Creating a Positive Learning Environment - Mick McKinnon, Hockey Coach Educator
If people learn differently, what are the challenges? How to cater for a mix of learning styles
Unless you get to know the person, then you’ve no chance.
“There’s a saying: ‘how many times have I told you this?’ Well if you’ve told them that, that many times - you need to find a different way of delivering the message.”
‘I worked with one player in particular who just couldn’t understand one aspect of the game and I was getting extremely frustrated. I had a really good assistant coach - who is an educator and he said ‘this is on us, not her!’ Because you keep throwing stuff out there, and it’s not going in.
“So we sat down and we chatted with her about what worked for her and we put things into video for her that we were able to just diagram for other people, or run through on the pitch - it made a difference.”
‘But I spent 6 months banging my head against a brick wall - blaming her, when in fact in retrospect I probably knew after 2 months that it wasn’t going in and I should have looked at it in a different way.’
Is ‘what do you need from me’ - a vital question? From a coaching perspective
‘You can’t impose what you want on them. You need to be delivering what they want!’
“I think one of the biggest things to understand is - I hear coaches talk about ‘my team or my players.’ But that’s not the relationship, the relationship is you’re their coach. You work for them, not the other way around.”
‘We tend to think, well they’re my team and they’ll do this. But actually no, you’re their coach and you need to make them better. Now sometimes they don’t know what’s best for them and it might be they think A is the solution, and you know it’s not. Your job is to convince them or persuade them that B’s the solution.’
“Finding out what that player needs is the first step to making them better.”
What is the impact of a poor learning environment? Contrast with a good learning environment
‘I think a poor learning environment is where people are scared to make mistakes.’
“When people are scared to make mistakes, there’ll be no progress because mistakes are necessary for learning.”
‘I describe the journey towards competence or expertise in something as a sequence of mistakes that get further apart and less dramatic. But they’re still there, even the best people in any field make mistakes from time to time. If as an educator, you take away the person’s willingness to make mistakes then you take away their ability to learn.’
How important is reflection in reducing mistakes? As a journey of learning to reduce mistakes
‘If you have the ability to self reflect - so if you imagine a mistake is running into a brick wall - some people I've experienced will jump up and blame the wall! And they’re never getting any better.’
‘It’s when you make a mistake, if you have the ability to look at yourself and what did I do wrong, not blame other people, not blame situations - what did I do wrong? What could I have done better here. Then those mistakes will become further apart and less dramatic, but if you keep blaming the wall - then you’re never getting any better!’
When should a coach self reflect? Constant Learning
‘Coaching’s a constant, you’re never switched off.’
‘You might be driving, you might hear something on the radio and you go, oh that’s interesting and you might apply it to coaching. So coaching is a constant. Self reflection should be this constant thing, and sometimes success is the worst thing that can happen to a coach because it leads you not to self reflect. You think, well things are going great and that’s probably the best time to self reflect.’
‘Self reflection isn't just about what went wrong, it’s identifying the things you did well that led to success, and I think that a lot of people can be down on themselves via self reflection.’
“But it’s an absolutely vital skill that coaches need to understand and again it’s not something we spend enough time on in coach education. It’s the root to improvement and success can mask faults.”
‘I had an incident, I used to have big issues with umpires when I was on the sideline. But it was, and I’d blame them. It was only when i realised that it was my fault - you know I had one incident where i was ashamed of myself and i realised it was my fault and it was counterproductive to what i was trying to achieve. That took me two or three years to go through and to go through a lot of pain - but it was necessary. And that was a brick wall for me where time and time again I blamed the wall.’
‘Only when that realisation came - oh, this is actually my fault, this is about me was I able to move past it.’
How can you support your player’s self reflection? Empowering Athletes
‘Don’t assume that they all want it, or need to - is the first thing?’
‘Because for some people self reflection can be quite negative because they only look at the negative things and they start to pile dirt on themselves. Where in fact, I've worked with players who do 95% of things really well in a game and then they’ll be stressing about the 5% of the things they didn’t do well in the game and it’ll start to deteriorate from there.’
“I think that giving them opportunity via video, giving them opportunity via just little questions at training, little one on one conversations with them, allows them the ability to self reflect if they want to.”
To what level should players design the environment? Player-led Coaching
‘I still think that's your job as the coach. I think that they play a part in it.’
“The best coach educators are the players.”
‘So if they’re not getting better, you’re doing something wrong as a coach. So there’s your first sign - that’s how they basically tell you things need to change because they’re not getting better.’
‘But I still think it's your job as a coach to create that learning environment. We mustn’t get away from player-led coaching teaching our players to become better coaches. I think that we can sometimes go too far down that root with player-led coaching where the players are coming out of it with a lot more coaching knowledge but haven’t improved as players. They’re still players!’
“Player-led coaching means sometimes the players lead us to change things, but I believe in player empowerment but to a certain extent. I still think you're the coach, you’re the one who sets up the framework for the way the team plays, which will be dictated by their abilities. But ultimately you’re the person who sets up the framework, you’re the one who designs the sessions that get them to play in that style.”
Top tip for a coach to improve learning? How to improve the learning environment
“I think a top tip for any coach, any young coach is to coach as much as they can, and coach as wide a range of people as they can.”
‘I think (‘at the risk of sounding like a grumpy old man’), the biggest mistake that younger coaches make is they want to go straight in at a certain level. They see themselves as coaching at this level and there’s a snobbery about who they coach. Whereas, by increasing the diversity of the people that you coach, in age, gender, physical ability - what you’re doing is you’re increasing your exposure to different types of learning and what works for different people.’
‘The more exposure you have to those different types of people and different types of environments will improve you as a coach when you eventually reach the level that you aspire to be at.’
‘I think that younger coaches should be looking to coach as much and as diverse a range of people as possible, rather than just being focused on the level I want to be at and I'm going to go there straight away.’
“I think some people are trying to jump into Formula 1 cars, before they've mastered the go-kart!”
