When Coaching and Teaching Collide

When Coaching and Teaching Collide: Treating the Court Like a Real Classroom
By Tony Oldani, Arizona Region, IHSVB

Recently I found myself having to explain to a non-coach at my high school that good coaching is really just good teaching. He challenged me on this, citing an assortment of stereotypical coaching situations, all of which got me perturbed because he was not really aware of what we did as coaches. And then I took some time to watch our coaches on campus and I noticed his views were closer to accurate than I wanted to admit. I then observed some club coaches and saw similar behaviors.

For our profession to really be seen as a co-curricular program for student-athletes, instead of just an extra-curricular, our coaching needs to model good teaching practices. These practices will produce superior athletes and give concrete evidence to the tangential lessons we hope to instill in our student athletes like leadership, cooperation, communication and sacrifice.

What I’m suggesting is that we approach the training of our sport in the same way we would in our classrooms, and that means addressing what we teach, how we teach it and how we direct the learner towards mastery of our material.

Curriculum Design – What do we need the athlete to know, understand and do?
As coaches, we need to understand that “rolling out our system” is no longer enough – not in the sense of winning, but in the context of all that we need to teach our student-athletes. Good teaching has at its core good curriculum design. In both the classroom and the gym, I have found tremendous success using the Backwards Design Model as described by Wiggins and McTighe in 2000. This process starts with the end in mind – determining where the student (athlete) should end up after going through the season, and then creating a plan to get them there. This includes assessment points to ensure the instruction is working towards those goals, since just because you taught it, doesn’t mean they learned it! The steps for this design effectively direct the coach to design the program from the lasting goals first, working backward to design the individual training sessions that will instruct and assess the athlete along this journey.

The three most important questions for the coach to answer include:

• First, what are the lasting values we want our athletes to take away from their involvement in our programs? These are the big ideas for the team members.
  • This is where the teacher/coach can articulate specifically what they want their athletes to take away from the program in a lasting way, such as cooperation, leadership, overcoming adversity, etc. These can also include specific sport skills sets as well.
• Next, how will the coach be able to assess the athlete’s progress towards these goals?
  • This can include statistical evidence, but might also include anecdotal or other such performance measurements.
• Finally, the coach will construct a plan for the individual “lessons” that need to be taught to get the athletes to the desired outcomes.
  • These need to take into account some needed flexibility for each learner and for the group as a unit, and be adaptive to new instructional techniques and changes in standardized requirements

For our program, this meant examining what we wanted our boys to leave our program understanding and being able to do. One of our 'big ideas' is that we want our athletes to be able to cooperatively solve problems. We then create situations throughout the season where they are forced to make decisions or create solutions to tactical situations that require them to work together. In some cases, these situations just 'come up' during practice, not unlike a discussion in a classroom, and can become an unplanned teachable moment. In other situations, we hand out only pieces of information to various members of the group so they have to communicate effectively to achieve their goal of solving the problem. This skill certainly manifests itself in the match when the players on the court have to respond to a tactical change from our opponent. More importantly, cooperative problem solving is a skill that will have lasting significance in their lives. And unlike coaching approaches from the past that just assumed this was happening, this curriculum has been designed to ensure that value is at the forefront, that assessments are in place to ensure it is happening, and the lessons are created deliberately to work on these enduring values of the program.

Another important facet of seeing our craft as teaching is it transforms the role of the athlete from 'doer' to 'learner.' Athletes are not then simply instructed to replicate the how-to’s that the coaching staff instructs. Instead, they are challenged each day to grow in their understanding of their sports skill base and tactical foundations. This can have an immediate impact on their motivation and growth as the process becomes central to their involvement, rather than simply looking at the result. They want to learn to hit line because it is another challenge in their mastery of the curriculum, rather than just a way to get playing time. However, if the athlete and coach believe that the sport is designed around a curriculum and that athletes are learners, we must address how we provide feedback and seek to correct learning deficiencies.

Corrective Feedback – Fostering the New Learning

On a typical day in class, Mr. Owles is passing back yesterday’s test to his students. As is usually the case, many of the students did an excellent job and receive positive feedback from their teacher for the work they have done. But then Mr. Owles gets to Scott and things change… “Everyone out of your desk and on the floor… Start doing push-ups until I say stop! Scott didn’t think it was important to study for the test and decided something less than his best effort would be good enough…”

Hyperbole? Unrealistic? Of course, but this happens every day in gyms across the country. No classroom teacher would use this type of corrective behavior when a student is struggling in a learning situation. Instead, an adaptive teaching strategy would be implemented to aid the learner is his or her mastery of the material. At the very least, the teacher and student would engage in a discussion about where and why the student is not connecting the instruction to their ability to demonstrate mastery.

Coaches rely on physical punishment as a means to correct struggles in learning and this can have a damaging effect on the development of a young person. To be certain, there may be instances where some sort of punishment is a more appropriate response to a learner’s actions. But physical punishment should never be a response to a learning situation. At the very least, these reactions cause a dislike of physical activity, and may stifle a learner’s desire to master the material due to a fear response initiated by the coach’s reaction. If this fear becomes ingrained, the athlete will struggle to achieve peak performance as self-confidence, control over emotions and the merging of action and awareness are all compromised.

As coaches, we must work to become master teachers. We must instruct and assess. We must modify lessons, and we must provide feedback that helps shape the learner. In the past, many coaches did this with a whistle, a grimace and a competitive fire that we hoped would be captured by our athletes. While I am not saying we need to stray from those strategies completely, we need to embrace teaching as our primary role and design our 'classes' on the court as such. Long after the competitions have ended, and the wins and losses have been added up, our athletes will carry our life long curriculum with them.

References:
Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Expanded 2nd Edition. (Upper Saddle River, NJ/Alexandria, VA: Pearson Education/Association for Supervision & Curriculum Development, 2005).