Coaches love to ask questions to help their athletes understand the decisions they must make during performance. This is especially true in group invasion games like soccer (football), rugby, basketball and hockey–games that require an especially high degree of coordination and shared decision-making. One potential problem with asking questions of athletes is making sure that the…
I was down in Florida earlier this week talking to coaches in U.S. Soccer’s Academy Director’s course… a high-level training for men and women who run–and design instruction at–top tier clubs. We talked a lot about asking questions of players- how important it is to build their attention and focus and cause them to think about…
One of the highlights of my trip to the UK last June was visiting Torquay Academy in Devon- not just because it’s a really outstanding school where happy kids are given the gift of orderly school and rich, challenging instruction but–epiphany alert–because when teachers used techniques like Wait Time and Cold Call they were…
I recently stumbled on a short video that a colleague in the UK, ‘MR WJ’ (aka, Lloyd Williams-Jones) made describing three TLAC techniques he uses: Cold Call, No Opt Out, and Show Call. MR WJ TLAC from TLAC Blog on Vimeo. He’s very gracious with the praise… which I appreciate though I am also a bit…
Some teachers are inclined to think of Cold Call as something that involves ‘picking on’ kids–it involves a teacher ‘forcing’ students to talk when the kids don’t want to talk. I don’t think that’s true. Ask a question of a room full of people and most (at least many) of them are having productive useful…