Teaching Safe Horsemanship: A Guide to English and Western Instruction

Equestrian accidents can happen -- but knowledge and foresight will often prevent or minimize a potentially serious incident. Author Jan Dawson combines her experience as a riding safety instructor and lawyer in this essential guide for anyone, professional or amateur, who works with riders. Dawson operates on a simple premise: correct riding practices are safe riding practices -- at any level. From understanding the needs and nature of horses through creating lesson plans, she explains the correct methods for myriad activities. Teaching Safe Horsemanship begins with an overview of horses, their likes, dislikes, and what makes them behave properly and improperly. You'll learn to assess horses' characteristics and weed out potentially dangerous animals. Instructors and students are closely examined, too, including an analysis of the characteristics of a good instructor and an explanation of the teacher and student attitudes that hinder learning. Eighty percent of all accidents involve falls due to loss of balance. Dawson helps you ensure that horse and rider are in proper balance -- to avoid falls and prevent injuries. She explains the crucial factors for deciding when a student is safely ready to advance to a new skill. Dawson covers motivation and learning, adult students, stable guidelines, curriculum, and class management. She also emphasizes the importance of lesson plans, because structured plans require you to think out each part of the lesson and set measurable, attainable goals for students. A separate chapter explains securing useful liability forms, what insurance coverage does and doesn't do, and how to handle accidents and lawsuits.…