I met with two distinguished, outstanding coach educators yesterday.
They have enabled me to work with twenty-one high performance coaches over a three-year period. Our meeting reviewed the two years of the project to date. The project is focussed on coaches’ personal learning journeys.
We spent five hours together. It seemed timeless (for me).
What struck me profoundly was the wealth of experience both have in their own sports and in the wider coach education community.
They are exemplary connectors. They know and share stuff. They have an encyclopaedic knowledge of people and places. They are mavens.
I wrote to both of them before our meeting to share these ideas:
I spend much of my time these days thinking about learning in a digital age. I see both your roles as central to learning organisations. I wondered what a business card with Learning Experience Designer as your role might do to change organisational perception.
Discussions in legal education have encouraged me to think about coach learning rather than coach development.
In our professional lifetimes, digital technologies have transformed our world of learning. One of the most important skills we need these days is sorting out the signal from the noise. When we started we were looking for signals.
As my contribution today, I am keen to explore:
- Personal learning environments
- Social learning
- Microlearning
- Just-in-time learning
- Non-linear learning pathways
- Dynamic evaluation
- Problem finding opportunities
- Authenticity
- Reflection
- Learning analytics
- Aggregation and curation in e-portfolios
… all enriched by connectivism … and the power of #
Both of these coach educators are vastly experienced. I am keen to explore and support their learning journeys too.
My project has encouraged me to think more and more about the meta-issues around coaching and learning. It coincides with discussions and research in the United Kingdom about support for coach developers. In an unpublished paper about this support work, this point is made:
This study has demonstrated that there are many really professional and able Elite Coach Developers in the UK system that could justifiably create a community of practice to ensure strategic development with appropriate and bespoke support.
I think we have great opportunities to develop this community by connecting and sharing. One of the steps for me is to encourage open sharing and the ‘findability’ of resources.
I do see hashtags as a profoundly effective way of sharing. We can create a folksonomy to support this sharing. I have chosen #coachlearninginsport as my tag.
I have an opportunity to meet another group of coach educators on Friday.
I am in awe of these educators and am keen to see them flourish in a vibrant community of practice, passionate about personal learning environments … at a time when many sporting organisations are questioning the price of coach education services without engaging with the value of the service being offered.
Photo Credit
The image I have used is similar to this image but I do not have the exact attribution. I will research actual source.
Hi Keith. Great you can join us tomorrow and thanks for your messages here. I am too interested in pursuing the signal and noise idea as spoken about by Nate Silver in his book. From your words it sounds like you believe that the noise is as important as the signal in learning? In my world at the moment I’m wondering whether in cricket in the UK we’re creating over complication with exploring all the noise around learning about coaching rather than trusting our knowledge and experience a little more. Look forward to catching up. Keith Tomlins
What a delightful surprise, Keith. Thank you for finding the post. I am delighted we are going to meet.
I believe we all need help with the noise and like you I am very keen to simplify complexity.
I have been talking about being a meddler in the middle as someone who supports coach learning as I think we are inextricably linked with the coaches we support.
See you on Friday.
Keith
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