Enhancing Coaching Effectiveness through Reflective Practice

Introduction

Reflective practice is particularly important in sports coaching because it has been identified as a significant contributor to performance. Reflective practice can be defined as an assessment of our actions and thoughts that is aimed at promoting learning and personal development. Schon (1983) defines reflective practice as one’s ability to reflect on an activity to continually engage in the learning process, while according to Bolton (2010) it means paying significant attention to the practical values and theories of everyday actions by focusing on and examining the experiences. Reflective practice, therefore, points to self-analysis of our situations, experiences or events. That is done to assess, understanding and interpret those situations and experiences in ways that enable us to develop a theoretical view of them that other people would understand should we need to explain it to them. For those undertaking a reflective practice, UK dissertation help is an important resource for guidance and support throughout the process.

For the case of coaches, reflective practice can be used for not only their development but also for the development of their players. In my role as the head coach of Grassroot Football club (which is an intermediate level club comprising athletes aged 16 years and below), I believe that I will significantly require to occasionally use reflective practice if I am to successfully and effectively coach my players. Through reflective practice, I will be able to convert my (past) experiences into learning which will enable me better coach my players. Reflective practice will also make me more self-aware, which will make me better understand my methods and find ways of improving ineffective ones or promoting the facilitative ones. Through reflection, I can also mitigate any issues or conflicts that may arise between my players and me as a result of practice or performance and their required standards. That is because reflection would allow me the chance to air my concerns to my players and try to resolve the issues. My role as the head coach will also give me the craft knowledge (knowledge-in-action or tacit knowledge), which is acquired in the course of practice rather than through coach education. That type of knowledge will enable me to assess situations and influence the future course of action or behavior, thereby improve my coaching effectiveness (Cropley et al., 2010).

Narratives as a research method

For this self-reflection, I will use narrative methods. That is because narrative methods are the best approach since this paper seeks to explore human experience and contextualize it as it is by representing it textually. The narrative methods also allow the obtaining of rich free-ranging discourse from small sample sizes as well as an analysis of written documents around the topic of interest.

Reflection within my Coaching Practice

In the course of my practice, I use reflection in several related areas such as learning, my effectiveness, performance, training and competition, my focus and my reflective practices.

What I Reflect on: Positivity and Confidence in my Emotions, Thoughts and Actions during Coaching Sessions

How I conduct my coaching, training and preparation for matches or competition is a matter of significant importance that will significantly influence the outcome received concerning performance. To achieve the best possible performance and results, I will need to be the best I possibly can during my coaching and training sessions. Reflective practice is a crucial aspect to the coaching and sports scenes as they are majorly concerned with human performance, and performance requires a reflection on our emotions, thoughts and action (in that specific order). Therefore as a coach, I must understand how I feel about coaching, think about what coaching means to me, what I would like to achieve from coaching and what I need to do to achieve my coaching goals

I, therefore, take time to reflect on how I feel, think and act concerning my coaching. How I feel about coaching will lead me to think about what I want to achieve, which will, in turn, cause me to act in a certain way. It is essential that I maintain positivity in all these ‘spheres’ of my coaching because how I feel, think and act will affect how my players feel, think and act in equal measure. If I am positive and confident, my players are likely to become positive and confident in their performance as well. The opposite is also true.

Coaching these young promising players gives me a great deal of joy, pride and inspiration. My emotions or feelings towards coaching have a trickle-down (contagion) effect on my players. As such, I must always make sure that I try as much as possible to be and stay positive, calm and confident and convey the belief or possibility of victory in all my coaching sessions. For example, during some training sessions, I get to observe my players in action to see what they do or fail to do and gauge their abilities and performance. In all my observations and subsequent feedback to them, I need to focus more on the positives and strengths, while highlighting how they could improve on specific areas or abilities where the performance is not up to standard.

On one particular training session in the run-up to a junior league qualifier, I observed that the players were highly motivated and exerted an extra effort. This experience (their motivation and determination) filled me with a lot of joy and gave me the optimism that they (we) would emerge victoriously. I relayed this feeling of optimism to them by encouraging them that ‘we had this’. This optimism on my part made them even put in more effort during the training, and on match day, they put up a stellar performance. Our emotions or perspective of looking at things has been found to be contagious (Goleman, 1997) and impact on others. I believe the ripple effect of my positivity and optimism impacted significantly on the attainment of this result. If I become aware of my emotions and their contagion effect, I am better able to coach my team by developing strategies that would be in line with and contribute to actualizing these feelings. Coaches should, therefore, be aware of their emotions and how they may likely impact on their players (Jones, 2012). Being aware of this emotional contagion will help a coach understand why some of his tactics, initiatives, strategies and techniques work, while others do not.

