It’s the end of the season or academic year, depending on the role or hat you are wearing. It could have been a successful year or perhaps you wish things had gone better. Hopefully, as time progresses, things will slow down, allowing you time to reflect on the past year. I know I am tired after this past year.
One of the challenges this past year was a new course that I have been teaching called Applied Technology Principles. The course examines various competencies, from digital citizenship and graphic design to computational thinking, 3D modeling, and Augmented Reality. The class is primarily first-year students with a few other students for other grades. The course serves as a survey class, also satisfying the 1/2 credit technology graduation requirement that has just been initiated at our school, Holland Hall, in Tulsa, OK.
If you have ever had to create a class for yourself from the ground up, it can be a bit of a rollercoaster. You have ideas, and you try them out. Sometimes they succeed; other times, there is room for improvement, or the unit didn’t quite go as planned. Coaching can be a similar experience. New ideas about training, team building or new regattas visited, there’s always something new that you are experimenting with. After all, each crew can be filled with different athletes and the approach taken from the year before might work or it may need some adjustment depending on dynamics.
So the question is: How do you move on from here?
It's Time To Be Vulnerable
I’m generally not a great judge of whether or not the programs I create are well-recieved by the students in my care. Mentally, I often work “backstage,” putting materials together or tweaking the competency rubrics to ensure solid learning progressions. As a result, what might feel like nervous anxiety when you are trying out new pedagogy or building the plane as you fly it, from the student’s point of view, could be a different experience.
As someone that tends to gravitate toward perfectionism, there is a tendency to shy away from constructive criticism. It is helpful to frame the need to get feedback as part of the process of getting better at teaching or coaching as so in line with the pursuit of the best possible results.
Look For Genuine Feedback, Not Validation
In order to help me truly understand what the student (or athlete if you are a coach) experience is like, I have employed surveys at the midpoint of classes or as an exit survey to gather data about what parts of the class the students felt like they got value out of and which aspects of the course they didn’t connect with as well.
My surveys often include quantitative questions such as:
1) Rate yourself from 1 to 10 on your tech skills at the beginning of this class.
2) Rate yourself from 1 to 10 on your tech skills at the end of this class.
When I asked this question this past spring, the average self-assessment score was 4 out of 10 before the class and 7/10 after the course. Given a population of thirty students, this does appear to be statistically significant. My point is that I have some numbers to gauge whether the students found the class valuable or did they feel like “we didn’t learn anything….”
The next series of questions asked for written responses about which projects they enjoyed the most and why and which projects they didn’t like as much or felt were valuable.
These qualitative data points are valuable because I can still count the units they enjoyed and the units they didn’t see as helpful. Additionally, I can also see why they felt the way they did or gained a sense of their experiences.
The critical thing to remember is that this is one perspective in an ecosystem of feedback that helps the students feel empowered that shows that you care what they think and you want to get better.
Modelling A Growth Mindset
By performing this kind of survey, you achieve a couple of things:
1) A measure of student buy-in and their perspective on their progress.
2) Modeling a growth mindset for students or athletes.
You could preference this survey with a statement such as “I value your opinion on this class, as this class is a work in progress, and I would like to be a better teacher/coach, and as a result, I’d like your constructive thoughts on how I can improve along with this class/program.
After collecting the results, I started a new document and wrote down some things I noticed about the class. I feel tired at the end of the academic year, but this unpacking helps me reflect, download and process what went right and what areas are for improvement.
I then tallied the units given the survey results. For example, many students enjoyed the computational thinking unit with an introduction to Python. In contrast, other students found that the least helpful and couldn’t see themselves using it in the future (authors note: I thought something like that taking GCSE Chemistry in high school, but then ended up teaching it for 20 years!). We can’t see the future as accurately as we like, so we never know when something will be helpful. For example, students who saw themselves on a medical career track didn’t
see the need for Python. As a result, I probably need to explain better the relevance of algorithmic thinking in different career options, even if that means a person never writes a line of code again. The deeper competency is genuinely where the value lies.
How Does The Apply To Coaching?
The principles already outlined are universal. I want to know how the athletes in my care were feeling about their progress. Do they see the value in everything we are doing as far as the program goes? I’ve been a teacher and coach for nearly twenty-five years, and what I know to be true is that the students/athletes in my care have always surprised me with how far they can push a project or their athletic performance.
By deliberately seeking out feedback from athletes, you give them a voice and a say in how things are and could be. This search for feedback provides them with ownership and the students OFTEN have good ideas for improving their learning environments.
The feedback sessions I have with my clients sometimes uncover significant findings that might not be determined in the initial discovery or onboarding of the client. The important thing is to keep the conversation going because life continues to move on, people change, and often the context does as well.
Conclusion
As a starting point, I am providing the questionnaire I gave to my Applied Tech class this spring. I’ll also provide a template for what this might look like in a coaching context. If you use these templates, I encourage you to modify them appropriately for your context.
Coaching and Teaching are not a one-way processes. I strive for an ecosystem of feedback (see my post on competency rubrics). Feedback is Coach to the student, student to student, and student to teacher. Forget Erg scores or end-of-semester grades. The conversation is always best around work or community relationships. I do my best to build trust with those that I work with. It’s helpful to also know about the things in my coaching and blindspots that I may not be aware of.
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