Developing a Coaching Philosophy (part 3)
Developing a Coaching Philosophy (part 3)
Magic mirror on the wall...
In the prologue for this series I wrote about the value of a coaching philosophy and in part one I shared how I began developing my own in earnest. In part two, I wrote about one place development can get stuck, as well as an example of how I managed to sidestep that. I encourage you to read the previous parts to understand the full story behind developing your learning philosophy.
This part of the series shows the importance of reflection in any learning.
I have been studying coach learning and development since 2018 and I have slowly formulated some ideas about how coaches can grow most effectively. But I have noticed two characteristics that I think underlie nearly all successful coach learning, reflection and authenticity. To dig into the role reflection plays in development, I’ll refer to my coaching experience through the lens of The Reflective Practitioner by Donald Schön, which I read in 20221.
n.b.: Schön wrote the book in 1984 and his use of language, particularly gendered language, reflects the norms of that time. Rather than highlight every time I make a change, I’ll make a blanket statement here that I have changed his gendered pronouns to gender-neutral “they”.
It’s been said that life is a great teacher but I’ll make the argument that life is getting a lot of help from you, the learner. One of the many famous sayings of John Wooden is “you haven’t taught it until they’ve learned it”, so what makes life a great teacher is you being a conscientious learner. But being an engaged learner is tougher than you might first acknowledge. For that, I blame all your formal education. From elementary school all the way through college, you were shown that education consists of showing up where teachers would transmit knowledge to your open mind. That way of approaching education doesn’t serve you well when you’re out in the world and yet you continue to learn. How?
According to many in the coach education field, coach learning commonly happens in informal and, often, self-directed ways2. When I say that life is a great teacher, it’s because of informal learning. But, in order for life to be the great teacher we say it is, you have to direct your learning. Reflection is how you take what life shows you and create durable learning. You likely already reflect often on your coaching but you may not have realized that you were doing it. This part of the series will help you better understand what reflection is, what it can be, and how you can do it better.
Donald Schön defines reflection very simply: “both ordinary people and professional practitioners often think about what they are doing, sometimes even while doing it…” (p. 50). When you dwell on a tough loss, rehashing what went wrong? Reflection. Telling stories with fellow coaches? Reflection. Writing a speech for your end of the year banquet? Reflection. But reflection doesn’t automatically include learning and that’s why Schön goes on to say, “As they try to make sense of it, they also reflect on the understandings which have been implicit in their action, understandings which they surface, criticize, restructure, and embody in further action” (p. 50). So when you hear the old coaching cliché, “the best time to plan your next practice is immediately after your current practice” you should see it as an invitation to reflect in a way that Schön would approve of. The key is that you’re thinking about what happened in order to increase your understanding of the situation.
It would be easy to think that there was a time in my coaching development when I reflected without seeking deeper understanding and then something happened to me (like reading The Inner Game of Tennis) and I began to reflect in a deeper way. The truth is that I can’t remember a time when I realized that there was more to reflecting than just a post-match effort to figure out what happened. It’s likely that, over time, I got better at asking different questions while reflecting. I probably got better at thought experiments like, “what would have happened if I had acted differently?” instead of simply asking “what happened?” and being unhappy with the outcome. Even though I don’t know how it evolved, the key is that my reflection did evolve to include not just what happened but also what could have happened. That’s one way to improve your understanding of a situation and, therefore, improve your reflection. But how can you make improvements like that? It starts by looking at what you choose to reflect on.
For many coaches, the most common thing to reflect on is technique, how the players and teams you’re coaching do what they do. But you’re also likely reflecting on your own technique: you’re considering what drills or games you could add to the next practice, or you’re looking for a different way to defend a particular attack, or you’re wondering if you should change the cues you use when teaching a skill. I know I did this kind of reflecting when I looked back on previous matches and decided what the team needed to work on most in the future. There are other areas that you can reflect on: tactical concerns, competitiveness, player communication, coach communication, to name a few possibilities. An easy way to improve your reflection is to reflect on multiple areas of your coaching. But there’s a deeper what question to ask, what are you comparing things to?
