Climbing Clinic Curriculum
As the Outdoor Climbing Program Coordinator at Colorado College Outdoor Education, I have the responsibility of curating the skills clinics that are taught twice a week. We teach basic skills such as anchor building and cleaning, and more advanced topics such as multi-pitch climbing, aid climbing, and rescue. When I came into the position in Spring of 2016, the beginner clinics were in need of a drastic overhaul. We wanted to shift focus to the most useful skills for beginners, re-order lessons to create a more logical progression, update outdated techniques, and create a more welcoming environment for beginners and underrepresented groups in climbing. Below you can find current version of the curricula, updated dynamically as it's revised in Google Docs over the course of summer 2016.
Some of the specific changes that I made are below:
- Reorganized to "Intro to Anchors," "Anchor Cleaning and Rappelling," and "Traditional Gear and Anchors" from old structure of "Intro to Anchors," (which covered both sport and trad anchors) "Sport Cleaning," and "Knots, Hitches and Gear."
- Change focus so people didn’t have to worry about trad if they only wanted sport knowledge
- Clearer system of pre-requisites
- Gave more time to go in depth into anchor concepts
- Applying knots and hitches immediately, instead of learning them abstractly, then having to relearn them in subsequent clinics
- Making a standard schedule for these being every 1st, 2nd, 3rd Wednesday
- So that people can plan, especially for pre-requisites for Ahlberg Leadership Institute Level 2 Climbing Training
- We can get them on Summit (CC Outdoor Education's management system) earlier, people can sign up at beginning of semester
- For individual content in lessons, I focused on:
- Improving progression, so starting with easy things, practicing, then building on this knowledge
- Focusing on concepts, not procedures. So instead of “tie a clove hitch to yourself, leaving 10-15 feet of slack...” it is now “prevent dropping the rope.” I think this will improve both understanding and recall
- Creating memory recall devices, such as making safety checks for rappelling go from top to bottom, as opposed to jumping around between parts of the system
- Updating outdated techniques, such as changing 3rd hand on leg loop to extended rappell, and