How I think about these emotions I get during my coaching is also essential because these emotions are spread to the players. The way coaches look at and explain things to themselves and others, and their usual thinking patterns have also been found to be contagious (Borg, 2010). I, therefore, need to think in a manner that inspires my players or to change how I think if my current way of thinking does not achieve the intended purpose. Because our minds can catapult us to success or hold us back from it, coaches need to think better (Hurson, 2008) or even dramatically alter how they think to change their coaching approaches for better results.

I believe that my current coaching situation is very appropriate for me, given that my players are young, ambitious, eager to acquire the necessary skills and highly motivated to be the best. I, therefore, need to inspire them through positivity during all my coaching sessions.

Learning from Past Experiences; for my Coach Development, Effectiveness and Performance

To succeed and be effective in his coaching, a coach must learn various things and attain a certain level of knowledge. My reflections of and within my coaching practice usually revolve around the type of learning, education or development I would need to experience or undertake to become a reputable and effective coach. Previous studies have shown that formal coach education is majorly ineffective compared to the craft knowledge that one gains in the course of their coaching experience in facilitating learning. Informal learning practices or experiences such as reflective practices enhance the development of coaching knowledge more than the formal, structured and instrumental coach education (Stoszkowski and Collins, 2016). Formal coaching education is conducted in disregard of the real practical experience leading coaches to sift coach education knowledge depending on what they believe to work for them and in their contexts (Stodter and Cushion, 2014). Researchers now understand the use of reflection as a discrete learning practice (Gilbert and Trudel 2001; Taylor et al. 2015). Reflection and experience have been found to form a very integral part of coach learning (Cushion, Armour, & Jones, 2003). Therefore coaches are better able to learn when they reflect on the practical past experiences of coaching (Gilbert & Trudel, 2001).

From my reflections, I can look at my past experiences, evaluate and learn from them to help me determine what course of action to take in the present or in the future. For example, my reflection of a previous game can enable me to understand what my players did or did not do that led to poor performance and identify areas in which I need to improve my training of the team. That will help me develop strategies that are aimed at bettering performance in future. By reflecting on previous training or match experiences, I will be able better to identify the flaws and shortcomings of my current strategies and therefore change or adjust them accordingly in light of the standards and performance I want to achieve. That will lead to me maintaining the effective (facilitative) strategies while discarding or improving those that I will deem to be ineffective. Understanding and appropriately adopting or adjusting strategies will help bring about continuous improvement in my coaching as well as the development and abilities of my players. Stodter and Cushion (2017); Townsend, Cushion, and Smith (2017) posit that a coach’s quality of coaching is highly dependent on their learning, which is majorly contributed to by reflective practice. Coaches have now begun giving more preference to informal and self-predicated social learning methods (Stoszkowski & Collins, 2015) which are aimed at improving coaching and self-development.

Reflective practice by coaches has significantly changed the traditional coach education as it was previously known; it bridges the gap between theoretical knowledge gained from education and that gained from professional, practical experience and observation (Buysse, Sparkman, & Wesley, 2003). Reflective practice is concerned with and relevant to continuous personal development (or CPD) as it enables us to plan for our future development by addressing how we think of and feel about ourselves concerning; our past activities and situations, and our present conditions and activities. This way, the reflective practice can allow using our learning and insights from our past experience to assess our current situation to improve it as well as the future. The above-highlighted process is very crucial to any sports coach who is concerned about his performance as it enables them to define, redefine, expand, adapt, adopt and apply ideas or techniques for coaching and self-development.

It is through this learning from my reflection of past experience that I can gain insights that will guide my coaching practice, activities and strategies. However, I must take care not to dwell or live in the past, but to use the past as a way of planning for the present and the future.

Reflection has, as a result, become common and relevant to coaching and coaches’ development, and can be used as an underpinning factor in connecting and comprehending the coaching education theory and practical experience.

