ideas of how to get them accustomed to the fundamental of the game:
- Try something simpler like capture/atari Go, capturing isn’t the ultimate goal of Go, but being unable to recognise captures is a reason why you can lose games especially on 9x9.
- Give simple heuristics like play in the more open area or go for the bigger side
- Use a lot of examples
- set up basic L&D puzzles to show the concept of alive and uncapturable groups, and capturing puzzles
- play lots of games, but the style of the game, whether it uses undos, whether the player can ask for hints/discuss options during playing, or review the game after instead, might depend on the learner.
I think where teaching kids vs adult learners differ is that typically adult learners want practical applications to what they’re learning and they may want more reasons or meta concepts to help them.
Kids on the other hand, I think can absorb the concepts more without the need to verbalise why something works. What I mean is, you can show a 5 year old a go puzzle app, and in some cases simply a correct/incorrect with a cool sound is enough for them to absorb capturing principles and L&D subconsciously.
So with teaching children it can be the case that steering them correctly with lots of games and examples is better or more efficient than trying to come up with meta concepts and proverbs and things.
Then if they disagree with a concept, you can just play it out and see what happens. The win/loss can be motivating and explanatory enough.
When teaching adult learners you might focus on relating the thing you’re trying to teach them to something they already know, you might give analogies to chess if they’re a chess player, you see people make analogies to money and investing when trying to explain concepts of big moves which don’t yield territory immediately.
So I think teaching Go can maybe leverage existing teaching methodologies anyway, but they just need to be mapped over appropriately to Go skills.
I think I would go for the simpler version of helping people easily retain and learn concepts, as opposed to easily gain X stones of rank.
Probably if we knew how to effectively turn beginners into pros we’d all already be high dans waiting to win the next qualification tournament 
I think though we can come up with ways though to “effectively” teach concepts though.
Inseong Hwang comes up with lots of analogies to teach things, describes reading in catchy ways like 1-2-3 reading, or defines meta-concepts like “Atari-eve”.
Dwyrin tries to break up strategy in Go into different blocks like coming up with a “basics” style in the back to basics series, essentially trying to category what a “basic” move might be. I guess you can see it abstractly like example focused ideas on things to consider when making a strategy.
Ma Xiaochun and Dai Junfu wrote books relating the 36 stratagems to Go, which maybe can work better for Chinese audiences, but still an idea of using analogies and examples to get across principles.
You have apps and go schools that try to gamify learning with Tsumego and other puzzles, like Go Magic.
Some different ideas above about ways go is being taught, other than just playing games and game reviews.
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This video in another subforum seems relevant to answer those questions: Place to share relaxing and thought-provoking videos - #550 by martin3141
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What if not? Do you have the knowledge of convincing anybody to be in interested in something? Please share it.
I don’t think you can teach someone effectively that doesn’t want to learn.
What you’re doing instead is trying to convince someone to be interested. That’s more marketing and sales than it is teaching. Or if it’s part of a state curriculum then it’s pressuring people who don’t want to learn X because it will impact their future.
If the conversation is like “Here’s this cool idea in Go” and they say “I’d rather play chess”, and you said “top 10 tips to gain 10 ranks in Go” and they say “I’d rather play chess”, then you’re not teaching them Go, you’re trying to market it to them.
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That’s not exactly what I mean. The person may be interested in playing Go but not in learning. Learning is hard. How to convince them that struggle and effort involved in learning has the value.
I’m not sure we have to convince people.
For instance, I’m interested in Chess, I watch chess streams from time to time, I watch podcasts from Fabiano Caruana or watch some of Levy Rozman’s videos, I watch some of the news and drama updates. I don’t play chess a whole lot, I might occasionally play with a friend, or infrequently online.
I’m not really motivated to learn chess, and it’s going to be hard to convince me to do it because most likely I’d rather spend time learning Go.
It’ll be the same for a number of chess players, they could have a casual interest in Go, but would rather spend time learning chess.
So I think again you’re in the realms of marketing. Like how would you convince me that for chess
I think promotion then might fit in another spot better like
etc
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I watched most of the video (only the lecture part, not the questions from the audience). He says more or less that in order to learn you have to make a mental effort, and that mental effort should be manageable and not overwhelming. And also that learning is motivating when learners can socialize and be encouraged by a coach (the teacher).
I guess we can find an application in go: to learn tsumegos, problems shouldn’t be too easy (otherwise you won’t make any effort) nor too hard (otherwise you’ll be overwhelmed). Solving tsumegos is more motivating if you study them with peers, like in tsumego competitions. And it’s better if the teacher just tells you whether you got the problem right or wrong, without telling you the solution, so that you can work out the problem again in your head and have another chance to make a reading effort.
On the other hand, a small percentage of students know intuitively what kind of effort to make, while the majority of students make efforts in a wrong direction, and it’s very difficult for the teacher to correct these “bad thinking habits”.
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When this sort of topic is brought up, I always like to mention this great blog post:
I think this question depends a lot on the specific objectives and context. There’s a big difference between what style might be most effective for, say, training dedicated pupils (such as in a professional academy with young players that are aspiring to become professionals) versus introducing friends / family members to the game as a new hobby to explore together.
For most of us, we’re much more likely to be in situations like the latter rather than the former. The article shared above discusses how that should shape our approach.
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The third, very different situation is teaching adult amateurs who already know basics and want to improve, without spending as much time as children in a go academy.
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