By Angelo Ross, PSIA-AASI Education Development Manager

The PSIA-AASI Teaching Snowsports Manual defines Teaching for Transfer as “relating previous experiences to new skills or outcomes to help students make mental and physical connections and accelerate the learning process.”

Summer is not a break from learning—it is where transfer is built. Removed from the immediacy of the winter season, instructors have the opportunity to convert experience into insight and ensure that what was learned last season can travel into the next.

Our pasts inform and shape us cognitively, emotionally, physically, and socially. Students and instructors bring their unique backgrounds—personal characteristics, motivations, knowledge, and experiences—into the Learning Partnership. Our People Skills address this aspect of the learning environment and its inextricable role in collaboration, communication, trust-building, and learning.

Researchers David Perkins and Gavriel Salomon examine the flipside of Teaching for Transfer in “Transfer of Learning” (1992). By exploring the nuances of how transfer occurs—and why it often does not—they provide a lens through which we can evaluate our teaching and refine how we design learning experiences for our students.

TRANSFER OF LEARNING

Perkins and Salomon define transfer of learning as “when learning in one context enhances (positive transfer) or undermines (negative transfer) a related performance in another context.” Transfer is the ultimate measure of learning—it answers whether learning travels.

A positive transfer example from the Teaching Snowsports Manual describes a student with an equestrian background struggling in choppy, off-piste conditions. By connecting the skier’s experience of “standing in the stirrups,” maintaining balance over the feet, and using the legs to absorb movement, the instructor provides a familiar sensory and conceptual anchor. The student’s prior experience becomes a pathway to improved performance.

Negative transfer can also occur. An experienced ice skater may struggle early in skiing due to the wider platform of skis compared to skate blades, or a skateboarder may find snowboard bindings restrictive. As Perkins and Salomon note, these effects are typically temporary; with experience, learners often recalibrate quickly. The larger challenge is that positive transfer is not automatic. Learners often succeed in a new domain without ever connecting it to prior experience, leaving potential learning untapped.

As the Teaching Snowsports Manual cautions, teaching for transfer is more than using analogies. Simply saying, “It’s like riding a bike” is rarely sufficient. Transfer is not incidental—it is designed.

KEY ASPECTS OF TRANSFER OF LEARNING

Types of Transfer

• Positive transfer (described above) enhances performance.
• Negative transfer (described above) undermines performance.
• “Near transfer refers to transfer between very similar contexts.” Example: rollerskiing ↔ cross country skiing
• “Far transfer refers to transfer between contexts that, on appearance, seem remote and alien to one another.” Example: golf ↔ snowboarding

Near transfer is more likely than far transfer to occur.

Conditions That Encourage Transfer

Thorough and diverse practice. Providing adequate practice time and practicing in a variety of contexts “yields a flexible, relatively automatized bundle of skills easily evoked in new situations.” This aligns with the principle of interleaving, the practice of mixing different but related skills or tasks within a learning session, rather than focusing on one skill at a time. Interleaving supports exposing students to a variety of techniques, tactics, terrain, and conditions during lessons.

Explicit abstraction. Giving students opportunities to reflect on and describe their understanding can facilitate transfer. As an example, an intermediate skier or rider with extensive trail running experience may describe the bending and unbending of the joints of the body and maintaining suppleness in the muscles as principles that underlie managing pressures in both snowsports and trail running, thus connecting those seemingly disparate activities in their minds and facilitating their skill development in snowsports. Explicit abstraction occurs during times of reflection and is similar to active self-monitoring, which happens in the heat of the moment.

Active self-monitoring. Real-time reflection on the task at hand can encourage transfer. Imagine a mixed group of advanced skiers and riders exploring a mountain together. The group stops at the top of a steep, slick pitch and discusses tactics for getting down. One of them suggests a strategy they’ve had success with on their mountain bike in steep, firm terrain: get a bit lower than usual, stay centered on the bike, and feather the brakes. The group agrees this approach may work on this terrain and decides to lower their stances a bit more, stay supple and active to stay on top of their feet, and make skidded turns to mimic feathering the brakes. Both explicit abstraction and active self-monitoring involve metacognition—thinking about one’s own thinking process—a best practice in learning that encourages retention, motivation, and agency.

