Principles of Teaching – How They Have Been Effected My Coaching Sessions Since September 2018

In this section of the blog I will aim to show how principles of teaching listed below have affected my coaching sessions over this year since September.

• ·         Differentiation
• ·         Inclusion
• ·         Stretch and challenge
• ·         Checking for learning
• ·         Effective planning
• ·         Learning Styles (Auditory, Kinaesthetic, Visual)

Inclusion

The Oxford Dictionary (2018) suggested that inclusion is being in or part a group of people. Putting this into sporting context it is clear that inclusion within a sports team is very important. As a coach the first stage to including every player, according to Hansen (2017), would be to create an inclusive environment with help from players. Hansen (2017) suggested one way to do this was to think about the food, this is an interesting point raised about increasing social inclusion. The meal after the game can help to do this, people when eating together will communicate and create their own little inclusive environment (Hansen, 2017). Other methods can be overseen by the coach of the team in the sense to enable the environment in a coaching session for players to say hello to one another and start a conversation (Hansen, 2017).  This ideally will lead to them working together more cohesively as a team or part of a team to increase the performance over the group (Hansen, 2017).

People with disabilities can find themselves excluded from some walks of life with them finding it difficult to situate themselves into situations where they can socialise with others (Kiuppis, 2016). But according to Kiuppis (2016) sport is a way to provide inclusion to these people with difficulties. Modified activities such as wheelchair basketball and blind football each contain modified versions of popular sports which has the possibility of giving inclusion to these disabled people (Kiuppis, 2016).

One advantage that inclusion has within a sports team is that it can create a community within the team in which everybody knows what both their role and others roles are to work towards a common goal (Kilmartin, 2018). This goal could be to win the next game, win a state championship or just to have fun playing together (Kilmartin, 2018). Either way this community will work towards this goal (Kilmartin, 2018). Another advantage of inclusion is that it can increase the performance of the team by a couple of steps (Kilmartin, 2018). If there are new players in your team as a coach you will be able to team them up with some of the more experienced players and they become a mini coach or mentor to them to show them the structure in which coaching sessions are based (Kilmartin, 2018).

One barrier to an inclusive environment within a ports team can be the attitude of the players towards each other (Porter, 2015). If some players have beef and an attitude towards each other this can have a detrimental effect on the whole team, effecting performance at games, team cohesion and general enjoyment of the sport (Porter, 2015). Another barrier to inclusion can be expectation (Porter, 2015). According to Porter (2015) this can occur from four distinct places, the coaches, spectators, your inner self and your teammates. The coaches after teaching you how to play the game will have the expectation for you to win and their reaction to a loss can be heartbreaking for a player (Porter, 2015). Spectators love to see the team win and be successful and in some cases like is seen in football the crowds can become quite hostile towards players who are not performing to their expectations (Porter, 2015). Your inner self can beat itself up if you know yourself that you are not performing as well as you know you can having an effect on your own performance even further (Porter, 2015). Lastly your teammates can have big expectations of you if for example you are the best player on the team and you are not performing well you can be blamed by teammates for the loosing (Porter, 2015).

In my own personal coaching sessions this year I believe that I have been able to include all participants as much as possible despite age and gender. For example I know for a fact that in the first activity I did in my assessed coaching session, the recap of the pop pass activity, there was a female member of the group located in each group of participants. However I believe that some of the female members of the group felt a little excluded when I moved to a game situation activity in my first rugby session in which there was a rooking activity where people had to go to ground and bind over to allow a pass out the back. This therefore will be something to review and possibly for next time put the group of girls together working as a team then there couldn’t be any discrepancies.

Stretch and Challenge

To stretch and challenge an athlete or player as a coach you may decide to use the game centred approach (Carey, 2016 cited in ASEP, 2018). Traditionally speaking coaches would teach a skill by using drills to improve this skill. However according to Carey (2016 cited in ASEP, 2018) simply learning how to do this skill will not benefit a player when it comes to using the skill in an actually game situation due to them having not actually practiced it within a game situation resulting in a lacklustre performance as the players are not prepared.

