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.
A Game Changer
July 9, 2012
In the year 2000, fewer than 300,000 books were published in the United States. In 2010, more than a million were published.
This means that electronic media didn’t kill the book publishing industry, as some experts predicted. Quite the opposite. But electronic media surely changed the industry in several major ways, including:
-
It democricized the industry – made it cheaper and easier for almost all of us to publish whatever we want, whenever we want, even if only our family and closest friends might read it.
-
It dumbed down the industry. With almost everybody able to produce almost anything, the average quality of published works has plummeted.
The importance of these book industry statistics to us is that they point to what can and does happen in other aspects of life, including school sports. They provide evidence that sometimes what we think might crush us, only changes us. Causes us to do things differently – cheaper, faster or better and, sometimes, all three at once.
Some of us in school sports may, sometimes, curse electronic media; but many of the changes they have brought us are positive. Like officials registering online, receiving game assignments online and filing reports online. Like schools rating officials online; and online rules meetings for coaches and officials. Like schools scheduling games online, and spectators submitting scores online. Like the ArbiterGame scheduling program the MHSAA is now providing all its member high schools free of charge.