About

ABOUT COACHDEV

CoachDev is about improving coach learning and development initiatives. CoachDev does this through:

Mental Models

Promoting mental models of learning that are evidence informed and context validated. Ideas that work in practice.

Learning Experiences

Helping to influence the design and delivery of the learning experiences coaches use to learn. Simply put, this is about ways that optimise real-world hands-on learning.

Resources

Providing resources to help on your journey. These includes free downloadables.

The joy of coaching

The blog hopes to provide coach developers (CDs) with useful tips, and resources for use in their day-to-day work. Some posts will challenge beliefs. Others will celebrate CDs from around the world. And we hope you will enjoy reading about the innovative approaches of other CDs.

Coaching is a process of guiding and influencing the development of others. Athletes are variable in their needs and attributes. Just as varied are the tasks athletes set for themselves or are given by coaches. If we needed more convincing that coaching is a nuanced and complex business the social and physical environments are never static. There are infinite athlete, task, and environmental combinations. Coaches and coach developers, welcome to the world of learning where there are no recipes or quick fixes!

The blog focusses on how CDs and coaches might effectively go about their business. But the end point of their work is the ATHLETE. Coaching is about teaching the sport at an appropriate challenging level, while providing experiences that help participants grow as people. Coaching is ultimately about relationships.

Posts in CoachDev aim to provide ideas that can be used in practice – that is, ideas & resources that will influence how coaches are developed. In the last two decades or so there has been an explosion of research in coaching science and coach learning and development. Much of it impenetrable to those outside of research institutions. A case in point is the large volume of information about the best way to teach games. David Bunker and Rod Thorpe, writing about ‘teaching for understanding’, published The Curriculum Model in 1986. Almost 40 years later, it is not uncommon to see games being taught in ways that do not properly consider their context. Similarly, inefficient prescriptive instructional strategies are used when better options are available. The same is true for much non-games teaching for that matter. An alphabet soup of ‘non-linear pedagogical’ approaches is ripe for a good shake up – that is, for translation into plain speaking.

CoachDev is not an ‘academic’ exercise. It aims to bridge gaps between ‘technical’ writing and writing that is more friendly to the busy CD and coach.

It is inevitable that translating from one context (academic) to another (practitioners) may mean something is lost in translation or even mistranslated. It will be for me to fess up and update with more up-to-date information. So, CoachDev is both about sharing ideas and me learning to be better at what I do.

In addition to the articles I’ve penned, CoachDev features content from guest contributors, and showcases coach developers from around the world. Readers will also find examples of innovative good practice in coach development.

I hope you find the content stimulating and of some value.

A BIT ABOUT ME

I was the national coaching director and international judge for Australian gymnastics for about 10 years. A one-year stint at the University of Saskatchewan saw me teaching gymnastics classes while spending time on a gymnastics related educational writing project with two Canadian mates.

That was followed by an extended period with the Australian Coaching Council and then manager of sport education for the Australian Sports Commission (ASC). While at the ASC, I attended a gathering of coach educators in Leeds sponsored by the then National Coaching Foundation. That meeting was the genesis of the International Council for Coaching Excellence which was formed shortly after Leeds. I was an inaugural board member for a number of years.

I am currently a non-aligned consultant working for various organisations in the area of coach development. I value my volunteer work as much as my contract work.

In 2015 I completed the ICCE / National Coach Developer Academy course at Nihon Sport Science University in Tokyo.

In the late Palaeozoic era, I worked for an oil company in their laboratories and after that tutored chemistry at Macquarie University in Sydney.

I like to read in and out of my current field. Writing is usually fuelled by green tea. When I can, I oscillate between my woodworking workshop and the garden (which like coaching is always an unfinished business).

Canberra is where I live. It is on Ngunnawal country, the land of the traditional owners. It affords many opportunities for me to walk and think (mostly about coach development).

CLIENTS