The Teesra

Category: CPD

continuing professional (or personal) development

  • Coaching Philosophy v2.01

    Back in December 2018 I drafted a “coaching philosophy’ whilst working through the iCoachKids MOOC Developing Effective Environments for Children in Sport.

    My Coaching Philosophy v2.0

    • Better is always possible — you just might have to re-define your better!
    • But if it isn’t fun, the participants won’t come back next week, and will never have the chance to get any better!

    I have belatedly returned to the iCK courses, and have just completed MOOC #3, Coaching on the Ground: Planning, Doing, Reviewing.

    One challenge set for the “Lifelong Learning Coach” is to revisit and review behaviours, habits, and philosophies.

    So — how does the Philosophy 2.0 it still stand up to scrutiny, 15 months on?

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  • Coach education — minimum set?

    I recently updated my CV (no, I am not applying for new jobs, just a periodic review and trim) and it is now overflowing with CPD courses — mostly interesting, and all relevant in some way to the work I am doing, but I suspect that only a few will actually change how I coach (for the better, hopefully).

    Which set me wondering about the “minimum set” of qualifications required to call yourself a coach?

    What are the most important lessons from coach education — formal qualification, ongoing CPD, informal learning — lessons that have fundamentally shaped the way I coach?

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  • Coaching children — giving them what they want, and some of what they need — with iCoachKids

    I have started on the iCoachKids online course Developing Effective Environments for Children in Sport.

    This is the first of three “MOOCs” from the iCoachKids project, an international, collaborative, multi-agency project aiming to support the development of a Specialist Children and Youth Coaching Workforce across the EU, funded by the Erasmus+ programme of the European Union.

    Thought-provoking content (lots of it!), enthusiastically presented, and addressing an area of coaching that is too often dismissed as “just coaching kids”!

    The role of the coach in children’s sport is widely misunderstood— are they performance coach, guru, task-master, child-minder?  — when perhaps the most important thing that a coach in children’s sport can do is to help the child to develop a love of sport (any sport) that will carry on into adult life.

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