A couple of weeks ago I was tinkering around with the classes I was thinking about teaching in 2022. 2020 and 2021 was very intensely Zoom-centric and whilst I had fun with those weekend classes, I think a lot of students also may have felt the mini-classes were too difficult to really get into a groove on since the topic tweaked each week or was self-contained into a single weekend.

It got me thinking about what I’ve always spent a lot of time deliberating – how to produce a better BaZi class where the outcomes are meaningful for the students? A meaningful outcome for me is a student goes into a class feeling unsure about how to read a chart and comes out the other side very much more confident about how to actually get USEFUL ACTIONABLE information from the chart.

I spent some time then researching what was the new trend (at least on Twitter) amongst various professional course-makers and instructors and discovered COHORT-BASED LEARNING was the new IT.

What is cohort based learning?

Wharton Online describes Cohort-Based Learning as “Cohort-based learning is a collaborative learning style in which a group of individuals advance through an educational program together. ” This article explains the advantages of cohort-based learning vs self-paced learning.

Forbes also has an excellent article on cohort-based learning, by way of the perspective of the teacher, on why it is the 4th wave of the democratization of education via the internet. 

Finally, Future.com offers good insights into what are the advantages of cohort based learning including: “Since MOOC content is pre-recorded, it’s one-directional, meaning there’s no opportunity to ask questions in real time. This hinders the format from teaching anything that requires more feedback, discussion, or hands-on practice. Thus, MOOCs are great for subjects that are primarily “knowledge transfer,” such as how to sort data in Excel or other such skills. But they’re not great for higher-order skills—those that require analysis, evaluation, synthesis, judgment, and creativity.“

Essentially, it is what we as Asians will call – a tuition class.

Why learn BaZi by cohort?

Traditionally that’s how people used to learn BaZi, Feng Shui and even Martial arts. Like the Chinese, the Greeks and Romans of the old days who would attach their children to famous philosophers or thinkers to learn (there was no school back then – your pedigree was based on who you managed to persuade to take you as a student). If you’ve seen the movie RISING SUN, the Japanese also have this system of sempai and kohai.

Cohorts were effectively padawans (to borrow the Jedi term), and an old school sifu or teacher would often have a few. These cohorts would practice together, learn with each other, get bullied by the senior cohort (storyline of every Shaolin Temple kungfu movie), do household chores in the sifu’s house, but most importantly, go through the challenges of their craft together with each other and form a lifelong relationship.

In the early days of my study of BaZi and Metaphysics, I also had a cohort of sorts although I was the most junior member. They shall not be named but some of them are rather well known in the world of Metaphysics. And we had tons of fun together whenever we congregated in Malaysia or China – it was many happy hours spent talking Metaphysics and BaZi, and exchanging ideas as well as case experiences.

Frankly, modern day learning of BaZi, university style, is just not fun nor effective when you are trying to actually master the subject (vs, learning the building blocks – for the building blocks, mass classes or even an online learning system is actually effective). It is simply too easy to get lost.

Here’s potentially the scariest (or coolest) part of Cohort based learning – there is no syllabus.

This obviously makes people go – huh? But in the old days of Chinese Metaphysics, there was often no syllabus. The sifu would wake up and maybe decide – he wanted to talk about topic x. It could be entirely related to topic y which he talked about the day before. Sometimes, he might just ramble on and the cohort has to ‘catch up’ as it were (read figure it out yourself). Of course, it won’t be quite THAT unstructured but by and large, cohort-based learning is a combination of a Socratic style Q&A driven learning process, with a small amount of formalized learning (usually either standardized or tailored to the group).

Level Up with BaZiQueen: Cohort-Based Learning Experiment

So my first class for 2022 is going to be a personal experiment by way of a Cohort-Based Class.

What are my goals as an instructor in this class? To get every one of my 8 students (the cohort is going to be limited to 8 people) to be able to effectively read a BaZi chart, as defined by the ability to discern ACTIONABLE AND USABLE information during the reading process. (advice will be a bonus).

To achieve this, the target will be for the cohort to read 50 charts in 6 weeks (18 hours) – that averages about 8 charts per session.

There will also be no recordings of these classes for obvious reasons – the goal is for students to PARTICIPATE, not sit back and listen to the recording. I also find recordings encourage students to imagine there is a safety net and so they don’t have to think in the moment but simply kick back and listen to the recording later. As a result, they don’t engage their mind immediately to study the chart, which is the exact opposite of a real life situation where in when you are asked to read someone’s chart, YOU HAVE TO SAY SOMETHING (not wait for the class chatterbox to go first).

Furthermore, the objective of this class is to get students who are VERY SERIOUS about getting outcomes from their existing BaZi knowledge. In other words, you’ve put money into learning this subject and now you really want to learn HOW TO USE IT. For yourself, mainly but also if you are contemplating maybe charging for BaZi consults. So yes, it’s for the REALLY SERIOUS AMATEUR, or the VERY DETERMINED INTERMEDIATE or the WANT TO CHARGE MORE PROFESSIONAL.

(obviously if you enjoy just being intellectually challenged as a result of learning BaZi, that’s fine too).

Finally, the cohort drives everything which means the cohort determines the time for the class (collectively given everyone’s potential geographical location) and the start and end point of the six weeks so that everybody can clear their calendars.

Details of the class can be found at my Gumroad page: Level Up BaZi: Cohort Jia Zi

Questions? Address them to me at bazibuzz [at] gmail.com

Photo credit:  Shoeib Abolhassani on Unsplash