For many years e.t.c has worked with International Federations, National Governing Bodies, and Sports Training Providers to build and or evolve their coaching systems so they can offer high-quality coach education programs to ensure coaches can provide high-quality athlete experiences and outcomes.
We have been missile locked on the role of the Coach Developer as the conduit between coach programming, coaches and their participants and athletes.
We have offered Coach Developers access to engaging, dynamic and thought-provoking programs of education and training to help evolve their classroom and practical facilitation skills, their assessment and evaluation skills and their ability to act as mentors providing supported practice in the field.
We have used a robust evidence based generated from within sports coaching and the wider education world to help Coach Developers reflect on and evolve their box of learning and development tools to ensure they can provide high-quality learning experiences for coaches, from beginner to master coach.
This week we had the opportunity to take what we know and work with Salem-Keizer Behavior Intervention Team, who work across K through 12 within the Salem School District in Oregon. This team provide formal training and supported practice in the education setting for school staff from Instructional Assistants to School Principals. Their role is to help staff understand a child's social, emotional and learning needs as well as how to recognize trauma and manage conflict which often includes deescalation and sometimes physical restraint. This team also operate alongside school staff and have a caseload of students and are consistently expected to model best practice.
We custom built the learning program for this Training Team. The intent was to use sports coaching as a parallel and help Trainers consider what they do, how they do it and why they do it so that they can think differently about their role and be even more effective in formal and non-formal learning settings.
Adopting a blended approach using a mix of online and in-person learning, trainers were given the opportunity to:
Establish how and why coaching is a useful reference point
Consider how to effectively facilitate adult learning
Explore Push-Pull delivery strategies
Identify the adult learning principles
Prepare to facilitate classroom and practical sessions from MandtTraining Course
Reflect on own practice and identify opportunities for development
We were slightly nervous working across domains about if and how well this learning would land. We should not have worried! We were truly humbled by the Team's open minds, willingness to learn and their high quality contributions, especially on Day 2 which ran high on practice. Leading learning with peers acting as learners but thinking like Trainers can sometimes but challenging but not for this Team! They created an amazing space for thinking and sharing! And here they all are!
Feedback from the Training Team has been hugely positive:
I just wanted to thank you again for such a well-thought-out, and purposeful training. I found your approach very tactful and interesting. So much to take away and unpack in terms of the learning process, breaking down different teaching methods and strategies, and making it all very applicable for behavior personnel even though it is not your field of expertise. A very hard maneuver to pull off, but you most definitely pulled it off.
I would highly recommend e.t.c to any coach or trainer who aims to improve their skills and have a solid grasp of what it means to access the learning process, not just "teach".