[Another entry that stemmed from a writing prompt from our workshops with the Philadelphia Writing Project. Today’s writing prompt was: "Deborah Meier has discovered and lives by the credo: ‘Teaching is mostly listening, learning is mostly telling." Write about a time in your teaching and learning experience when this resonates to you."]

For me, I think this becomes about coaching. The players “tell” you what they’ve learned with every game. Did Gaby understand the concept of protecting the middle when the center fronts the post in the 21 Slide Zone D? Does Jessie understand the concept of faking left before going to her right in her drop step? If they did, they’ll tell you when they execute it in a game. I learned after a year or so of coaching that trying to plan out several weeks of the skills I wanted to teach my players was not a particularly helpful exercise, because if I didn’t listen to what the kids were telling me, I would push forward on the skills before they had learned what I need them to learn to be a good team. One of the real breakthroughs for me was when I started breaking down game film and watching it with them. We’d talk about what we had worked on in the practices leading up to a game, what our game plan was, and then we’d watch the film to see where we did or didn’t achieve it. The funny thing is that sometimes we won without every really doing what we meant to do and sometimes we lost even though it was clear from the tape that kids had learned what we wanted them to do. (And sometimes that meant that I had a lousy game plan… which forced me to learn more too.)

And it was interesting, because once I viewed my coaching a team sport as another example of true performance-based assessment – and one where the kids’ success on the court had a powerful and obvious relation to whether or not I had listened to what they had and hadn’t learned about what I was trying to teach them, that meant that I had to look at my own classroom to find where those lessons applied. Once I did that, student assessment told me so much about where I had not succeeded in the classroom with students, which made assessment a reflective process for me as well.