School Improvement and Coaching

I've been thinking a lot about coaching lately. Partially, I'm sure, because I'm reading Making Learning Whole by David Perkins (thanks, Gary!) but also because I think so much of the way we learn and the way we set up smart systems can be seen in smart coaching.

When I first became an Ultimate Frisbee captain in college, one of the former captains of the team told me, "Don't try to do everything in a time out. Give everyone three things to think about and nothing more." It was great advice because it was always very tempting to go over EVERYTHING I saw on the field in every time out. But whenever I did that, folks never retained everything, and now everyone walked away with a different piece of what they thought was important.

This became great advice as a high school coach as well... and not just for timeouts. One of things I learned as a coach was not to try to do everything at once. Before every season, I laid out all the skills and concepts I wanted them to master, and then I laid them out across the season -- how I would introduce ideas and then constantly spiral back to them... so that we could build slowly and smartly together. But I also learned how to focus on certain ideas, certain concepts, player by player, skill by skill. And I learned that, whenever possible, connecting ideas together, so that players could see how what they did related back to the whole was incredibly important.

But I also realized that I couldn't teach everything. I know coaches whose teams had twenty plays with multiple offensive and defensive sets, and more often than not, those teams could be beat just by out-executing them. Our teams did what we did very well, and what we did was rarely scripted, but rather we put in systems that relied on players to know what they were doing very well and then make smart choices based on what they saw in front of them.

Yeah... allegory, right?

But what made me think about this was not about teachers teaching kids, but how too many places deal with teacher learning and school improvement. So much about the current school improvement ideas are about trying to improve twenty different things at once, and I don't think that works. It sounds good -- especially because we can all see that there are often many, many problems in schools -- but it rings hollow, because the sum of all those parts rarely add up to a whole.

What amazes me, more and more, is how few schools have a clearly defined pedagogical practice that can be articulated simply and powerfully, and are therefore, even more susceptible to this kind of problem.

Let us think about how we build smart teams and build smart schools. Let us realize that we're better off picking the things we want to do well and then work tirelessly to do those things well. Let's be smart about what we want to be, how we want to get there, and how we get there collectively and individually, and then let's stop trying to go over all the ways we want to get better in a 30 second time out.