Tactical Tuesday Part 2 - Check For Understanding

Replace Self-Report, Active Observation, Culture Of Error

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Part 1 - Practice Preparation

Let’s get right into it with 3 practical tactics coaches can use today to upgrade their teaching at practice. Check out Part 1 for an introduction to this series.

Checking For Understanding

This section of the book begins by referencing John Wooden, so I’m already in. Lemov notes that there’s a difference between “I taught it” and “they learned it.” This difference might even be more significant in sport, where there’s arguably a third layer:

I’ve taught it
They understand it
They can do it

(You could probably make the same 3-part distinction in academics between “I taught it”, “they learned it”, “they can apply it in a non-academic context” as well, but again, I’m trying not to get too bogged down in the weeds here. I want to keep this more as thought exercises for coaches.)

We know there’s already a gap between practice performance and competition performance, which we call transfer. And there’s a gap between what they know today and what they’ll know tomorrow, which we call retention. Our first tool in narrowing either one of these gaps is Checking For Understanding. Let’s look at 3 tools for your coaching toolkit.

(1) Replace Self-Report
There are certain things as coaches that, once seen, you can’t unsee. After the first time my wife attended a GMS clinic, she couldn’t stop seeing all the snaps/waves/bobs that players make when passing. Self-Report is like that for me. This is Self-Report in the context of coaching:

Coach: “Alright so when their outside hitter is attacking, zone 6 player needs to be here and zone 5 player needs to be here. Everybody understand?”
Players: (nod)

Coaches have the benefit of actually watching their players play, which is the ultimate check for understanding. (“Oookay turns out they didn’t know what I meant by ‘don’t fall on the ground and start crying instead of attempting to dig the ball,’”) However, we can save ourselves some headache and make practice more efficient if we Replace Self-Report with a check for understanding. That might look like this:

Coach: “Alright so when their outside hitter is attacking, zone 6 player needs to be here and zone 5 player needs to be here. Everybody understand?”
Players: (nod)
Coach: “Okay Jessie you hop over there in zone 5 and show us what that would look like.”

Heck, for some teams it might be as simple as saying, “Jessie, what do I mean by zone 5?” Don’t assume they always know that.

You don’t need to drill down on every single detail constantly. But when you do drill down, instead of an unreliable self-report, replace it with a check that requires a player to demonstrate their understanding.

(2) Active Observation
Allow me to quote from this chapter:

If we think we’re going to circulate around the room making “mental notes” about thirty students’ work on two problems with four steps each, while perhaps taking a few questions and offering occasional encouragement, and still be able to remember at the end of it what the most common error was and which students struggled where, we are kidding ourselves.

and

For one thing, while I believed I was very observant, I probably was not. Usually I would be looking passively, waiting to be struck by spontaneous observations about what students were doing… What I noticed was often a random event. What I gave students feedback on was also likely to be accidental.

This sounds like a lot of practices I’ve seen. Spontaneous observations and accidental feedback. If I’m honest with myself, it happens too much at my own practices.

If you listened to my appearance on Dan Meske’s excellent Out Of Rotation Podcast, I talk about being taught Active Observation by Keno Gandara (hey Keno!) who was then an assistant at Washington. Until that point, I thought that great coaches were great because they just saw everything all the time. He taught me that having a good coaching eye was less about seeing everything all at once, and more about seeing one thing at a time.

Here’s an example of what this looks like on my whiteboard: