foolfillment: the blog

Over the last three days I’ve been taking a course to get my Level 1 Coaching and Teaching for swimming. This is a course that I’ve wanted to do for about 2 years. This year I had the massive privilege of watching Alex Jordan take his development squad sessions. Alex is the guy charged with improving competitive swimming across all of the Scottish Borders and is an enormously talented, knowledgeable, and enthusiastic coach. His sessions have been filled with great ideas about the teaching and coaching of swimming and have provided me with loads to think about. I’ve counted these sessions as some of the best CPD I’ve had this year, in the same way that one of the best ways to my improve teaching in school is to observe other teachers.

This course that I’ve been on this weekend has been totally different – probably one that I could be much more justified in writing up as CPD, because there are specific learning outcomes, a test, and an obvious application for it. However I have not felt totally engaged with it for much of the time. There are a few reasons for this – the main one probably being that I’m on holiday and I’ve been on holiday sleeping patterns!
One thing that I think has made an impact on me though is the nature of the course – there is a set amount of content to cover and it is assessed at the end, including a written test. For the first two evenings I’ve found myself not really feeling very enthusiastic about things and questioning (internally) why we are looking at a lot of the content. For instance we have spent a large amount of time on health and safety and Child Protection. Obviously these are important and of course it is the responsibility of a coach or teacher to ensure that the environment is safe for every swimmer. But, I feel like we have spent a huge amount of time on them, and they have been dry topics to study – and I think they are dry because our knowledge of procedures is going to be assessed at the end. As a result I have seen myself become the epitome of a tactical, surface learner. I have been quietly just listening to the bits I think will be assessed and engaged no further with it.

Today, however has been great. We have been in the pool, we have been watching other coaches, we have been looking, in detail, at the strokes. It has been really enjoyable and I have found myself much more focussed and enthused. Why? Two reasons I think : the more active methods, though there was a lot of classroom work this afternoon; and the subject matter being more suited to my interests and also more applicable. At the same time, I know that we are going to be assessed on this stuff and I’ve been picking out the bits I think will be in any test; but I am much more engaged and I can turn all the information into knowledge – I’ve been a deep learner again with some tactical moments thrown in too.

Perhaps now I’ve gone away and thought all this through I can write this blog post as CPD too?!

This entry was posted at 5:56 pm on the 4th of July, 2009 and is filed under general. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.