Doug Lemov's field notes

Part one of a really interesting (for me) interview I recently did with Soccer America’s Mike Woitalla is out and up today.  You can read it here.  The topic is Check for Understanding, which is perhaps the biggest challenge for any teacher… the hardest “endemic problem” in the job, to use Deborah Ball’s phrase.  Two follow-up thoughts on the interview:

First, observing athletes makes a challenge that we are also at risk of in the classroom a bit clearer: When you practice doing it wrong, you get better at doing it wrong.  That is, low quality practice doesn’t actually help that much. It may, in some cases, actually make players (or students) worse.  Elite runners, as I understand it, are very careful not to run “junk miles.”  Running slowly trains you to run slowly. We noticed recently in one of our schools that students were rushing through homework (you can read more about halfway through this post) just to get it done, with the result that they were practicing writing poor and hastily constructed sentences over and over every night.  Did what we did in school all day counteract that fully? Or were we regressing?  I don’t know, but it was scary to entertain that thought and we immediately–like a coach–re-engineered how we did homework to ensure that students practiced being successful.

Second, I have to say I find the tools coaches develop fascinating to reflect on and sometimes adapt and apply in schools. What I loved about the coach in the vignette I described in the interview (It was Skip Dawson, by the way, a local coach here in upstate New York with a towering reputation) was the way he found a way, in the midst of the girls’ struggles to hit their passes correctly, to encourage them to more accurately self-monitor. Briefly, when they struggled to pass accurately he asked them to pass along the line at the top of the penalty box so they could see whether their own passes met standard.  Think how smart that is. For most of the drill they weren’t really giving their fully-focused best to hit better passes because they didn’t really know for sure that their passes weren’t sufficiently accurate. It was easy to tell themselves they were doing it right. Skip’s adaptation not only fostered quality outcomes but self-monitoring– a culture of assessing your own performance accurately.   This is something I’ve got some good video of other great coaches doing in subtle ways.  Check out this short clip of Navy coach Dave Brandt* working on first touch with his players, for example.  Dave painted a tiny line in front of each cone so he as a coach can better see whether his players’ first touch was re-directed sufficiently and more significantly so his players can see it as well.  Without the line, many of those guys who made a B+ first touch would probably think, “Hey, I did it right!”  With the line they think, “Hey, I’ve got to be a little sharper.”

Anyway, there are lots of applications of that both on the practice field and in the classroom.

Parts II and III of the Soccer America interview post Monday and Wednesday, followed by profiles of four great coaches. Kind of like a mini TLAC for soccer coaches.  Hope you’ll read them all.

*A legend who won the Div III national championship six times at Messiah College and has since transformed Navy’s program and taken them to the Div I tourney for the first time.

Check for Understanding; Self-Monitoring; Dave Brandt, Coaching