When I Reflect in relation to Training and Actual Matches (Competition); Focusing on Myself and My Players

I can practically use reflection in my conduction of training and in actual matches. As a coach, I am charged with the responsibility of developing my team’s skills, abilities and skills. That I usually do through several different training sessions, and whose results I believe should be translated during a real game situation. So I must reflect on certain aspects of my training sessions and the actual game situations at different stages of their occurrence. During training, I am able to observe the players, how they make their moves, the actions they take, their relation with each other and their performance. I can reflect on these observations during the training or after. Reflections during the training sessions mean that I will be thinking about the observations I make in real-time (as the training continues) while reflecting after the training means I will not critically think about my observations until after the training. Gilbert and Trudel (2001) in their studies found that most coaches who showed excellence and success had learnt through their engagement in the following reflective practices: during the present action (reflection-in-action); within but not in the middle of the present action (reflection-on-action); and outside of the bounds of the current activity (retrospective reflection-on-action).

These observations during the training sessions form the basis of the feedback I give to my players concerning their abilities and performance. The type of feedback I give to my players, how I give it and when are of great importance since they have a direct impact on how the players will receive them, which in turn impacts on potential future performance. How they perceive this feedback has a direct correlation to how they perform because it determines if they appropriately change or improve their behaviour or abilities. If they perceive me as being overly negative in my feedback, this will make them feel more anxious and self-aware, thereby causing a reduction in their performance. However, if I give this feedback in ways they consider to be positive, or that focuses on bringing out the best in them, they will be more motivated and inclined to improve their abilities, and therefore performance. My reflections of the training and their outcomes should, therefore, be done in more positive, motivating and inspiring ways that focus on enhancing my players’ abilities. From this feedback, I am able to (re)establish standards with my players as they will get to understand and appreciate the importance of improving their abilities and performance.

The culture of reflection, if passed down to my players, will make them understand what they need to do on the pitch in any given situation, rather than having to entirely depend on me to issue instructions which they carry out robotically. Fostering the culture of reflection may help my players develop a technical skill and knowledge level that (nearly) borders mine, and this will enable them to think on their feet and make appropriate decisions in the face of changing game situations. That will allow the players to learn and develop an in-depth understanding of the game which will be extremely helpful to them for their reflection-in-action during a real match during which I won’t have the chances to advise them on what to do or not to do. That will give my players an autonomy which could sure lead to an improvement in performance and desired outcome. Besides reflecting-in-action, I will also need to reflect on how to prepare my team for success and more outstanding performance (pre-thinking or reflection-for-action). That will help me to develop and each my players on several ‘what if..’ scenarios such that in light of what may happen in the field during a game, they can either revert to the game plan or critically assess the prevailing situation and make appropriate decisions.

This reflection will enable me to identify ways of conducting my training and preparing my team for competitions effectively. Through this reflection, I can also identify various issues that may hinder performance, those that facilitate performance as well as any strategies that I could implement in order to enhance my team’s performance, in line with Gilbert and Trudelʼs (2001) experiential learning model.

My Use of Video in Reflective Practice

In my coaching practice, I could use video to facilitate my reflective practice. The incorporation of video into my reflective practice will enable me to better analyze a previous game or match situation in terms of what happened and why they happened with a reduced chance of error, as compared to if I conducted the analysis solely on my mind’s recollection of the situation. Asking these questions and challenging players will enable them to make better decisions aimed at improved performance in future. Videos will also enhance my analysis of the game since I will have the full information. I will therefore not overlook any information that is critical to my analysis or arrive at a conclusion or decision basing on incomplete or partial information.

The conclusion of Frank and Miller (1991) that coaches are usually less than 45% correct in their post-match analysis and feedback; is a compelling reason for my use of video in reflective practice. Brewer et al., (1991) also encourage the use of video for post-match analysis in order to reduce the chances of arriving at casual conclusions as a result of the match outcome influencing the retrospective approach applied. Byra (1996) found that using video to analyze performance gave an in-depth analysis rather than a superficial or mere description of the performance.

As a result of this understanding, I will be able to conduct one-on-one player-led debrief sessions in which we analyze and discuss previous performance intending to develop commonly accepted standards of development and performance.

Conclusion: reflection-for-action

Reflective practice is critical to performance and will, therefore, take a central position in a significant part of my coaching sessions such as player ability and talent development, training and post-match analysis, my learning, self-development, effectiveness, strategies and coaching styles. I will need to reflect on these areas to improve my players’ abilities and performance and achieve the desired results. To better and effectively utilize reflection, I will have to follow the recommended reflective practices and methods that enhance reflection.

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