10 WAYS TO IMPROVE YOUR COACHING

The following comes from a passout via Coach Mike Dunlap: 

The evolution of a master teacher takes years of skill development. The outstanding coach is an exceptional teacher. We believe that there are fundamental steps that should be considered when teaching your team:

1) Know the five laws of learning
• Explain what you want
• Demonstrate for the learner
• Player demonstrates
• Correct demonstration
• Repetition is lord and master

2) Know how players learn
• Visual
• Auditory
• Kinetic
• Writing/Drawing
• Player as coach
• Cooperative versus competitive technique
• Whole, part, whole versus part whole method
• Feedback system – negative versus positive

3) Teaching techniques
• Universal teaching technique (i.e. find the problem and fix it)
• Praise, prompt, and leave (i.e. find positive, correction, and next step, leave)
• Relay teach – the cooperative method
• Create your own language (e.g. anachronisms)
• Use your voice as a tool
• Speak in word pictures, analogies, and metaphors
• Overload to get conditioned response (i.e. consistently give the student the advantage when they are demonstrating as early success breeds confidence)
• Progression – teach in sequence and then reverse it (i.e. inductive & deductive)

4) Use the four steps of shaping
• Set the stage
• Modeling
• Prompt
• Forms of feedback (i.e. ask questions, make observations, reinforce the correct response)

5) Talk less, do more
• We need to reduce out verbal instruction

6) Recognize the power of observation, listening, and gathering information
• Behavior patterns
• Myers/ Briggs psychological exam, self-aggression evaluation, and the “I am sheet”

7) Role declaration is paramount to a coaches’ success

8) Know your audience, circumstance, and be ready to adapt or change course

9) Competition means time, score, and personal records (e.g. individual/group)

10) Apologize
• We will make mistakes. We humanize ourselves when we go public and our players will accept us more readily.