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’ve been reading up on Cognitive Load Theory quite a bit lately. Two of my favorite discussions are this one by Adam Boxer and this one by the New South Wales (Australia) Dept of Education. It’s been useful among other places in my personal life, where I’m in the midst of teaching two teenagers…
I spent the day visiting Freedom Prep HS in Memphis today. There were lots of highlights, but I wanted to write about one classroom in particular- and specifically about a single phrase the teacher used that was simple, brilliant and useful to others. The teacher was Torian Black. He teaches 9th grade African-American History. During…