The Teesra

Category: Coach Development

  • Follow-up: The coaches toolkit revisited (3): deliberate practice vs. deliberate play

    Many thanks to @ImSporticus for including this post in his weekly round-up of re-posts — it generated quite a few comments.

    This, from Phil Kearney: “As a means to move away from a “versus” mentality, I really like Whitehead’s description of freedom (play) and discipline (practice) as “…two rhythms, now one of which is louder, now the other, but both have a place at all stages in development”

    https://twitter.com/kearney_phil/status/922801656957493248?s=21
    Collected in “The Aims of Education and Other Essays” Alfred North Whitehead, 1929

  • The coaches toolkit revisited (3): deliberate practice vs. deliberate play

    In the iCoachKids MOOC, “Coaching on the Ground: Planning, Doing and Reviewing”, coaches were challenged to review their coaching practice.

    I have looked at my use of the coaching tools themselves, and of the spectrum of practice types, Blocked-Variable-Random.

    In this final section, I wanted to look at the question of Deliberate Play vs. Deliberate Practice.

    The design of “deliberate” (or “purposeful”) activities (all coaching activities) should include:

    • structure;
    • clear progression and challenge;
    • outcomes (“if you don’t know where you are going to, how do you know when you have arrived?”).
    • coach feedback and/or opportunities to reflect on performance and the relevance of the techniques (technical, physical, mental, social) to the game.

    But is it deliberate practice, or deliberate play?

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  • The coaches toolkit revisited (2): Blocked, Variable or Random?

    Following on from reviewing my use of the coaches’ toolkit, I wanted to take a look at how I deploy different types of practice — Blocked, Variable, Random — and what I can do better.

    I have long been an advocate of game-based practice — because I like playing games, and so do (most of) the children I coach — so I’ll admit in advance a preference for Random.

    But that doesn’t mean there is no place for Variable, or even Blocked, practice — there always will be, but for me it’s games, first.

    (more…)