Summer School Part 2

Direction Instruction, Guided Discovery, Mutual Exploration

In Part 1 of the Summer School series, I talked about Self-Organization, the limits of Self-Organization, and what it means in practice. Now, I want to talk about a 3-part lens to view how you teach and what you say to players during practice.

Direct Instruction

Direct Instruction means something very specific in an educational context, but I’m going to take a slightly looser view of things for volleyball purposes.

In this context I’m using Direct Instruction as a mindset you’re adopting as a coach that:

1. You know exactly what you want to teach them.

2. You know exactly the steps you want to use to teach them.

3. You’ll lead them down that path in a specific way.

I’m bringing this up because it’s in contrast to Self-Organization or a more Ecological approach. In this method of teaching, there’s not an opportunity for a variety of solutions to emerge: you have a clear correct solution that you want them to come to. There’s also not an allowance for players to discover this solution on their own. You’re going to tell them, “this is what I’m trying to teach you and this is how I want you to learn it.”

Direct Instruction has proven efficacy in certain educational contexts. For example, I taught my daughter to read using Direct Instruction. Most education research shows that teaching specific phonetic rules accelerates reading progress, even in a language like English which is notoriously irregular phonetically.

The question is, does this paradigm have any place for volleyball coaches?

I think so.

The problem is that movement skills are not things to be known and retrieved. They are the result of perception and interaction with the environment. Also, the ultimate goal of movement is not avoidance of error but to be able to respond to a wide range of stimuli. Thus, Direct Instruction needs to be defined and used more carefully. To me, Direct Instruction is to be used as a starting point or bridge to a more varied movement skillset.

Therefore, my best practices for Direct Instruction are:

• Use for the introduction to a skill

• Focus on preparation and posture rather than timing elements

• Pair with unrestricted movements from the beginning

For example, when I teach the beginning 6-8 year-olds at the local Volleytots program, I teach them very specifically: “hold your hands like this.” (Pancake, pancake, sausage, sausage) If they like holding their hands a different way, too bad, we’re doing it this way right now. This is because almost every single young player will be well served by learning a proper and tight grip with their wrist and hands. They will immediately improve and be able to more successfully keep the ball up in the air.

However, I also pair this with some opportunities to play the ball in novel and creative ways. For example, I have them do “selfies” where they try to keep the ball in the air for as many contacts as possible. It might look like 2 minutes each of:

• Forearms

• 1-arm

• 1-arm, alternating

• Setting

• Alternating bumping and setting to yourself

• Freestyle

So there’s a fair amount of variable practice there, and then the Freestyle is the ultimate in variability. I try to challenge the players to invent some new way of keeping the ball up in the air that they’ve never done before. Use your head, use your foot, bump it off the net or the pole or the wall and then play it again.

An even simpler use of Direct Instruction would be the rules of volleyball. I use Direct Instruction to teach players the overlap rules. I have them stand in specific spots and show examples of what constitutes an overlap and how to best stand to optimize your positioning without being out of rotation.

On the other end of the skill spectrum would be something like systems organization. I don’t allow players to self-organize the core of our defensive system. I’ve studied a lot of volleyball and I know the probabilities about where balls tend to get hit over time. I will directly instruct players on where and how to stand in their base blocking and defensive postures. When the ball gets set the left-side, stand here, move to this spot, etc.

And of course, that’s always paired with some amount of practice that will put players in other contexts. We’ll play 4v4 with 2 in the front-row and 2 in the back or maybe pure doubles.

Another example would be instructing players to hit clean, no-spin float serves. Some players may self-organize to this, if given time. And the process of how to hit a clean serve cannot be entirely directly instructed. The contact on ball has to be experienced and processed by the player herself. However, the idea that a ball hit without spin is highly effective is one that I’m going to directly teach my players. “It’s more difficult to pass a ball that has no spin than a ball that has some spin on it. Therefore, we’re all going to learn how to hit float serves with no spin.”

Now, the process to get there starts to merge into the next paradigm.

Guided Discovery