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When I look back over the years I have been coaching, having started at 16 and now just turned 37, I can reflect and say that I think I have honestly only ‘coached’ for the last five years. Before that, I’m not convinced what I was doing was coaching, maybe putting on football practices for kids, but I certainly didn’t KNOW what I was doing or WHY I was doing it. Having spent time considering the journey and influencers on my coaching I can now start to understand a little more about what I’m really doing.
Things were at a point where I was comfortable, happy with my approach to coaching and helping the boys get better; as people and players. But I think I am coming to another crossroads where this comfort is going to change. See, I’m not convinced I’m getting it totally right, or rather, I think I am missing part of the plot – an essential part of the plot!
I’ve spent a good few years learning about HOW to teach; the essential components on what makes a good experience for young players, about coaching styles, different approaches to questioning strategies and really focused on the TEACHING element. However, I think I have I’ve not spent enough time on their LEARNING – truly understanding what they are getting from the practices and sessions, whether they are actually learning anything.
Two quotes I think are particularly useful at this point:
“You haven’t taught it until they have learned it”
(John Wooden)
“It’s not what you say, it’s what they hear”
(Red Auerbach)Last night was the start of the journey into changing this, into beginning to understand what the players are actually learning and then I believe I can start to evidence that me being there is making a difference. This is what happened:-
Our Support Coach is leading the U10 session; he’s working on breaking the line with your first touch.
During the first game, I ask one of the players a question quietly – “Have you learnt something new in this practice or are you practising something you already knew?”
He thinks it’s a trick question at first but answers with “something I already know”.So my brain is running now, thinking about his answer, what we are setting out to achieve and loads of questions are firing off:
Q1. What do the players already know?
Q2. Do we undersell their knowledge and they know lots more than we give them credit for?
Q3. Do we have to teach them something new every session?
Q4. Is it ok to just be practising and refining something you already know?
Q5. What’s the percentage balance between these points? Is there one?
Q6. How do we find out what they know?
Q7. When do we find out what they know?
Q8. What about when some know something and others don’t?
Q9. How does this shape and influence our planning of sessions?At this point there is a conversation with the ‘Coach Developer’ at the Club and I share where my brain is going. He is aware of my thoughts around shifting the focus from teaching to learning anyway and is a good person to debate stuff with. For example, Q9, I suggest that in the next session I deliver I am going to bring some flip chart paper and get them to feed in everything they know about the “session topic” before we start. I’ve done this before recently when we did a session on communication skills and it worked well. Coach Developer makes a great point – if they know most things, to extend their learning now is going to mean planning on the hoof, developing a session there and then to meet the needs of the players. That’s not easy. Therefore, should we ask the question about their existing knowledge in the session before the one we do later in the week, to help my planning? Good point.
Added to this we then discuss the aspect of doing reviews/debriefs to find out what the players have learnt. This is normally done by most coaches at the end of the session – the kids collect the equipment in, they are then thinking about their journey home and all they really want to do is shake the coaches’ hands and leave. Is this a meaningful time to ask them to reflect on their learning? I’m not sure this is now.
This sparks another conversation – when is a good time to find out what they have learnt? The outcome is that we are going to play about with some different approaches and see what happens.
Back to the session
As we finish we get all the boys together for a ‘classic’ approach to finding out what they have learnt and undertake a review. By this stage, the Support Coach and I have been talking about these things too so we start by getting them into pairs to discuss “Have you learnt something new in this practice or are you practising something you already knew?”, the question I asked the one player earlier.Listening to some of the conversations, many started with “I didn’t learn anything new but….” When we got all the boys together to hear some of their answers only two of 20 said they had learnt something new (which was the same thing) – this was a coaching point I had added into the second game via an intervention to their half of the group.
The journey home for me is always an interesting time to reflect on my coaching and this one was a particular thoughtful one. Is it ok for the players to not learn something new? Do we label sessions before we start that ‘this is about technical refinement’ or ‘this is about learning something new’? How do we manage this for the whole group, as they are all in different places with their knowledge and understanding and ability to apply this to the game?
I really believe that this slight shift in focus is important. I am in a place where I am comfortable with my knowledge and understanding, and therefore approach, to teaching for the value of the players. I now need to spend more time thinking about assessing their learning. After all, isn’t that the most important part? I can deliver 120 fancy coaching sessions a year, with bells and whistles and all sorts of singing and dancing stuff going on, but if the players aren’t learning, I’ve failed!
When you start to really drill down into it, facilitating learning through good teaching and engaging practices is one part, knowing that you ARE genuinely helping to making better players is something different.
Quite a lot to think about in this coaching lark…!
Nick Levett – English FA
Phenomenal post. It really has me thinking and reflecting upon my own practices and how I might approach some of the topics you are thinking about.
As I was reading through your thoughts, my mind kept returning to the fact that a lot of your ideas seem binary when the reality is there is a definite sliding scale. The whole idea of knowledge is a spectrum of self-perceived understanding, as well as true and actual understanding. Your series of numbered questions doesn’t really seem to allow for any level of the process of understanding aside from “yes” or “no”. Though, simply posing the questions of 6, 8, and 9 in particular are going to have me thinking all night.
