The Teesra

Category: session planning

  • Pedagogy & philosophy — ECB National Programmes getting it right

    This post relates to the National Programmes prior to 2022. Changes to the training programmes for Activators in 2023 and 2024 have rather changed my opinion.

    In a recent post I mentioned how, in my opinion, the ECB’s National Programmes have more to say about learning to play (by playing “games” to learn; repetition without repetition) and player behaviours (the multi-ability model, developed in collaboration with Create Development) than the mainstream coaching programmes.

    I ran All Stars sessions for three years, pre-lockdown, and have delivered training for National Programmes Activators for a couple of years, now, and the more I see the more I am convinced by the underlying pedagogy and philosophy of the National Programmes.

    Pedagogy — the method and practice of teaching

    Philosophy — a theory or attitude that acts as a guiding principle for behaviour

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  • Whole-Part-Whole — time for another look?

    Back in 2014 I posted a simple page describing the “Whole-Part-Whole” session plan — play a game (“Whole”), coach a specific skill component relevant to that game (“Part”), then play the game, or a conditioned version of the game, again (“Whole”, again).

    Just a description, filed under “coaching resources” alongside some more traditional session plans (level 2, back then, was billed as “learning to write plans”), with no attempt to explain why it might be useful.

    Recently, the page has started to generate some more views — nothing spectacular, but as many visits in the last 12 months as in the previous 7 years.

    So I thought it might be interesting to take another look at Whole-Part-Whole (WPW), and why I still think it is a useful framework for session planning.

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  • After-school club — programme planning

    After-school club — programme planning

    I was booked to run an after-school club this half term — an hour per week, yrs 7&8.

    What follows is an outline of the programme and session plans, with an indication of the Objectives I was working towards.

    N.B. Most of the “planning” was actually done on-the-fly.

    I knew something of the School’s objectives in advance, and the session constraints we would be working to; I also knew what I wanted the players to experience, in terms of “skills” included, physical and psychological. But the actual “plan” came together on the way to the School each afternoon, and had to be flexible enough to be changed to accommodate e.g. fire alarms going off 5 minutes before the scheduled start time…

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