Using a metaphor or analogy. Perkins and Salomon encourage the use of metaphors and analogies to facilitate transfer and, like the Teaching Snowsports Manual, advise readers that simply stating a rhetorical trope (“It’s like pedaling a bike…riding a horse…shooting a foul shot…walking…) is likely not enough for transfer to occur. Connecting rhetorical devices to body mechanics and applying it in a variety of contexts is usually necessary for students to make the connection: “When we walk, to maintain balance, our belt buckle moves toward our load-bearing foot and shifts laterally toward the other foot as we take the next step. Similarly, when we ski, keeping the outside leg supple and the belt buckle closer to the outside boot allows us to effectively direct pressure toward that ski and maintain better balance. During turn transition, as we switch feet, the belt buckle moves laterally more over top of the new outside boot, similar to when we walk. Let’s practice with wedge turns then we’ll increase pitch and speed to try it in parallel turns.”

A CONTINUUM OF CONNECTION

Some movements and contexts are more similar to snowsports than others. Wakeboarding is more similar to snowboarding than bump skiing is to playing chess. Perkins and Salomon identify high-road and low-road transfer as distinct mechanisms by which transfer can occur.

Low-road transfer occurs when contexts are sufficiently similar that transfer occurs through semi-automatic responses, as in transfer of skills from wakeboarding to snowboarding. In both activities, participants ride a single board, often with feet secured by bindings, facing 90 degrees to the direction of travel, and use heel-side and toe-side edge control to carve the surface and perform tricks. Some understanding, sensations, and movements transfer semi-automatically with very little mental effort.

High-road transfer, by contrast, is dependent on explicit abstractions (described above) to transfer prior learning to the new context. Bump skiing and playing chess require very different types and amounts of physical exertion. However, success at both activities comes easier through reading the landscape, planning ahead, pattern recognition, and adapting in real time. An experienced chess player who is just learning to ski bumps may successfully apply thinking strategies from chess to bump skiing by visualizing the bumps as a chessboard, reading available lines, seeing patterns, identifying potential routes, and having a plan for contingencies.

As skiers and riders, we can leverage this understanding to facilitate transfer of skills among the various activities in which we participate. As teachers of snowsports, we can reflect on our own learning experiences of connecting principles from disparate activities, thereby deepening our wells of teaching methods and empathy for students.

SUMMER AS THE BRIDGE

Summer provides ideal conditions for high-road transfer. Without the pressure of real-time teaching, instructors can step back and ask:

• What patterns did I see last season?
• Which decisions consistently led to effective outcomes?
• What principles explain those outcomes?

Equally important, summer activities offer opportunities to experience transfer firsthand. Whether hiking, cycling, climbing, or surfing, instructors can actively look for connections:

• How does balance show up here?
• How is pressure managed?
• What decisions am I making in response to changing conditions?

This process deepens understanding and empathy—two critical components of effective teaching.

Summer is not a pause in learning—it is where learning begins to travel. When we step away from the immediacy of teaching, we gain the space to reflect, connect, and abstract the principles that underlie our experiences. By engaging in varied activities, practicing active self-monitoring, and intentionally drawing connections across contexts, we create the conditions for transfer to occur.

When winter returns, the instructors who have done this work don’t just bring back memories of last season—they return with refined decision-making frameworks, deeper empathy for their students, and a broader repertoire of strategies. In this way, learning for transfer becomes not just something we teach, but something we live—ensuring that what we learn in one context shows up wherever the next turn takes us.

Resource: Perkins, D.N., and G. Salomon. (1992). “Transfer of Learning.” In Husén, T., and T.N. Postlethwaite (Eds.), The International Encyclopedia of Education (2nd ed., 425-41). Oxford: Pergamon.