Kinda of running through this exercise to reflect on my U10-12 coed sessions from Wednesday with a bunch of kids I don’t regularly coach is interesting. Our warmup was a bunch of coerver stuff like ball rolls, so I’ll use that as my primary case. Did the players already know what a ball roll is? about 75% yes. Did they understand how to physically do it? about 66% yes. Could they do it at speed? about 25% yes. Did they understand the timing of it relative to defender closing? 1 kid out of 50.
So my point is that a kid’s answer of “yes” could be drastically different to the reality of the situation because they don’t know what they don’t know. It’s an interesting concept to include the players’ self-reported level of knowledge in our planning, I’m just not sure how reliable and accurate it might be.
Great post, and I’m sure I’ll be returning to re-read it and think on it some more after pickup tonight.
David,
You are sounding a lot like a teacher; something a good coach should be! I appreciate how you devote thought to this area. I notice you are squaring your focus on concern for really reaching your target audience – the player. It is evidenced in your selected quotes: “…until they learned it” and “…it’s what they hear. ” In the educational field, this is something we call differentiated instructional practice. At the heart of differentiated instruction is the learner.
For example, let’s say I seek to coach a group of kids I do not know on how to dribble, pass, or shoot. I can find sessions and bring them to use at the practice. As a result, the kids will have to modify themselves at the mercy of my design, which was devoid of my knowledge of the kids’ present levels of performance in relation to my intended outcomes – assuming I really had any at all. Sure, I can make adjustments live during the session, which is fine. However, what predetermined knowledge did I have of my audience prior to conducting the session? Continuing with the aforementioned example, say I arrive at the field on Monday with my lesson on how to dribble, pass, or shoot, and my audience is a group of U9 boys who have never touched a ball. On Tuesday I arrive with my same lesson and my audience is now a group of U9 boys who have been heavily involved in soccer since the age of 5? I metaphorically just walked around with a size 6 shoe and tried to make each member of my audience fit into it, regardless of his or her shoe size. For some kids, my instruction may have accidentally fit just fine, some may have outgrown it a long time ago, and some are yet to grow into it at all.
Which brings us to the question of what they already know about that which we want them to learn.
- Begin with the end in mind. What is it that your players will be doing effectively (goal)? What does it look like and sound like? Task analyze the components that comprise the whole. Knowing the components helps to diagnose later on in future sessions.
- Craft and conduct a pre-assessment setting up the exact conditions that would elicit the application of learning you seek to have your players demonstrate. Prepare to take some data on what you see in reference to each of your players gaps’ in their present levels relative to your learning goal. Your players will naturally demonstrate what they know instead of having to articulate it devoid of context because your pre-assessment should elicit the behavior right in front of your eyes. Video tape it if you feel the need to look at it more carefully. I would conduct this pre-assessment Thursday prior to the week in which I would initiate informed instruction, which would occur on the following Tuesday.
- Armed with this knowledge, I would suggest you analyze the information and come up with adequate entry sessions knowing what you saw your players do. Were they far more prerequisite in their knowledge than you initially thought regarding the components that comprise the whole? Did they surpass your learning goal as written? Now you have a working baseline with your players in mind.
- Design your sessions, and about midway through the series of sessions, implement the pre-assessment again to see where they are as a result of your instruction. Are they getting it any better now that you have been able to coach/teach them? Yes or No. If no, what can you coach differently in respect to the components. They may need to learn something a different way. The onus lies not in our ability to place fault on the learner for not responding, but in our ability to recognize a lack of responding due to our instructional misfire and creating another method by which to seek a response. If we are relentless in the pursuit of always seeking a positive response and re-teaching/re-coaching in a different way, great things happen.
- Upon completion of all the sessions, conduct the post-assessment, which can be the same authentic pre-assessment you created that matched perfectly to the application of learning you wanted to see and hear from your kids.
- Review the data for pre and post. How did your players rate regarding the learning behavior necessary to carry out your intended learning goal?
Now during the instructional phase (between the pre and post assessment). It is perfectly permissible to always check for understanding. Get overt responses from your kids, be it verbal explanation or physical demonstration. Have a coach/parent walk around and occasionally ask a random kid here or there this open-ended question: “What are you learning right now?” When you want kids to process something, it is a fantastic idea to have them briefly articulate their understanding to a teammate and then have the teammate return the favor. At this point you can navigate and listen to what you hear. Upon completion of any session, it is advisable to create what is called an “exit ticket.” Basically, it is a player’s way to exit a practice by briefly sharing what they learned (which can be verbal) with a coach prior to them leaving. The aforementioned strategies are all forms of informal on-the-spot assessment, which allow you to make real-time incremental changes should you see or hear something that is not matching your learning goal(s).
Lastly, if some players demonstrate more proficiency than others as evidenced in the pre-assessment, you can now use them strategically by purposefully placing them into various groupings during your sessions. They now serve as demonstrators/models to those around them who can pick up on their talent. This is where peer learning/coaching comes into play! Kids learn best from one another.
Take care,
James Brodie
Mr. Brodie.
This is so obvious as to be brilliant. Yes and Yes I find myself saying. Thank you.
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