Turns out swimming lessons for infants offer amazing developmental benefits that extend far beyond the pool… Take a look at this report from the LA Times about a recent study conducted in Norway and the United Kingdom:

everyone-in-the-pool-even-infants.html

(The following article will appear in the United States Swim School Association Spring 2010 Newsletter)

At the Imagine School of Swimming in New York City, we like to say it’s “the singer, not the song.” This philosophy guides our growth, placing the talents of our teachers above a strictly prescribed curriculum. A passion for the sport of swimming is a prerequisite for the job, but an electric, creative personality is everything. This is how we have built an aquatic culture that has saved thousands of lives over the last eight years. However, at Imagine, children are taught much more than safety and the strokes.

Imagine prides itself on being a creative center where you will not find an assembly line teaching mindset. The program strongly believes that you cannot franchise dynamic early education. (Leave franchising to selling sandwiches and t-shirts!)  Imagine requires prior experience teaching children and/or competitive swimming backgrounds, but most importantly a “way” with children and parents that is elusive and impossible to ignore when you see it. A strong teacher and mentor must be able to quickly adapt to a child’s mood or the general atmosphere of a group of children of any age on any particular day. Despite a lengthy interview process requiring many hours of in-water training, along with a hefty Imagine Teaching Manual, we can usually tell if someone is an ‘Imaginaire’ within two minutes of meeting them.

It takes a certain degree of emotional and social intelligence of the aquatic pedagogue to read what the pupil needs, rather than blindly going through rigorous teaching steps and progressions that a teacher has been forced to follow on a particular day.  Every child reacts differently to single-minded disciplinarian ways or, alternatively to laissez-faire learning environments. The teacher must learn to develop the sensibility to help each little person excel.

We realize that our location makes us exceptionally lucky, with regards to finding fantastic teachers. The “best and the brightest” have long flocked to New York City to pursue an endless variety of creative pursuits. Imagine seeks to tap that wellspring of creativity, hiring former swimmers who are now opera singers, novelists, painters, or aspiring rock stars. Supporting these artistic pursuits is integral to the Imagine culture.

We encourage our teachers to draw on positive childhood experiences of their own and translate them into their swimming lessons. It takes some soul searching for all of us to go back and think about what activity or moment made us especially happy in the water and drew us back to pools, lakes and the sea ever since. Each Imagine teacher can re-live their childhood at Imagine in the most positive way, as if a fabled era is to return.

Unfortunately, traumatic childhood experiences often influence a student’s progress. Fear is probably the number one obstacle to overcome in swimming. When we are hasty and timid, our body tightens, and we sink. Working through deeply rooted fears requires a great deal of patience from the instructor. It requires communication and the ability to listen to each student.  Only when the child trusts the teacher, will he or she ultimately surrender to the water and float. When a student feels safe in the environment, he or she will then revert to taking on more daring challenges.

The most rewarding result from swimming lessons is watching the development of confidence. The teacher must aid them in raising their sense of self-worth and tailor the purpose of each activity to each child’s physical and mental needs. Some might reckon this teaching approach produces a chaotic environment, but to the outside observer, Imagine lessons could not look more structured.

Teaching swimming the “Imagine Way” is meant to foster a lifelong love and passion for the water, expressed in a wide variety of underwater pursuits, from racing to surfing to snorkeling to diving, etc. Joining a team is only one aquatic avenue encouraged at Imagine…

“Safe Fun” is the school’s underlying motto for each and every lesson. While structure and a lesson curriculum are clearly essential, the life of the lesson is everything. And that starts with a brilliant, international cast of aquatic enthusiasts!

It’s a cold day in New York City, with a bracing wind and a ‘feels like’ temperature in the teens. Not exactly conditions that inspire thoughts of jumping in the pool. Yet that’s one of the warmest, friendliest places you could possibly be right now. And if you want to be water safe by summer, now’s not the time for a break.

As former elite swimmers, much of the Imagine staff remembers the return to practice after the few weeks when we’d take some time off after our big meets. It felt like learning to swim all over again. No matter how many hours we put in, training to be at our aquatic best, that feel for the water left astonishingly fast, usually just days after we’d dried off. Now that we’re competitors turned educators, the connection is impossible to miss.

It’s been estimated that for every month out of the water, it will take a week for previously mastered skills to return. Meaning a ten week break in the coldest months can send lesson levels back to early fall. Kids will relearn these skills quickly, particularly if they’ve had a positive experience prior to their break, but why spend time relearning instead of progressing?

Of course, keeping kids healthy during these chilly days is the top priority. A wet head too often results in a cold by morning, which means extra time and care must be taken changing before and after classes. Fortunately, thanks to our chemical friend, chlorine, the pool itself remains healthy and utterly disinfected, no matter the temperature outside. In fact, the CDC has gone out of its way to stress that scary viruses like the H1N1 does not pose a threat of spreading in swimming pools.

So, bundle up and come on by… The water’s the warmest spot in NYC right now!

The Art of Mentoring Young Swimmers

At Imagine we laugh a lot, and we play lot. Story telling has been a vital teaching tool in the educational structures of many cultures. Each teacher draws out stories for mentoring their young swimmers to inspire and teach one another. Stories distract from previous fears our student might have, and help us stay in the moment.

