In this blog, Steve Dorey, FA county coach developer, discusses the importance of reflecting on your coaching.
Coaching can seem like it’s ‘not a sport for beginners.’ It’s endlessly complex, with more problems than you could have imagined when you first picked up your stack of cones. But it doesn’t have to be this way.
Beginner coaches have a lot to deal with to just put a session on. Working alongside many coaches taking their first steps in their roles, a great number suffer from an element of surprise when delivering practices.
Plans often look good on paper and they seem like sure fire winners, only for things to turn out differently when the ball starts rolling. Time and again, I’ve heard the phrase “I didn’t expect that to happen”, which suggests that beginner coaches had only considered the session going perfectly. Therefore, if coaches got into the habit of explicitly stating their expectations as part of the planning process, the element of surprise could be lessened.
In a group setting like a formal coach education course, there are a number of fellow coaches to bounce ideas around with. When working in your own context however, you might be on your own or working with one other person. Often you can’t see the woods for the trees, so a strong suggestion here is to find a ‘critical friend’ to share your ideas with. This could be a fellow coach, a friend, or partner, somebody who you trust and will give an honest opinion.
Make your expectations clear
The process of making your expectations clear is twofold: firstly, you can be really clear about what you expect to happen when you’re on the grass and secondly, it gives you the opportunity to notice when there is a clash between your expectations and reality.
Drawing on the work of professor Donald Schön - who developed the concept of reflective practice - noticing these clashes presents an opportunity to run what he terms ‘on the spot experiments.’ These are the moments in your session when you do something to get things back on track.
Think about how you might have used the STEPS principle (size, task, equipment, people, scoring) in the past, making a change in one element in an attempt to produce a different outcome in your session.
Reflect-in-action
Once your experiment is underway, you then step back to see if it’s working (or not). This process is known as reflection-in-action. You’re reflecting on something whilst you’re in the thick of it. Your reflections will then tell you if you’ve got back on track (what you expected to happen) or if you need to run another experiment.
This continual process of setting expectations, noticing clashes, experimenting and reflecting in action is essentially the coaching process.
I have used this with coaches with great success, particularly when others (assistant coaches or parents) are involved, as more eyes equals more noticing. More noticing equals more opportunities to run experiments, which equals more opportunities to reflect-in-action.
Each cycle of this process will help build your repertoire of ideas for future experiments whilst also adding depth to your knowledge. Without clarity on your expectations though, you’ll be in for a surprise.
Post-session reflection
Post-session you have the opportunity to look back and judge how it went. Again returning to Schön, this process is reflection-on-action: after the fact, when you can’t do anything to affect the outcome.
This is a crucial step and is often cited as key to developing coaching practice. Without looking back on how things went, it will be really difficult to get better. By stating your expectations clearly to begin with however, you now have a particular lens to look back through and focus your reflections and make best use of the Plan-Do-Review cycle. Gilbert and Trudel sum the necessity up perfectly:
“Ten years of coaching without reflection is simply one year of coaching repeated ten times”
The inspiration for this blog came from the excellent Dr Dave Piggott at Leeds Beckett University, whose own blog posts are a rich source of insight, knowledge and ideas which can have a profound impact on your coaching.
If you want to learn more about reflection, take a look at these articles on The Boot Room:
References
Gilbert, W. & Trudel, P. (2006). The coach as a reflective practitioner, in: R. L. Jones (Ed.) The Sports Coach as Educator: Re-conceptualising Sports Coaching (pp, 113-127). London: Routledge.
Piggott, D. (2017, March 6). Accelerating Learning from Experience: How to Get Better at Reflection [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://coachdavepiggott.wordpress.com/2017/03/06/accelerating-learning-from-experience-how-to-get-better-at-reflection/
Schön, D. A. (1983). The reflective practitioner: How professionals think in action. New York: Basic Books.