Using Teacher Development As A Model For Coach Development

Improving Coaching ability should be done the same way that schools have gone through the process of increasing Teachers abilities. Both of these jobs share a large amount in common, and it would seem that how we develop Teachers is eventually how Coaches will also develop.

Improving coaches from within an organization is similar to the change that we have seen in Player Development. Teams over the past several years have tried to figure out how to improve the Players within instead of always having to go outside to supplement their own player pool. The same principals can be applied to the coaching side. If you’re always looking outside to fill holes, eventually the coaching talent well might run dry. Growing the coaching talent pie should be our focus.

When attacking this issue many organizations are of the mind that improving knowledge should improve talent. While this is a sound idea in theory, knowledge in many cases does not equal improvement. There is a stark difference in Knowing and Doing. Knowing does not equal doing.

So as quick as some places have been to adapt new technologies and teach their staff members about how to interpret the information. This is only one side of the coin. Knowledge will only get you so far. Having the ability to bust out of old habits, and apply this knowledge is much more difficult. In many situations humans can be fooled to think that knowledge equal improvement by itself.

A process that create compounding improvements over time should be our aim. If we set a sound process into play, and let it play out we would see improvement on autopilot. Many of the activities that coaches should be asked to do are uncomfortable. But getting over their own comfort is probably the biggest choke point in improving coaching.

Quality teacher development has focused around three distinct areas to help guide improvement. Role Playing, Viewing Other Models, Filming and Sharing Of Lessons.

Role Playing

Many of the most progressive schools have attached themselves to putting together in a situation where teachers are consistently role playing during their professional development time, or even during their prep periods. This means that teachers are asking other teachers to come into their classrooms so that they can practice a particularly difficult situation that they encountered.

Role playing is an easy way for coaches to go about improving. If you want to have someone improve their own cueing of athletes then teaching them about it will not create the change. Having them practice the cueing that you want them to use should be the focus in a situation such as this. By practicing in a group you are creating a situation where all the coaches get to be in a situation where they are trying to improve a particular skill. This is good for everyone within the group as each person not only gets to see what works and what doesn’t but everyone gets a chance to view other models of coaching. By role playing you are creating a situation where coaches are practicing good habits while also working to promote change as you work through something.

Essentially Role Playing creates a situation where coaches can practice their own coaching in a low stakes environment. Something that few coaches are given the opportunity to ever do. Practice.

Viewing Other Coaches

How often do coaches get to view other coaches in action? As a student teacher, you get the opportunity to watch a couple of teachers in action on a daily basis. Building models in your brain for how you think coaches work is different from how they actually work. Coaches viewing other coaches is something that should be encouraged instead of everyone working in their silhos and working as an individual.

Often new teachers will view their own Supervisor during their student teaching, and then never view another teacher for years. This seems odd to me. But I feel that many coaches go about this in the same type of way. They will view other coaches during Spring or other time period, but they don’t get the look inside someone else’s coaches practice except for short, limited windows. I think expanding this and pointing to skills that the viewer should focus on could be an area to examine.

Filming Practice Sessions

This to be yields the biggest benefits for an organization to use. Filming and sharing coaching sessions should almost universally done by all coaches. The biggest reason being that your mind is not good at doing two things at once. Unfortunately as you are trying to coach you are also not good at recording what you are saying, and doing. This is where the camera comes in. It is doing the recording so you don’t have to. Just as Trackman and Rapsodo have added a layer of objectivity, the camera adds that same situation for you as the coach. It is important to get over the first few times that you film yourself as it can be difficult to “get over”, but if you are able to do it this has great potential for you as a coach.

I’m not suggesting to film a while hour session. I think that this can be counter productive. But I do think that making it so that you have short videos to examine and share can help make improvement. I also think that once you have asked coaches to collect video on themselves it is just as important to create a way to share videos among staff members to start to build a library of footage to look back on. Not only for coaches to view improvements, but to guide other coaches to view these coaches as models when they are struggling to teach a particular topic or movement. Why not have your best coaches sharing their best coaching with others?

I don’t think that these changes are at all easy to implement, but I think that if and when they are done their is a lot of value that can be gained from a process such as this. Improving the talent pie from within, is much easier and cost effective than going out every year and seeking others just to plug into a system.

This is about 75% of how quality teacher development has been implemented by schools on a large scale. I think that a few small changes can have dramatic impact on coaches within an organization.