Critical Evaluation of my Coaching Development
As a keen competitor in a variety of sports, I have come across many coaches both good bad. It is a vital role within all kinds of sport and a role which I have always been very interested in adopting. I entered the course with believing to have and adequate amount of experience within football coaching. Having already completed my FA level 1 coaching badge and having numerous hours of voluntary coaching at my local football club under my belt with youths, I considered myself to be talented coach with a wide range of knowledge within my chosen sport of football. The introduction to coaching module however took me upon of journey of self development where I began to critically analyse my performance as a coach as well as opening myself up to a variety roles as a coach, potential participants and sports.
One of the first new concepts I learned, was the idea of a coaching plan. In my previous experience as a coach my plan was something devised in my head, on the day depending on what equipment had at my disposable. Whilst this taught me how to be flexible and think my feet I soon found that it was much more beneficial to plan a session ahead with a clear layout, including warm ups and cool down and a review section at the end . This allowed my sessions to have a clear structure, as well as a chance to evaluate how successful the session was as well. Session plans also allowed me to evaluate my own performance as a coach, which came under close scrutiny in week 4 where I had to deliver a 20 minute coaching session which was recorded. This was my first opportunity to really see my strengths and weaknesses as coach as there was no hiding from the camera! One of the main findings from this session was the realisation that I did no use language as eloquently as I once thought. I found that watching myself back a lot of concepts I was explaining did not sound as clear as I though at time, this was a real eye opener for me as it made me realise the importance of expressing myself in way that my participants could understand and relate too.
Another fairly new concept for me to learn was Howard Gardener’s idea of multiple intelligences. This is the idea that people ‘have a unique blend of intelligences’, for example somebody may have verbal linguistic intelligence (the ability to use words and language) where as another person may have visual spatial intelligences (the ability to perceive the visual). Howard Gardner's theory of multiple intelligences has met with a positive response from many educators. It has been embraced by a range of educational theorists and, applied by teachers and policymakers to the problems of schooling. A number of schools in North America have looked to structure curricula according to the intelligences. Gardner’s theory of multiple intelligences links in with the idea of multiple of learning styles which are simply different approaches to ways of learning.
In week 5 and 6 we learnt just how important it was to incorporate both multiple learning styles and multiple intelligences into our coaching sessions. In these two weeks we delivered practical sessions in pairs, both pairs delivered the same session however one session was delivered only using verbal instruction and the other delivered the same session using only visual coaching. In the first week my partner delivered an exercise to improving shooting. As a participant in this exercise this proved to be difficult as without a demonstration it was very difficult to understand the instruction it was difficult to picture what technique as required to undertake the exercise correctly. The second week involves me delivering the same session but only with visual techniques, this again was very hard session as my demonstrations had to be correct at all time or the message I would be sending across would be wrong. It also proved to be very hard to gain the attention of the participants as well as delivering