Developmental Chess Instructor
Chess has been believed to have a great impact on the mind for a long time. It brings out endless possibilities: critical thinking, musical ability, pattern recognition intelligence, synthesis, analysis, creativity, evaluation, you name it. Chess was, for a long time, the favorite pastime of the high and mighty people. Almost two thousand years have passed since it was first played. It proved to help people improve their strategic thinking when planning attacks and defenses for wars. It is no wonder that the chess pieces borrow their names from this field.
So probably seated at their courts of these high and mighty people, scholars of the past must have drawn an analogy between the playing of chess and the development of mental capability, especially when these war strategies resulted in success. They must have realized that there is a correlation between the two which causes us do delve much deeper into our mental faculties thus stretching them further, resulting in smartness. Developmental learning is learning that takes place as part of a cognitive development process, the process by which the psychology acquires perception, learning and reasoning.
Developmental Chess Instruction therefore is the teaching of chess as a way of improving the mental capacity and cognition in general. There is a belief that the thinking patterns acquired from playing chess can be transferred on to other facets of the mental faculties, and the result is represented by improved verbal reasoning, logical reasoning, mathematical capability, strong analysis and problem solving among others mentioned before. So generally speaking, Developmental Instruction of chess can foster education, creating smarter kids, instill leadership abilities and create people with cultured and steady minds.
The developmental chess instructor has more to do than just play chess with whomever they are teaching. It entails patience. It entails the search for recognition of patterns in the student and seeing how well they grasp its meaning. They must watch out for and polish the student’s process of producing ideas and their substitutes. Sometimes the instructor has to go fast, sometimes slow. Going slow at instructing is often associated with inculcating the value of patience in the learner. It instills the virtue of hard work, and learning to wait.
It can even go as far as helping to channel anger for those who are quick-tempered. The long-term effect is a socially astute and culturally well- tempered individuals. Going fast on the other hand trains their ability to quickly create solutions from their thought process as the demand calls for it. It allows for the recall process to be shortened and load in time in the mind to improve. This also brings about the idea of instructing younger children. As they grow with a trained mind their mental capacity increases almost exponentially. You may even end up with child prodigies with amazing mental capabilities, maybe ten to thirteen moves ahead of a usual logical thinker.
It is therefore observed that a developmental chess instructor is an important part of the integral process of teaching chess as a means of improving cognition.