9. Observation & Feedback
(including Note-taking & Debriefing)
I missed this Saturday session due to a memorial service, but read through the material posted on Google Classroom. I’ll get to sit in on this in a future CDC, I believe, which will be brilliant, because, as I’ve said, the class is structured to model best practices by getting us, the coach developers, doing more and more of the heavy lifting as the course goes on. Working with the other coaches through the actual work of observing and thinking about it in greater detail will help enlighten me even more.
All of the material has been valuable so far, but I’m bummed I missed this one as it’s probably one of the key things I would like to improve, and more tools to observe and provide feedback would be welcome. And simply the practice in the class has been very helpful.
But, I had a read through the material and the slides from the classroom session, and here are my thoughts on it now based on those readings and, of course, my own experience doing some of this work already in other areas…
Observation
In order to give decent feedback, you need to make sure the things that would ordinarily get in the way don’t; and some of the tips are the same from the communication module, because we’re also meant to communicate our feedback, of course. So making sure your whole attention is focused on the session on which you’re meant to give feedback is crucial, as is avoiding making judgments — all the stuff we had worked through in the Listening module.
I sometimes use the ‘mirroring’ technique from Chris Voss and Motivational Interviewing, not for pulling some Jedi mind-tricks, but more to make sure I’ve gotten what the other person is talking about. With mirroring, if you’re not familiar with it, you repeat the last few words, or the last few salient words back to someone from what they’ve just said.
“Be observant and keep an open mind.”
Jim had a slide titled “Planning to Observe,” which I thought would make a good checklist to have, prior to observing a session you’re meant to provide feedback on. Here’s my crack at it, and things I want to make sure I’ve thought about before the session begins.
In addition to these items, there are a few filters, through which we can observe a session. They could be any or all of these:
The Coach Developer’s own experience
Recognized best practice
Research
National Governing Body (NGB) criteria
The Coach’s own criteria/request
Ethics, laws, and safety
I’m pretty good at applying my experience to my observation and most of the times, for sit-down sessions, good at note-taking, but I will often let the timing slip away, have a nebulous (or at least not explicitly defined) grasp of the measurement of success for a session, and my enthusiasm will sometimes tear me away from a good vantage point for observation. So those are definitely aspects I’ll want this checklist for, just to remind myself of what it is I should be focused on.
A Note about Note-taking
Note-taking! Looking back at weekend one, where we covered a lot of Coach Developer skills, one of the big ones was note-taking. And, while I think I’m not bad at taking notes, I learned a bunch of things about organizing them and some tools to allow me to make use of them later far, far better. Most of this I got from running the practical sessions I had prepared for the course (a formal and non-formal session, one on setting technique and the other on advanced serve reception tools), twice on my own at our home hall of Castle Park, and once with a Coach Developer Assessor’s feedback on the last weekend of the CDC-41 classroom sessions. Craig, the assessor, had some brilliant nuggets for note-taking.
One key takeaway: Keep your notebook handy at all times. I usually jot notes down on my session plan, but I either need to have a dedicated space big enough in or alongside the session plan, or, better, I need to use a dedicated notebook. Things get messy too quickly, especially if you have a demo piece to show the coaches what key coaching points they should be exhibiting. So keep that notebook handy. For my coding sessions I moved off hand-written notes about three years ago, because it made it easier to generate the evaluation reports at the end of the session, but in the hall or out in the world I feel like a notebook is a far better, less intrusive way to go.
The other? Keep columns for ‘What I Saw’ vs. ‘What I Think.’ Keep timestamps on the observations so that you can reference specific points in the actions where you have feedback, to make it even more relevant by adding context.
The differentiation between the two columns is that there is no judgment in the first column, so if there is a difference in opinion about what happened, you’ve also captured the straight facts, the time at which something occurred, so you can orient the discussion.
I actually used this in a coding certification workshop I ran this week1, and having the exact timestamp to recall certain events is so handy when in the past the exact sentiment might have slipped from my mind by the time we got around to discussing the feedback at the end.
Feedback
I like the differentiation between feedback (in the moment or briefly at the end) and debriefing (usually a longer session, often one on one, anywhere between 10 minutes to an hour).
For feedback, I know I still try to use a technique we2 used with the kids when they were small. Instead of phrasing things negatively, like “don’t punch your brother” or “don’t think of a white elephant sitting on the table in the middle of the room,” we would try to figure out the inverse, positive statement to use, like “hey, how about you ask your brother to un-fire you from your job in the imaginary zoo?” or “think about a sea otter swimming in our gutters.”
I will still, so, so often, catch myself with meaningless chatter feedback3, which I’m trying to cut down on. Just like measuring our outcomes, our feedback should be specific, actionable. Even when we’re praising a certain aspect of a session, praise the specific thing, so it’s not just a general, overall “good, great, you’re doing great.” It should also be tied as closely to the action you’re giving feedback on as possible. While I’m taking notes (or should be), the person receiving the feedback is usually thinking of just delivering the action or whatever it is they’re working on. I’m giving feedback to insert a (possibly) new piece of information for them to be mindful of, so if they’ve already moved on six or seven steps from the origin of the feedback, they’ll have a much more difficult time to attach the two when the session is still in progress.
