The Cornered Cat

In this intense, 3-day class, you will learn some amazing teaching tips and training tricks that help you bring out excellent the best defensive handgun skills in your beginning and intermediate students. On the range and in the classroom, you will learn more than you ever thought possible about:

  • Class management, including safety;
  • Getting the most out of your teaching time;
  • Principles of adult learning;
  • Business and publicity skills;
  • How, when, and whether to demonstrate shooting skills for your students;
  • The best hands-on way to teach trigger control;
  • Tricks that help you spot students’ shooting errors as soon as they happen;
  • Ways to correct errors without discouraging your students; and
  • An amazing number of ways you can coach each of your students toward excellent performance, regardless of the personal challenges they bring to class with them.

In this class, you will learn how to explain and demonstrate foundational shooting skills for your students. This includes a quick overview of several different systems in widespread use among professional handgun trainers and the reasons behind them. Did you ever wonder why some firearms schools teach one type of grip, and others teach a different one?

You will learn how to read your students’ targets so you can easily personalize your teaching for each student on the fly… and you will learn why some professional trainers never use the popular “diagnostic chart” we see everywhere online!

As you learn to identify students’ eye dominance and address related sighting issues, you will become better prepared to work with the cross-dominant shooter. To help you work with your left-handed students, the class spends some time working out of a left-handed holster. Do you know the easiest way for a left-hander to lock open the slide of a semi-auto? Or how a left-handed shooter can most easily reload a revolver?

You will learn to identify and correct trigger control problems as they occur. How can you best reach the difficult student? We explore how to approach the challenging student in a way most likely to keep them happy with you and engaged with your material.

Although this class focuses most intensely on teaching skills and range management, you will find your shooting skills stretched further than you would ever believe! We explore many different ways to measure and improve your students’ shooting abilities. This means you will learn where you stand on several different tests of shooting ability used throughout the handgun training community. To receive your certificate at the end of this course, you will need to meet a tough but fair shooting standard.

During the class, you will have the opportunity to improve your own “range presence,” that indefinable something that helps excellent trainers maintain good order and safety when groups of people share the range. We address the specific challenges of female voices on the range, and ways you can improve both your volume and your authority when you call the line. You will learn several tricks of the teaching trade as you give a short presentation to the class, and will learn several effective ways to handle questions from your students.

Most important, during this class you will develop your own roadmap for bringing more of your teaching skills on line in the future, with a clear plan of how to get where you want to go in the firearms world. You will walk out of the class with improved shooting skills, better teaching confidence, and a big stack of resources that will help you keep moving forward with your training business.