Category: Coaching
Coaching
NOTES ON FACILITATION SKILLS AND TECHNIQUES 2012
Keith Wilkinson
Introduction:
For three days in September 2012, I attended a safety workshop in Mississauga for a major energy company. The workshop was led by three learning facilitators from a professional training company and I was able to compare and contrast their approach and facilitation with those of NCCP LFs.
Later in the Fall, I attended a three day CAO ( Coaching Association of Ontario) Facilitators workshop in Gravenhurst. The facilitation and approach was surprisingly similar, given the differences between corporate and sports coaching contexts.
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Of all the roles, stances and expectations that are thrust upon coaches, the most important is to be a supportive educator — inspiring, enabling, supporting and empowering. And all these are well beyond the bounds of teaching sports skill and expertise. Of all the knowledge and skills coaches are expected to have, Kidd believes that the most important is an explicit pedagogy or ‘logic model’, with a curriculum of self and social discovery, and the experience of putting these into practice. It is not enough to say we believe in sport as education. The research says that we must become much more intentional – about both the provision of opportunity, and the quality of the experience provided by sports
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The modern Rugby coach seems to have been fooled into thinking that the coaching job entails production of a generation of "multi-phase-contact, breakdown-oriented players who run around in pods, setting targets for strike runners to exploit, while the hoi-poloi of the team look to barge into rucks and tidy up loose ball.” It is not a great concept for the art, speed and fluidity of the game. There is no evidence of game sense, imagination or creativity. However, I still hear this language at practice sessions, the length and breadth of the country.
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As Technical Director of Rugby Ontario I spend a lot of time around the playing and practicing of rugby in Ontario and across Canada. One thing often stands out to me as one fundamental issue (amongst others) that coaches must address for the betterment of the game.
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All coaches undertake some level of planning when it comes to delivering an effective practice. This planning could be in the form of email exchanges or phone calls to coordinate with assistant coaches, or spending the first ten minutes practice sorting out the session while the athletes play touch.
Some of the factors that go into planning are the number of athletes, their level of rugby skill and athletic ability, the length of the session, the amount of space available and the number of days to the next game. These are all important factors when determining the goals of your practice. It is counterproductive to plan a practice that develops advanced strategic play when the basic technical skills required are lacking – for example working on advanced scrummaging techniques (nudges/wheels) when basic body positioning is poor.
In my experience, effective coaches take a step back from session planning and start with a season plan. They establish goals for the year – what techn ...
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