This standard of comparison often goes unnoticed and, therefore, it isn’t reflected on. You may not realize that, when you reflect on a coaching choice you’ve made, you’re comparing the outcome of that choice to what you had expected or hoped would happen. That outcome can then be judged as good, bad, expected, unexpected, etc. relative to that standard. This process is what Schön calls problem setting: “When we set the problem, we select what we will treat as the ‘things’ of the situation, we set the boundaries of our attention to it, and we impose upon it a coherence which allows us to say what is wrong and in what directions the situation needs to be changed. Problem setting is a process in which, interactively, we name the things to which we will attend and frame the context in which we will attend to them” (p. 40). So deeper reflection doesn’t mean attending to a wider variety of actions that happen, it means also attending to why those actions are important to you and why you believe those actions should be changed. Asking questions about your problem setting helps you define and understand your coaching philosophy.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with making decisions without reflecting on them, so you shouldn’t think that you’re coaching wrong if you’re not reflecting on your problem setting. In many ways, being good at something means that you can do it without thinking about it. Schön calls this intuitive kind of performance knowledge-in-action. But he warns that relying solely on intuition and not reflecting can lead to “overlearning” (where what you’ve learned becomes so ingrained that you miss small but important differences), boredom, and burn-out (p. 61). Reflection keeps you paying attention to how both you and the situations you’re in change over time. So how can you reflect on your coaching?
The answer to how you reflect on your coaching is shaped by your philosophy of learning. Recall that you can view knowledge and learning on a spectrum from absolute to relative (see the prologue and part 1 of this series). It is less important where you are on this spectrum, it is more important that your style of reflection follows your philosophy. Schön refers to the relationship between your philosophy and your reflection as framing: “When a practitioner becomes aware of their frames, they also become aware of the possibility of alternative ways of framing the reality of their practice. They take note of the values and norms to which they have given priority, and those they have given less importance, or left out of account altogether” (p. 310).
When I was more towards the absolute side of the knowledge spectrum, my frame prioritized the knowledge and experience of experts over my own. I gave little importance to my own experience and even less to the experiences of the players in my care. I valued what experts did and said so highly because I believed that knowledge was universal and absolute so what experts knew would be better than what I and the players knew. As a result of this frame, my problem setting consisted of comparing what players in my care did to what elite players did and looking for differences. I would attend to these differences and seek to lessen the differences. My plans for solving the problems I had set followed three steps: diagnose, search, and apply. If I could accurately diagnose the differences between the players in front of me and the elite players I had seen, then I could search for methods to address those differences. My searches consisted of looking for expert methods, things that were “tried and true”. Once I found methods, I could apply them. If the differences shrank, then the methods were working and I continued to apply them. If the differences didn’t appear to work then I would look for other methods.
In this case, I reflected on the differences between the players in my care and elite players. I sought to better understand what made them different. I reflected on the methods I applied. I looked for signs that they were working (or not). In part 1 of this series, I described this kind of reflection as a turning point in the development of my coaching philosophy, when I began to shift towards the relative side of the knowledge spectrum. How did my framing and problem setting shift as a result?
As I came to view knowledge as relative, my frame became one that prioritized my unique situation over generalizations. I valued the feedback of the players, both direct and indirect, more highly than I had previously. I came to believe that how they were succeeding or failing at tasks was more informative than if they were succeeding or failing. The problems I set became about comparing a player’s current state to either their past states or to their possible future states instead of about comparing them to elite players. To solve these new problems I had set, I followed different steps: define, experiment, and adapt. If I could accurately define the present state of the player, then I could experiment in practices with ideas I had about pushing that player towards a different possible future. When practices became experiments, the plans may have been certain but the outcomes were not. As a consequence, I had to prepare to adapt if the outcomes weren’t what I’d hoped for. Schön described it this way: “The lesson plan must be put aside then, or else it must become a rough ground plan for action, a skeleton around which the teacher develops variations according to their on-the-spot understanding of the problems of particular students” (p. 332).
What is seen in these two examples is that the frames you use and the problems you set are products of your learning philosophy. Reflecting on them creates a deeper awareness of how and why you coach. Deliberately shaping them transforms your coaching.
This part of the series is about the hows and whys of reflection in the context of learning. But there’s still that last piece, authenticity, that we need to discuss. That’s next.
Developing a Coaching Philosophy (part 4)
Schön, D. A. (1984). The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think In Action. Basic Books.
Nelson, L. J., Cushion, C. J., & Potrac, P. (2006). Formal, Nonformal and Informal Coach Learning: A Holistic Conceptualisation. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 1(3), 247–259. https://doi.org/10.1260/174795406778604627