The traditional approach relies on first teaching the players the skills of the game through drills, then teaching them about the tactics of the game (Carey, 2016 cited in ASEP, 2018). According to Carey (2016 cited in ASEP, 2018) one limitation of this approach is that even though the skills get taught in drill situations these drills however do not have any context towards the actual game. Therefore as mentioned prior when it comes to a game the skill in question will be almost useless to the player because even though they know how to do the skill they do not know how to use it (Carey, 2016 cited in ASEP, 2018). Another limitation of the traditional approach to coaching is that the drills in which the players will learn the skill are really boring (Carey, 2016 cited in ASEP, 2018). It was mentioned by England Rugby (2018) that when the word drill is said it gives off an instant negative view and suggests to all coaches of every sport to either say game or activity, these words are much more positive.

In my own coaching this year I believe I mostly tried to stretch and challenge all participants not just in their physical ability but also mentally challenging them to use teamwork to problem solve. An example of this problem solving happened when I was doing my coaching assessment on rugby passing where I did an activity I called truck and trailer. As can be located in my feedback for this session I let this activity go on even when it was getting a little messy and some of the participants were struggling with the understanding of what to do in this activity. However reflecting back I believe that is was good that I did not jump in too soon because this then allowed the stronger members of the group to communicate with the less confident individuals to tell them what to do. Which in turn I believe enhanced the abilities of the group by increasing teamwork and communication. On this point as featured in my post session feedback arguably I let it go on too long however both my assessor and I agreed that it did work itself out eventually and generated a flow to the activity.

One example from the same session, the rugby passing session I was assessed on, I used the game centred approach at the end of the session in which the group was split into four teams and two games of end ball were being played at the same time. Reflecting back I believe the games were centred on the main goal for the session to improve passing ability. However in L shape passing activity I emphasised running onto the ball and the end game featured not being able to run with the ball so this would be a point to work on.

Learning Styles

Every player in a sports team, like any member of the general public, will learn more in one certain style than another. Therefore it is important to cater to every learning style in some form or another. There are three main learning styles according to Mind Tools (2018) include a visual learning style. As a visual learner you will like to see things with your eyes, in sporting context this will consist of demonstrations (Hughes, 2018). The second learning style would be auditory, which means a person would like to be told what to do with a lot of explanation (Mind Tools, 2018). In sporting context this could also feature within demonstrations in which the coach would talk through the process of a skill adding in coaching layers for players to hear and remember (Hughes, 2018). The third learning style is kinaesthetic, which a player would learn best by trying a new skill, making mistakes and then learning from them (Mind Tools, 2018). In sporting context a coach will be able to cater for this type of learning style  by using what is known as the whole, part, whole method (Martens, 2012 cited in Human Kinetics, 2016). However it is not simply a case of labelling people one of the three styles the University Of Massachusetts (2018) argues that everybody will use all three types of learning style at some point. But one of the three will be the dominant of the rest meaning that particular person will enjoy learning by for example visuals more than kinaesthetic and auditory styles.

Therefore ideally the best way to teach a skill to cater to all learning styles would be to first allow the participants to have a go, bring them in, show them a demonstration explaining in detail the important points you are looking for and letting them try again (Martens, 2012 cited in Human Kinetics, 2016) (Mind Tools, 2018) (Hughes, 2018).

I believe in my coaching sessions this year at some point in most sessions I have catered to every learning style in some degree. For example my visual demonstrations were aimed at visual learners in the group I had broken down each skill into a number of stages. In my hockey passing session I called the ball a ball and your hockey stick was a dog and told the participants that the dog will always follow the ball. In my first rugby passing session the three stages were step, elbow and across the chest. The step was to provide momentum for the pass, the elbow was to make sure it was raised to make it easier to offload when passing and across the chest was the direction in which the ball travelled. In my second rugby passing session I used step the same as before, look too see where you are passing the ball, swing for the swing pass and finally point in the direction the ball has travelled. My final example from my cricket bowling session I only used two stages the first being what I called usain bolt and the second rotate. Within the demonstrations of these broken down skills I explained each stage as I have just done in this part of the blog to cater for auditory learners. Finally in the activities during the sessions there were lots of opportunities for trials and kinaesthetic learners to get stuck in and have a go at the skill and I was always on hand to correct poor technique.