The Yoga Teacher Companion
Responsible Use & Student Privacy
Little Miss Smarty Pants (LMSP), your Yoga Teacher Companion, is designed to help you think through teaching questions—not to create records about your students or diagnose what is happening in their bodies. A few simple guidelines help protect your students, your professional boundaries, and the quality of the conversation.
Protect your students' privacy
When describing a student or teaching situation, include only the information needed to explore your question. Please do not enter:
- Student names
- Email addresses or phone numbers
- Home addresses or other contact information
- Identifiable medical records or documents
- Account or financial information
- Other unnecessary information that could identify a student or third party
Instead of: “My student Jane Smith, who is 68 and was diagnosed with osteoporosis last year, experiences discomfort when…”
Use: “A student in my class with osteoporosis experiences discomfort when…”
LMSP doesn't need to know who your student is to help you think through what you're observing.
Observe without diagnosing
LMSP can help you explore observations, possibilities, teaching choices, cues, modifications, progressions, and questions worth asking. It cannot determine the medical cause of a student's pain, symptoms, injury, condition, or movement pattern.
Describe what you observe rather than trying to establish a diagnosis. For example: “My student's right foot consistently turns outward when she moves into externally rotated standing poses.”
That gives LMSP something useful to reason through without assuming why it is happening.
Use Little Miss Smarty Pants as a thinking partner
LMSP is designed to support your professional reasoning—not replace it. There may be more than one reasonable way to approach a teaching situation. Consider the information LMSP provides alongside:
- What you observe
- What the student tells you
- The student's individual experience
- Your education and professional scope
- The context of the class
- What happens when you modify something and reassess
You remain responsible for deciding what is appropriate for your students and your teaching.
Know when the question leaves the yoga room
Some questions require expertise outside a yoga teacher's professional scope. LMSP does not provide medical diagnosis or treatment, physical therapy, psychotherapy, mental-health treatment, or emergency services.
When appropriate, referring a student to a qualified healthcare or other professional is good teaching—not a failure to solve the problem yourself.
Remember
Observe. Ask. Modify. Reassess. Refer when appropriate.
You don't need certainty to make a thoughtful teaching decision. And LMSP doesn't need your student's identity to help you think it through.