Know when to go ...

There are many challenges for the student to overcome in trying to make the considerable leap from the learning environment to real-world environment/scenarios. One of the biggest hurdles is that students can easily become over-reliant upon the verbal commands of their teachers – when to move, what to do, when to start, when to stop, etc – whereas in real-life they are on their own.
One example of this can be seen when students are told to hit the pads, or do the technique – on verbal command. On the surface of things, this seems like an orderly and good idea; the student even develops good technique; but then if the situation should ever arise in real-life, where the student needs to use the same technique – how do they know when to go?
Eg: On the firing range the new police officer is clearly told – ONLY FIRE WHEN THE COMMAND TO FIRE IS GIVEN. Sounds good – safety and all that – but what happens in real life? The bad guy aims his gun at the officer, who has even drawn his weapon and is looking down the barrel at the nasty perp – but what needs to happen before the officer pulls the trigger? There is no-one giving him or her the command to FIRE. This can lead to problems.
The fix is simple: in the classroom, we might well start out by giving the students verbal commands as we walk them through the technique or combination – but at some point it is a good idea to wean them off a reliance on those verbal commands and transition to a model where they are responding to a visual cue given to them by their training partner instead. Eg: our partner drops his right shoulder back – we hit the pad; our partner puts his hand up to push at our face – we armbar, etc.
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