8. Planning
“The best laid plans of mice and men…”
The Start at the End: Outcomes
We dove into planning by first looking at the outcomes we were looking for1. Not exactly the outcomes, but what the outcomes should be. And that is SMART.
If you (me) haven’t seen the acronym before, it stands for: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, Time-bound
It’s a super useful measuring stick to put against your outcomes. Is the statement I’ve made, in relation to knowledge or experience gained during this session, going to be something I can concretely check for understanding or achievement? Well, if it’s all of these things, then that is going to be a good outcome.
“But, man,” you say, having stepped into the Ye Olde Horse and Cart Shop and Assembly Room, “that horse seems to be behind the thing it’s meant to pull.”2
Well, in this particular case, the outcome is our horse, which is going to drive the entire session and should pull along the tasks that will help us get knowledge.
Once we know what we want to achieve, we can start planning out how to get there, hence the need for a few guardrails for writing good outcome statements.
Next Up: The Middle & Tasks
The meat of any session should be activities or group work where the coaches are doing as much as possible, as soon as possible.
Jim trotted out another acronym3 to help design tasks that would best advance our participants’ skills: the L.E.A.R.N.S. principle.
Learner-centered - meet the learner where they learn best (taking into account things like motivation, pace, skill…)
Environment - make sure you’ve established a supportive and fun environment where everyone can contribute
Activity-based - if they’re actively involved they’re more likely to learn; thinking and applying ideas and practicing will be the best way to learn new skills
Reflection - by encouraging and building in reflection to the tasks (or in the summary at the end) there’s more attention paid to the session’s contents, which will optimize learning
New - keep the materials up-to-date, current, and innovative4
Stretch - find that sweet spot of just enough challenge to engage, but not too much to frustrate, and not too little to bore the participants, like the desirable difficulties mentioned in the Learning Styles section
I liked this, but I found the checklist he gave us way better, for me.5
The thing I like most about the checklist is the tool it gives us for evaluating our tasks to see if we keep, edit, or trash them, all based on how they relate to the outcome, the participants, and the learning. It should answer a lot of questions we would have that measure the effectiveness of the session: How do we know we’ve achieved learning?
The Beginning at the End:
Once I have the outcomes, and the middle, it’s time to hit the beginning.
We have another acronym, but it’s awkward, because you can’t pronounce it, so I won’t re-print it here6, but let’s just say you should introduce:
yourself,
the topic,
the context in which the topic is embedded,
and the outcomes
On Thursday, before this weekend, were supposed to develop a session plan for presenting My Vision for Coach Support in my NGB. Before this Saturday session, my session plan for the Sunday delivery looked wildly different than what I wound up presenting. Originally I had expected to present the wall of support we developed the prior week (see above). But as Saturday went on, I realized that wasn’t the purpose of the session at all… this was an opportunity to leverage the brains from the different sports around me to drive more interesting solutions and ideas for Volleyball Ireland Coach Support. I may have realized this because I’m pretty sure Jim pretty much explicitly came out and said that.
In the evening between the Saturday and Sunday sessions, after the drive back home from the North, I re-wrote a lot of my session plan to have this structure of the Intro (2 minutes), the Core (8 minutes), which consisted of up to 3 activities, and the Conclusion (3 minutes).
“My Vision for Coach Support in my NGB” as Guinea Pig
The next day I presented my vision… or, rather, a shared, developed vision, thanks to the folks in the room, and it definitely had some rough patches. My biggest takeaway from the interactive presentation was that I spent too long on the intro… in a 12-15 minute session I used up 5 minutes in a long-winded intro to the WHY we needed a vision for coach support and use the limited Coach Developer resources wisely.
This was the plan:
Topic: My Vision for Coach Support in my NGB
Duration: 15 minutes
Facilitator: Matt Hanlon
Outcomes:
Participants will be able to clearly identify supports for coaches for Volleyball Ireland and the beginning of the roadmap to delivering these supports.
Intro:
Time: 2 min
Like many of our sports, participants way outnumber the number of suitable coaches — so one of our main challenges is to involve and educate more people to perform in the role of a coach and to know what that means.
We need to balance CD involvement with broadness of reach… a low bar to start with targeted, timely instruction or tasks that will further coaches’ understanding of fundamental volleyball skills to teach.
Core:
Time: 8 min
Task 1: What are the key motivations for coaches to seek support? (And also, what are the key motivations for your coaches to coach, in the first place?)
Task 2: What are some of the most effective (from a CD-time and from a coach development perspective) supports we could put in place? By exploring common tools in use now?
Task 3 [if time allows] : How can we make the coach feel the most responsible for his or her own learning?
Conclusion:
Time: 3 min
Map the results of our tasks onto the bricks from the Wall of Support (or create new bricks, if need be…
Now, I want to pat myself on the head somewhat sarcastically for my ambition in having three tasks in the span of 8 minutes (the boxers are fast, but come on…). So it made for a messy run through the tasks.
I had the resources listed out (flipchart and stand, markers, paper), and the questions I would use in the Core phase to encourage things along, if they were stalled or veered way off course.
Questions:
What are the main motivations of coaches in the different sports? Eg. kids, in the sport, played it growing up, giving back, way to pass the time…
How do you consume information about the craft of coaching, and of coaching your sport, in particular? Podcasts? Websites? Videos? Instagram? Apps?
What does your coaches’ network look like?
Methods of assessment:
Open-ended questions (TEDS-PIE)
Feedback from the sticky notes and in the answers to the questions
The questions helped a lot… I had a vision of participants writing their support bricks on sticky notes and placing them on my developed Wall of Coach Support from the previous day in a triumphant marriage of the task output with previous work! Well, given that 15 minutes isn’t long, and when someone blabs and fidgets a little before getting to the good stuff, well, you’re gonna be pressed for time.
But the questions worked to focus things in a tight timeframe and clarify the task when it wasn’t immediately obvious to the participants what I was looking for. This was a definite case of group management, because they’re not always going to focus on what you want them to focus on. I need to have written more clear tasks, of course, or have other leading questions and props around to encourage discussion in a particular wa to achieve the outcome.
Having lived through it, I would make sure the timer is more visible,I would trim the beginning down, dive right into more clearly stated tasks, have the markers and sticky notes prepped and in front of the group, and try to save even more time at the end to let the group summarize out findings. I think that’s a really powerful piece that will help their last impression of the session be of themselves providing the real intelligence to the whole proceeding.
Of course that wasn’t the VERY start… this was following lunch and Jim put up the Intended Learning Outcomes, as per usual… with a twist… at the end of the session we would complete the 4 ILOs.
I’m going to drop the horse and cart metaphor now because I can sense it wobbling like a very badly laid analogy by an unlicensed architect, and there’s no way I’m shoehorning the rest of the planning section into this kind of thing.
As someone with an intense and perhaps unwarranted hatred of acrostic poems, these acronyms and the way I keep chucking them on the page are causing me just a little bit of twinge of pain in my very soul.
There goes my module on “Teaching Sideout Scoring” and “Hair Tips from Steve Timmons”
It’s like Jim Stone’s super helpful book, A Game Plan for Better Practices: Using Checklists as a Training Guide: https://jimstoneconsulting.com/book/
Okay, fine, it was STCO (Self, Topic, Context, Outcomes). See? How are you supposed to pronounce that?