Top 5 questions you must ask to find out the best Yoga Teacher Training (YTT) program Doing some hard work to find the right Yoga Teacher Training program can help you a great deal in deepening your own understanding of the discipline as well as effectively enabling you to share it with others. Finding just the right program for your needs can be the difference between an average learning experience and one that changes your life for good! The past few years have seen a major surge in the demand for Yoga Teacher Training Certifications in the United States. However, please note, as against the popular perception, there is tremendous amount of dedication, experience and time required for creating a quality Yoga Teacher Training program. You can’t expect a school solely focused on its revenue model to deliver that kind of education. It’s here that the importance of asking the right questions, being a prospective student, comes into the picture. Such questions can help you filter out the institutes that are more concerned about your personal development and education, than how big your purse is! Let’s go ahead and learn about the top 5 questions you must ask in this regard. Is the school registered? Of late, Yoga Alliance has emerged as a major player in the world of yoga, to the extent that you may not get a teaching job in this field if you don’t get a Registered Yoga Teacher (RYT) certificate from a Registered Yoga School (RYS). So ensure that the one you’ve shortlisted is indeed a RYS. All these registrations are provided by Yoga Alliance; it also offers various other valuable benefits like educational webinars, liability insurance, health insurance and more. Even if you’re taking up a program for purely self-improvement purposes, it’s always better to go with an institute that gives you a RYT certificate, as it can come in pretty handy if you do change your mind in the future and wish to switch to yoga teaching. How experienced is the yoga instructor? You need to learn much more than a few Sanskrit words and some basics of alignment to turn into an effective yoga teacher. It’s always better to learn from faculty that has years of experience under its belt, and one that has been studying, working and practicing with thousands of yoga students already. It would be best if you can verify if the teachers of the shortlisted yoga school/s have obtained E-RYT (Expert Registered Yoga Teacher) certificates or not. These are again handed out by Yoga Alliance. Eventually, the depth of the techniques you can learn from someone who has been honing his/her craft for over 10 years may be significantly better compared to someone who graduated just a year ago. What’s the student-teacher ratio like? Imagine how you’d feel if you were in a class of less than 20 students, as against one that has around 60 of them, all cluttered up in a small space. Schools that have at least one dedicated teacher per 4-5 students are always better. A healthy student-teacher ratio facilitates personalized instruction, and you
can get ample feedback to improve your practice, sequencing and overall teaching abilities. Furthermore, the teachers mustn’t hesitate to address your queries. What do the other graduates have to say? Talking to the recent graduates of a YTT school can be the best way of gaining info about its quality. The students will be able to share a first-hand account of the establishment, and tell you whether the institute delivered on its promises or not. Ideally, the school shouldn’t hesitate in connecting you with the graduated students via email or phone. What’s the curriculum like? As per Yoga Alliance, every Registered Yoga School must provide a certain minimum number of instructional hours in each one of its educational categories. However, it’s up to the institute to allocate these hours in multiple ways. You must request the school to tell you about its booklist and overall curriculum, apart from the classroom hours’ format. The Yoga Alliance guidelines suggest that teacher training must be imparted in a dedicated environment, instead of mass classes organized for the general populace. The depth of your training as well as your effectiveness may get seriously compromised if the institute doesn’t abide by a clear curriculum, and the training sessions are opened up to the general public too. Final word Once you’ve asked the above questions and have gone through the answers provided by different institutes, you’d be in a much better position to figure out the best Yoga Teacher Training institute for your needs. All in all, it’s about locating a program that’s the best fit for your long-term requirements, and one that equips you with everything needed to become a knowledgeable and skilled yoga instructor.
About Author AyurYoga Eco Ashram in India is registered as a non-profit Trust, and is operated and maintained by spiritual/monastic seekers. The yoga institute is accredited as RYS 200 + RYS 300 (Registered Yoga School) with Yoga Alliance USA and also as RYS 200 with Yoga Alliance UK (for students from UK and European countries). AyurYoga eco-ashram is the perfect destination for learning Yoga in India & provides yoga courses such as yoga teacher training, yoga retreats for beginners, ayurveda and spiritual retreats in India.)