Debriefing
Just like a well-planned session, the debrief should have a start, a middle, and an end. At the end, the coaches should be left with an action plan they’re motivated to pursue, based on the feedback in the debrief.
Some of the ways we can structure our debrief is in the form of a discussion, where the session components are evaluated and direct feedback is given on them, and, if appropriate or desired, alternatives could be proposed or compared to how they might achieve similar desired outcomes (or not). You (as the coach developer), might have the coach lead the debriefing session. Or the debrief might be an informal chat over coffee, or with a clipboard in hand, like a formal assessment for certification.
In all of these forms, though, you still need some tools to help progress the debrief.
One of the simplest I saw in subsequent weeks was the “What, So what? Now what?” model.
So the debrief can be organized around these questions…
Coach Developer: “What did you do?”
Coach: “I corrected the player’s setting technique with feedback, but maybe it was too generic.”
CD: “So what? Why does that matter?”
C: “Well, it could have been more helpful if I referenced where she was contacting the ball. Or if I gave her a cue to help get her hands in the proper position.”
CD: “Now what? What will you do with this insight?”
C: “Next time I’ll use our specific elevator floors analogy to remind her of the position of her hands when she contacts the ball.”
Thanks to the planning module, we even have other tools we can lean on, like the LEARNS model from above, just turning each of the letters into a question:
Learner-centered - Did the coach meet the learner where they learn best (taking into account things like motivation, pace, skill…)?
Environment - Was a supportive and fun environment where everyone can contribute established?
Activity-based - Were participants actively involved?
Reflection - Was reflection built into the tasks (or in the summary at the end)?
New - Were the materials up-to-date, current, and innovative?
Stretch - Did you find that sweet spot of just enough challenge to engage, but not too much to frustrate, and not too little to bore the participants?
And Jim had a few resources in the class folder from the European Coach Developer Academy, which explored other models, too. The 3D Process might be another to refer to, because it’s quick and easy to remember when you’re trying to plan your debrief session:
Diffuse - after the session, let the adrenaline dissipate a bit and the coach can go back over the session and recount what happened
Discover - Allow the coach to reflect on their performance and identify gaps
Deepen - Prompt or allow the coach to consider how they can use their insights and apply them to future sessions
A few years ago, about a year or two into my time training trainers for Apple, I added in a new component to the feedback after each person presented their lesson. Instead of going from peer feedback straight to mine, as the mentor trainer, I asked them to reflect on the lesson themselves, and even gave them space on the peer evaluation form to do a self-evaluation to catch any things they did really well or things they could have done better and then next steps they would take in the future if they presented this lesson to their own students. I really like the What Went Well, What Could Be Improved, Next Steps model, and I try to incorporate that into most feedback I have to generate, from player feedback after a campaign to team feedback after a season that goes to the federation and should help inform our following season by building on what we learned from the just finished one.
For example, in our 2022-2023 Campaign Retrospective, I wrote that some of our next steps should be more friendly matches against better competition for the U18W National Team. So we had more matches scheduled, nearly every training weekend and more, during the 2023-2024 campaign. As a result, the girls seemed a little more ready for competition in Malta this year, and came away with their first international wins. That, of course, wasn’t the only thing that did it, but it certainly helped.
I’m comfortable with session planning, but I do feel I need to have a better structure and plan to my coach developer work in the gym and apply some of those same techniques I use in the classroom out there.
Co-delivery on the Sunday
I reflected on this elsewhere, in a self-assessment document, but I presented on the Sunday with two Olympic handball coaches an Introduction to Progressive Passing and Catching Skills in Handball to Children. The two guys I worked with were excellent coach developers because they got me ready to coach the handball skills, but, on the day, as a group, we were very poor in staying in the Coach Developer role. We didn’t provide enough opportunity for the coaches to coach, and did a lot of it ourselves, between our team of three.
We used each other, the CDs, as the example athletes and coaches, so it was more of a demo session by a seasoned coach (the two handball guys), than getting the coaches coaching. Also there was a lot of exposition in the early stages, when silent demos would have done, but it’s a hard instinct to thwart when you know the people in front of you don’t know much about the sport, so you do feel a certain inclination to share a bit more.
The feedback from the coach developer assessor and the fellow prospective coach developers helped drive home the flaws in the session, which, when it goes off the rails, sometimes you’re all in, and the best thing you can do is reflect and fix it for next time. It was an excellent reminder of what our role is, and to make sure I keep that front of mind: which role am I in the hall as right now? I love coaching athletes, but it’s as fun and as valuable developing coaches. There were a lot of lessons from the session and the debrief, from minding the time more carefully to remaining in the coach developer role and taking full advantage of the coaches available when you are working with an additional coach developer or two.
Yes, it’s me from the future again, popping back for a visit as I edit the old self-reflection journal into something readable. Of course, by the time you, not me, read this, it’s the past, but a different past than the rest of the journal entry.
Okay, the ‘we’ might be generous to me; my wife is the one who was always researching and digging and coming up with optimal solutions for all sorts of things. She’s like the woman behind the curtain in the Wizard of Oz and I’m often a slightly less impressive Oz facade.
You know the type: “Good!” “Excellent!” “Great job!” Like I’m some real-life incarnation of the Wii Sports cheerleader/narrator: