Let’s imagine your supervisor at work wants to get a handle on how
you’re doing your job. Your work is such that much of it is done on the
phone or through email. The supervisor decides to sit near your desk for
an hour to observe. What would he/she see?
You’re a stay-at-home
parent and your spouse wonders what you do all day. The spouse decides
to shadow you for an hour to find out. Except that the hour chosen is
the one when the baby is napping, the washing machine is on, the
breakfast dishes remain, and you’re on the couch, folding towels and
catching a few minutes of Law and Order. What would the spouse’s
conclusion be?
And so it goes when the likes of me need to go out
to assess practices done by the likes of you. We call these field
evaluations and they’re now being done for all coaches seeking High
Performance or Development 1 certification. We assess one practice for
each of those levels, though at HP, there’s also a game evaluation. The
process is detailed with a standard set of evaluation forms created by
the Coaching Association of Canada (CAC) and Hockey Canada.
The
most important part of the field evaluation though is the mentoring and
feedback. As in the two real world examples, it’d be unfair to base an
opinion of a coach’s practices on just one. This is particularly true
for the Development 1 level because coaches there generally have far
fewer practices. As a result, they need to do more multi-tasking of
skills and tactics, often taking short cuts through progressions.
No
matter the level though, these field evaluations point out some key
things about coaches’ soft skills, the ones that don’t really show
easily through drills. We used to call them teaching techniques and
probably not enough time is spent in coach training on what really is
the foundation: communication skills, how feedback is given, time
management, understanding age group considerations and their
relationship to practice content, etc. The best drills are worth little
if many of those teaching techniques aren’t solid.
The CAC/Hockey
Canada assessment tools effectively address these. Certainly the vast
majority of my time assessing practices is spent discussing them with
coaches in the pre-brief (time before the practice) and de-brief (time
after). In a few instances I’ve had to return for a second practice to
ensure the coach has addressed the concerns from the previous one.
One
practice is essentially a still frame snapshot from the film called
“Your season.” It’s only meant to give a sense of a coach’s approach and
to provide assistance. In other words, it’s a start.
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