With our young swimmers at Imagine, we seek to find our own way by attempting to combine the coach, teacher and mentor attributes. The Aqua-mentor’s role at Imagine is to instigate ideas or actions during lessons, so our young swimmers are learning life-saving skills – often without realizing immediately that they are learning – so the student will only have fully processed much later what he experienced, learned or took with him from certain situations. Learning is not an instant process. Mentoring is a symbiosis, a mutually beneficial relationship. Both the mentor and mentee have the power to influence each other. Mentors are facilitators and teachers who allow the mentee or protegee to discover their own direction. We don’t simply provide solutions, rather ask questions to surface individual thinking to find own solutions.

It must become clear to us that each generation of swimmers holds its own place in our sport. We never stop learning from other swimmers and coaches. Imagine’s teachers share successful (and unsuccessful) practices, giving us the ability to look at situations from different perspectives This makes Imagine a dynamic program. Drills we do constantly evolve and change, just like the bodies and minds of our young students.

We profile the path of development and transformation of children as they travel toward greater awareness and appreciation of the water world. Create a safe & fun environment for students to grow, experiment, and make mistakes. A mentor lets one struggle in order to learn, though Imagine’s commitment to safeguarding our young swimmers does not be jeopardized when letting them make “supervised mistakes”. As we know from our own adult lives, making mistakes is often the only way we realize to (finally) change direction.

As mentors of children we constantly strive to become better at developing the talents of others. We must lead them, follow them, when we see they’d like to show off something to us, and very importantly quietly get out of the student’s way, and not block his individual way of learning by insisting on a set curriculum. The mentor’s task is to foster initiative and a sense of responsibility in the growing child, rather than restrict teaching to imparting knowledge.

I have a friend at USA Swimming who likes to say that at Imagine Swimming, we follow “the Australian model”… We take it as a compliment, and we’ll be the first to acknowledge that, when it comes to developing our sport as a national pastime and a lifelong passion, the Aussies are unrivaled worldwide. The Americans may continue to win the most Olympic medals and dominate swimming’s world ranking lists, however, Down Under, swimming is a way of life – and learning to swim is an unquestioned educational imperative. This cultural devotion to making sure every Australian boy and girl is safe in the water – and LOVES to swim – is an inspiration to everyone here at Imagine.

The numbers tell quite a story: In swim-obsessed Sydney, Australia, there are a registered 180 swim schools in and around the city, servicing a population a fraction the size of New York’s. In the metropolitan area, there are maybe a tenth of that – leaving countless children unsafe in the water, and scores of potential aquatic athletes never to discover life-shaping talents.

The Aussie model that my friend refers to is this: Develop swimming schools first, before considering the competitive side of the sport. Then, when that essential foundation is fostered, future teams are created organically through kids who display the talent and interest in further immersion. In the U.S., inexplicably this passage – from lessons to practice – is often interrupted, as swim schools and teams have traditionally been kept separate. On one side there are learn-to-swim programs and the terrific National Swim School Association that represents our industry. Across the waters, there are club teams and USA Swimming, together the producers of some of the finest swimmers on earth. But where is the bridge between the two? And why don’t these two proven successful entities work more closely together?

This is a challenge we’re currently embracing here at Imagine, as our young team, the Manhattan Makos takes its first strokes into USA Swimming competitions this fall. This Saturday, October 3rd, Makos who learned to swim at Imagine will dive in at Asphalt Green’s “Season Starter” – their first officially sanctioned meet. It’s an exciting and rewarding moment for so many of us, especially when it doesn’t seem all that long ago that we were teaching these same children to float on their backs or go under water for the first time!

Olympic medals are amazing – and this country is the home to Michael Phelps and more Olympic swimming champions than any other nation. But America is also home to too many children who can’t swim, who’ve never even been exposed to lessons. It’s home to plenty of kids who’ve been taught the basics in the water, who then never have the opportunity to take the next stroke, join a team, and race.

The Aussies seem to understand and celebrate this complete journey from a first infant lesson to the starting blocks of the Olympic Games. At Imagine, we’re proud to share this ‘model’ with every one of our swimmers…

Greetings… and welcome to the first post on Imagine’s brand new blog!

We’d like to begin by sharing a story that appeared in the New York Times last month, on Sunday, August 15th. The Op Ed piece by Alison Gopnik was entitled “Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think” – an Imagine-esque headline if there ever was one! In the piece, Gopnik writes that “babies and young children know, observe, explore, imagine, and learn more than we would have ever thought possible. In some ways, they are smarter than adults.”

The piece resonated so much with our school’s philosophy that we made it the central topic of our first Imagine Teacher Meeting of the fall 2009 season. While it’s one thing to recognize the surprising intuitive capacities of young children, we asked ourselves how that might be applied to improving our swimming lessons for children under six-years-old…

Here’s a bit of what we discussed:
First, respect the abilities and curiosity of every child and never underestimate.
Next, learning at this age must be collaborative. If you go into a class with a strict, rigid set of expectations and goals, prepare to be frustrated and end up moaning that your kids “just can’t pay attention.” When in fact, it’s you who isn’t paying enough attention to them. On the flip side, don’t equate lessons with 40 minutes of supervised play. Meet them in the middle – act as a guide, identifying where their imaginations flow, and directing these interests in ways that will enhance their aquatic learning…

We hope you’ll find these new studies as fascinating as we do. And we encourage everyone to read Gopnik’s wonderful piece: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/16/opinion/16gopnik.html