HEAD COACH AS A COACH DEVELOPER (STUDY)

 

These notes come yet another study that you can read in its entirety here.

It looks at positioning the head coach as a coach developer so they can carry out literal team coaching duties, like we see in the AFL with assistant coaches doing line duties, and development coaching doing, well, development.

This leaves the head coach free to do their actual job, team coaching, and although the head coach has final say over pretty much everything, the assistants and development coach are pretty autonomous in their roles but strongly guided and facilitated by the head coach.

We also see head coaches now take longer leave from the season's end until post-Xmas sometimes, with assistant coaches being out in charge of training for extended periods of time.

Reflection was said to one of the most most important parts of this process for feedback and further education for the assistant coaches.

The first part are the notes I took from reading the study and below that are some images of how this could be set up at local level - a million years from we currently do but easily doable if you wanted to go my route.

Just note that coach developer and head coach are used interchangeably throughout the post below.

• Findings highlighted an intentional structuration of sequence/timings of the pedagogical tasks/activities assigned by the head coach to the assistant coaches
• Mistakes were looked at learning opportunities
• Fosters assistant coach commitment to team success via further education, responsibility and autonomy
• A coach developer is an educator, leader, facilitator and evaluator and they are recognised as informed experts in coaching practices
• They are also skilled facilitators of assistant coaches’ learning and education a swell as being  responsible for mentoring and challenging peers via a wide range of structured activities
• The coach developer must potentiate the learning by assistant coaches through "doing" via  diverse strategies and activities directly related to their daily responsibilities
• The head coach must intentionally connect and sequence all the activities to promote the structured development of reflection skills and supporting/enrich the professional development of their peers where “all observations at the weekend are linked with what we want to see and why and what our day to day reflection was about”
• As a coach developer, the head coach sees mistakes as learning opportunities, fosters commitment from every member to raise the team’s performance and provides space to plan/lead field tasks
• Reflection skills are paramount for the head coach
• Mistakes are considered ways to add a different and complimentary vision
• Advocate developing learning cultures in the practice context which will include plenty of mistakes but do not interfere because it’s the only way for the head coach to let the assistant coaches add what they have/what they see different, otherwise they’re just inhibiting it
• All staff members recognise mistakes as the ingredient that allow moving forward in professional development – psychological safety
• The assistant coach leads the exercise and if there’s something very specific the head coach wants to add then they can, but if the assistant coach fails/gets mixed up in the exercise, then the head coach does not stop them
• Any mistakes are discussed upon reflection, not in the moment
• The head coach intentionally invites all assistant coaches to analyse past-games/future opposition and present to the whole coaching staff to promote collaboration/critical reflection, and all analysis is done on their own or in pairs with no outside influences from the head coach or other assistant coaches
• By allowing assistant coaches to run practice activities, the coach developer acknowledges what has been learnt so far and the learning contents that need to be further addressed
• It’s unthinkable that an assistant coach does not get the opportunity to lead, empower them so they can feel committed + it gives the head coach the opportunity to understand what they have already mastered and their remaining flaws
• Training is a planned collaboration by technical staff but led/managed by the head coach which gives the responsibility of the sessions dynamics (time, player rotations, feedback etc) to the assistant coaches and the head coach can focus on how practice is unfolding (facilitator)
• Everyone helps plan the session, defining exercises according to what needs to be learnt then the head coach decides who will lead each activity and if a specific note is needed then they’ll highlight it
• There can be sessions where all head coach does is observe, they don’t lead anything
• Reflection involves written reports on training camps assessing each player, entire staff, facilities and a final reflection and then getting it sorted for the entire club + un/structured reflective talks which occur all the time
• Reflection seems to provide meaning to the dilemmas of practice, validating our beliefs
• From an assistant coach perspective, the teaching-learning approaches (learning by doing and reflecting) + the other strategies above have largely impacted their personal/professional development
• The structure of the work built by the head coach is extremely important to the assistant coaches so they can understand the connection between all tasks and their sequence/timing
• After the assistant coaches complete the initial report on the training camp, they has first dibs at identifying/interpreting the events of what occurred and then the head coach can update/transform the lived experience into knowledge by verbally explaining their thoughts
• Within written reflection, the reflexive practice is addressed through reflective conversations and then the coach developer uses the written reflection to systemise the thoughts/interpretations and then the reflective talks to verbalise/share different insights, crucial to developing new knowledge for the assistant coaches

In my accompanying post later this week, I'll lay down my thoughts on this and how to implement it at local level.