Written By Mike Nolan and reproduced from TheFA.Com
Mike Nolan is an FA Licensed Coach embarking on the FA Youth Award journey and has, in essence, created a ‘community of practice’ to help support, widen and develop his own and his peers knowledge of coaching. His reflection on the experience follows below.
In Robert Jones’s book, The Sports Coach as Educator, a community of practice is defined as:
“a group of people [coaches] who share a common concern, set of problems, or a passion about a topic, and who deepen their knowledge and expertise in this area by interacting on an ongoing basis.” (Wenger et al. 2002: 4)
Coach education and learning should not stop once the course is finished. I have found sharing and reviewing practices and ideas with other coaches invaluable.
Since starting The FA Youth Award Modules, I have been lucky to be part of a group of coaches who initially got in touch on the old FACA forum, meeting up in person after much discussion on the forum and by email.
Over the last 13 months since attending the FA Youth Award Module 3 (YAM3); a group of coaches (Ricky Boxall, Phil Green, Ian James, Dennis O’Meara and myself) have been sharing our ideas, sessions and reviews. The session review has always been an important aspect of coaching courses from Level 1 upwards, but in YAM3 it comes into its own. The process of review is very detailed and this reflection refines and improves the coaching interventions, set up and strategies used in the next practice. “Whole Part Whole” coaching with a very specific “focus”; and a wide variety of coaching “tools” are the basis of what makes this kind of coaching very effective, but also quite difficult to master.
We try and give our players an environment where they are not afraid to try new things; we encourage them to take on challenges; we tell them that we know that it can be difficult; so why not embrace this as coaches and be a bit easier on ourselves?
Having completed the final part of the course, we were told to go away and practice, ideally for at least a year. Once we considered ourselves to be ready we were to fill in our log books and apply for assessment for full Youth Award if we wished. The innovative approach to learning on the course is reflected in this process.
A coach (with appropriate prerequisites) can take the YAM3 in order to simply gain new knowledge, and get the attendance certificate having completed a formative assessment during the course. It is then up to the candidate if they want to go on for the YA assessment. As a result, the pressure of a forthcoming exam is not present while attending the course. I personally found this a better way of learning, and it allowed you freedom to try something during your delivered session.
The other innovation in the YA is that the practical part of your assessment is carried out with the coach coaching their own team – not coaching another group of adult coaches. This consists of two twenty minute practices out of the ten log-book sessions conducted with the players previously. Although having an assessor watching will of course affect you, you have the confidence of knowing your players and knowing you have run it with them before. The process is more realistic, giving the assessor a feel for how you actually coach your players rather than delivering a session to a mixed bunch of adults that may know the things the assessor is looking for.
All of that is fine, but going away and practising on your own without any feedback is hard. I was lucky, the quality of the feedback from our group has always been excellent. It is important to be honest but constructive, and as we got used to reviewing each other’s session plans and reviews by email, this became easier. Crucially, experience has shown you have to feel comfortable with whom you are sharing your feedback; it’s not easy receiving difficult feedback.
Speaking for myself, this sharing (not just of YAM 3 stuff, but the various issues that crop up every week in grassroots youth coaching) was vital in developing the ideas gained on all of the Youth Award Modules.
Until recently we still lacked one thing – seeing all our efforts in action and we felt this was imperative as we approached assessment.
Resultantly, we decided to arrange a session for collective review. Our assessor agreed to meet with us afterwards to discuss anything that cropped up.
This led to my delivering a session with “Forward players using support behind effectively” as a focus on a cold Friday evening in February at Bedforshire FA’s 3G AGP in Dunstable. The group were U15 boys from Flamstead Youth, and thirteen showed up – one less than planned for (something every coach has to deal with).
I would urge coaches on any course to try and keep in touch with each other and share ideas. If you can get a few others that you feel comfortable with, I would highly recommend holding a coaching session for each other to discuss.
We invited a few other like-minded coaches along, some of who had also completed YAM3. We knew that it was not about me trying to deliver that elusive perfect session, but putting on a real piece of work with players I knew, as a basis for discussion and learning.
The players warmed up themselves, sorted themselves into teams and then went into a game, 7v6. They were given an opening challenge, but no conditions; this was the “Whole”. After a quick review, we moved it into a “Part” practice with conditions and challenges designed to improve our play in terms of the focus. The session was adjusted “in action” as we watched how the players performed, then back into a Whole once more (7v6 match again) before finishing up, the players taking responsibility for their cool down and stretches.
The other coaches were excellent in their review, being well practiced in approaching it from a Youth Award Module review method:
- What went well?
- Even better if…
- Change (for next time)
Here a certain degree of trust has been built up over conversations in person (and almost a thousand emails!) so once the discussion got going it was very open and thought provoking. The kind of challenges and conditions used, the group work and other interventions were all discussed. The YAM3 review has 25 boxes to tick; this thorough assessment process requires that each of these has to be ticked at least once in the two sessions.
It was very interesting to compare different styles of coaching, the wording we would use and the tweaks we would make to try and get the outcomes we desired.
Being asked “Why did you do it this way?” meant a much better reflection on my part, and I found this challenging at first – but also very rewarding since talking about these reasons opened other lines of discussion, fresh ideas and suggested adaptations of strategies used.
For me it was the most worthwhile exercise since attending the course itself over a year ago. While it is hard to quantify, I feel that this one session was worth more than a dozen on my own in terms of learning gained – and probably more.
I would urge coaches on any course to try and keep in touch with each other and share ideas. If you can get a few others that you feel comfortable with, I would highly recommend holding a coaching session for each other to discuss.
We try and give our players an environment where they are not afraid to try new things; we encourage them to take on challenges. We tell them that we know that it can be difficult; we understand that they may not get it right straight away. We want them to “give it a go” without fear of failure.
Experience has shown you have to feel comfortable with whom you are sharing your feedback; it’s not easy receiving difficult feedback.
So why not embrace this as coaches and be a bit easier on ourselves? It may be a bit out of our comfort zone to try something like this shared session, but we are not expected to put on a perfect piece of work every time in front of our peers. Real coaching is just not like that.
We plan and deliver it with the intention of it being the best it can be, of course. It could be argued that we learn more when things don’t go quite as we expected – but that’s the nature of the game too.
We will have outcomes and they may not be the ones we were expecting, but they are outcomes – we will learn from them.
There is a lot to gain from sharing experiences, whether we choose to do that by email, phone or face to face. However, from my experience having the actual practice unfold before your eyes was worth any amount of swapping session plans.
This article appears on The FA Licensed Coaches’ Club website. For information about accessing the site and becoming a Licensed Coach please visit: The FA Licensed Coaches’ Club Website