reflective coaching assesment practicle:

Just before the Christmas period, I performed the practical aspect of my reflective coaching assignment one in a group that consisted of:

·         Jonathan Pennington

·         Jared Brooks

·         Ashley Marsden (myself)

As a group we collaborated several ideas on contrasting sports and with contrasting drills, until we came to a unanimous decision to go back to the drawing board and start from scratch; which we did and we collectively came up with a lacrosse based drill, this is a sport we had very little knowledge of or experience in. I believe this worked to our advantage I believe as we had no pre-conceived notions or judgements of the sport/drill so we were not too direct and autocratic in our approach. This allowed the participants to partake in guided discovery which I think allows the learning material to be absorbed quicker as they have a role in learning the technique and skills, this is emphasised by Metzler (2005), who stated, “athletes learn skills, technique, and tactics through guided discovery and through self – awareness”.

The protocol:

We planned to set the session out in the following manner using both guided discovery and whole part whole.

Start with the main session the whole, where the particpants where instructed to manipulate their racket in order to pick up the distinctive team colours bean bag and take it to their team. This provided a fun, opposed start to the session which engaged the participants and allowed us to break it down into smaller parts and gradually improve effectiveness skill and technique. The whole part whole technique worked very well in this situation as the participants got to understand the objectives and the skills required to be successful, before we showed them how to implement and improve these through a variety of questions and demonstrations. This is emphasised by Franco Ferrero (2006), who stated , “Whole part whole allows the skill to be demonstrated in its fullness , then the individual elements that make up the skill are broken down and one learnt, come back to the whole skill again”. The diagram showed below shows how the techniques where broken up into parts.

 

Segment One is the drill in its entirety

Segment two, three and four represents, how we paused the session and through interaction through both questions and demonstrations, we improved and tweaked several aspects such as manipulation of the racquet, techniques on how to distribute and pick up the bean bags.

Segment five is where we returned to the main/whole aspect of the session, with improved technique, skill, knowledge and understanding.

We then tried to progress the session and focus more on receiving and distribution with soft balls, due to the vast improvement made by the participants in order to challenge the participants, some groups where better at this than others, as is usually the case so in order to provided everyone with the same chances and opportunities, we split the group into competent performers and ones who needed more help and thus challenged each group with a variety of passes and distances. (Stoddart,1986)  said “Sport has traditionally been labelled as the great equaliser and the arena in which all persons are treated fairly, regardless of their background or social standing”. So basically we treat every participant equally no matter, what their ability or no matter how well we knew them; we didn’t want to prejudice against anyone and be more bias towards the peers we considered friends.

References:

Franco Ferrero, British Canoe Union (2006) Coaching Handbook British Canoe Union: A Manual of Coaching Techniques P97

Metzler (2005) The Coaching Process: A Practical Guide to Becoming an Effective Sports Coach p170

Stoddart (1986) http://www.questia.com/googleScholar.qst?docId=5000177026