Up-Close Learning
November 18, 2014
Nearly 100 coaches gathered at the MHSAA office on Saturday, Nov. 1, for more than six hours of learning in Level 1 of the MHSAA Coaches Advancement Program. What occurred that day demonstrates the MHSAA’s commitment to a particular teaching and learning model we have chosen for its effectiveness, not its ease.
It would have been much simpler to put the 100 coaches in a single room and rotate three lecturers in front of them, and still simpler if everyone participated online in the isolation of their homes. But CAP is not delivered in either of those ways.
Rather, on Nov. 1, the nearly 100 coaches were placed in three separate rooms, so the presenters could see everyone’s eyes and read everyone’s faces and address everyone’s questions and concerns.
And, within those smaller rooms, the coaches sat in pods with four or five other coaches for more practical and often deeper discussion than the larger group setting allows.
Meanwhile, in an even more intimate fourth room, another 20 coaches completed the sixth and final level of the Coaches Advancement Program.
In an online world there is still a place for face-to-face teaching and learning. This is especially true in coaching where interpersonal relationships have more to do with determining success and failure than Xs and Os.
News Cycle is Downward Spiral
January 15, 2016
I’ve come to distrust most of what I read, hear and see in the news.
This is the result of reading, hearing and seeing reports about topics I know a lot about. When I read, hear and see how badly the facts are mangled and otherwise misrepresented by media reporting about my world, I figure the same must be true of news coverage of most everything else.
It is rare that coverage is factually accurate, fair and free of bias. I have to confess, this can be true of the complimentary stories about school sports; it is not only true of the critical stories.
The loss of long-form reporting by professional media who have spent many years with the topics and persons involved has affected all news reporting; but nowhere have the cuts been deeper than the always under-funded programs of lower profile, like media attention to school sports as compared to college and professional sports.
Into the void created by cutbacks in professional media coverage at the local level are newcomers with self-appointed titles and self-made websites and little relationship to the history of the topic, rationale for the rule or respect for people who gained authority by devoting lifetimes to that which the neophyte has discovered expertise overnight and without effort.
And now, fueled by social media, misinformation goes viral. Often without understanding of or accountability to facts. And usually with anonymity.