Enough of the Philosophy – How Do You Do It?

In our first blog, we talked about how Coach John Wooden ran a practice with no lectures or long harangues. We talked about the fact that effective coaching builds performance. We need to look at our end product of a teaching lesson as a performance – something we want the student to be able to do successfully.

 

Here is a brief introduction of where to start in rethinking teaching as coaching and lessons as building performance.

 

Giving Corrective Feedback

For starters, corrective feedback must be brief — a simple prompt that answers the question, “What do I do next?” Giving them a prompt for what to do next focuses the student’s attention, while avoiding cognitive overload.

Next, the student must perform the prompt immediately. That avoids forgetting.

At this point, having given them the next step, the teacher needs to move on and let them practice. The eternal enemy of corrective feedback is teacher verbosity.

 

Jones refers to this series of prompts as Praise, Prompt, and Leave. Check out the full picture in Chapter Six of Fred Jones Tools for Teaching: Discipline, Instruction, and Motivation.