“I’m valuing the journey as much as the destination”: Exploring shared reflection to support novice coach learning

Abstract

This paper provides an insight into the trajectory of coach learning over two seasons through a shared reflective process. It describes how a collaborative process in a volunteer, amateur coach setting was supported and sustained. The coach-researchers had coached a university sports team together for two years prior to formalising the collaborative process. They adopted a collaborative self-study methodology to support and structure their reflective practice and learning throughout the study. Weekly individual and collaborative reflections were written by both coaches. They engaged with a critical friend to offer alternative perspectives on their reflections, and they planned their coaching strategies together. This paper illustrates the collaborative reflective process that supported the trajectory of the novice coach learning. This journey is represented using Fuller’s concern based model to map concern for self, concern for the task and concern for the learners. The reflective process and learning trajectory are outlined to exemplify the value of informal collaborative reflection to support coach learning. Implications are outlined for shared reflective practice to enhance learning opportunities for other coaching partners and small groups or in other educational domains.

Keywords

Critical friend,Gaelic football,volunteer

Introduction

This paper explores informal coach learning in an amateur sport setting. It describes how collaboration and shared reflection facilitated this learning within a supportive coaching environment. The two coach researchers, Anne and Richard, worked as teacher educators in an Irish university, where they also coached the university Gaelic football team together on a voluntary basis. Although Richard was a more experienced coach, both participated in the shared learning. Specifically, this paper focuses on Anne’s learning as a novice coach. The findings have implications for coach educators seeking to better understand how novice coaches learn in non-elite settings. While it was not a central consideration in this study, the findings also add to the limited research on the experiences of volunteer female coaches.

Novice coach learning

Nash and Sproule¹ have recognised the need for further research to understand how coaches develop through the coaching continuum and progress from novice to expert.

Coaches learn from experience, but the ability to give meaning to an experience in a planned and systematic way can create a vital link between tacit and professional knowledge.² Guided or mediated learning can accelerate coaching knowledge (re)production and subsequent coach development.³ The knowledge drawn from informal learning has been identified as an important factor in the development of coaches.⁴ Many researchers^5–7 have highlighted the need for more longitudinal research to evidence implementation and impact of coach learning on a developmental pathway, and it is important to consider a novice coach’s position along this pathway.⁸ In this paper we use Fuller’s⁹ concern-based model to explore how a novice moves from concern for self (surviving the experience and feeling incompetent), to concern for task, (delivering instructions), and finally to concern for the learner, (where concern shifts towards the learners’ experiences). The original model, along with Fuller and Bown’s subsequent refinement,¹⁰ was developed as a means to examine how student teachers learned to teach and has been the catalyst for research in a number of educational contexts.^11,12 Although the stages in Fuller’s model are presented sequentially, moving outwards from concern of self to concern for others, researchers have since argued for a more nuanced approach, where the learning trajectory is enhanced through heightened inward reflexivity and self-awareness, while at the same time developing an outward aspirational focus.¹³

Because many parallels have been identified between teaching and coaching,¹⁴ the aim of this study was to examine how the model might apply in a coaching context. In addition, research has acknowledged the social and relational aspects of coaching.¹⁵ There has been relatively little research, however, examining the relationship between coaches in shared reflective practice,¹⁶ and little empirical evidence to authenticate the effectiveness of a collaborative learning process as a coach development tool.¹⁷ This paper seeks to address these gaps in the existing research.

Reflection to support learning

Existing research recommends the use of reflection and the provision of a supportive environment to support coach learning.^18,19 There have been calls for empirical evidence to support the efficacy of reflection on practice²⁰ to illustrate the issues and problems relating to reflection within the realities of the coaching process.¹⁸ The importance of reflection to identify unmediated learning opportunities has been acknowledged.²¹ Collaboration can facilitate reflection and development of coaching identity.²² Recent research has challenged assumptions about reflection as an individual process and suggested reflection should provide scepticism and criticality about practice rather than normalising and reproducing it.²³ By raising these issues, there is an acknowledgement that reflective practice is not an unproblematic concept. This paper provides longitudinal empirical evidence of two coaches’ shared experiences, reflections and perceptions of learning, grounded in notions of the coach as a reflective practitioner.^24,25 As both researchers are also teacher educators in the university where the coaching occurred, their experiences of reflective practice were grounded in constructivist views of learning, where “learning is a process of becoming”,²⁶ embedded within a socially constructed context.²⁵ Building on Fuller’s⁹ model, they explored how Anne’s learning as a novice coach can be better understood by positioning her development as a series of teaching and coaching concerns. Therefore, this paper examined: (1) the novice coach’s trajectory of learning, and (2) how a collaborative self-study structure supported this learning through a shared reflective process.

Methodology

Context

Richard has been coaching at various levels for almost 20 years, and has coached this particular university team for 13 years. Anne, in contrast, had some experience of youth coaching, but her involvement in this coaching context was her first coaching experience with an adult team. In their first two years coaching together, Anne took the role of an assistant. She was not involved in the session planning and helped out on an informal basis. During this time, they began to have conversations after training where they discussed various aspects of their approaches to coaching. Each of them were committed to exploring how to coach better, and decided to investigate this more formally. Consequently, Anne became more involved in the planning and coaching in the third and fourth year as a collaborative coaching partner. This research paper uses longitudinal evidence and data generated over those two seasons (totalling over 80 training sessions). Both coaches focused on implementing an athlete-centred approach. The foundations of this approach are based on each player’s rights and needs,²⁷ focusing on developing player autonomy and decision-making.²⁸ While adopting an explicit athlete-centred orientation was a new endeavour for both of them, their experiences as teacher educators aligned with the social constructivist nature of the athlete-centred concept.²⁹ Ethical approval was granted in line with the university’s research ethics protocols.

Collaborative self-study

Self-study research is self-initiated, is aimed towards improvement, is interactive, and uses multiple, primarily qualitative, data sources.³⁰ Trustworthiness is established “when other members of the community in which the work is being shared become involved and can benefit from it”.³¹ The researchers adopted a collaborative self-study structure as a means to support their reflection and to heighten their consciousness about what they were learning. This collaborative reflective relationship was mutually initiated and based on trust between both coaches, which was established in the two years of coaching together before commencing this study. Effective learning relationships rely on an evolved two-way communication process,¹⁷ where coaches learn through on-going interactions, observations, and reflections on their own coaching practice.¹ In a collaborative coaching context, each partner acts as a sounding board,²⁵ able to extract and synthesize information, through incisive questioning and active listening to stimulate critical reflection and decision-making.³²

In the present study, an experienced coach (Richard) and a novice coach (Anne) collaborated in a “a process of shared accountability”³³ as they coached and learned together. As coaching and coach learning are both individual and social processes,³⁴ the study incorporated a dual layer of critical friendship.³⁵ The first layer involved Richard and Anne being critical friends to each other; the second involved eight meetings with an external critical friend to provide an additional layer of criticality. The internal critical friend relationship ensured that the learning was more than individual self-reporting, and was interactive.³⁶ It provided a mechanism for a balanced dialogue where both coaches explored how they might do things better.³⁷ The external critical friend was not involved in the coaching but had extensive experience in self-study research. She assisted the coaches to problematize their practice and recognise their learning,³⁵ helping them to guard against self-justification and bias in their shared reflections.³²

Collaborating within a shared reflective process

The collaborative self-study structure supported coach reflection in three ways: writing, reading and dialogue, as illustrated in Figure 1. These elements contributed to a reflective process similar to reflective conversations involving “repeated spirals” of problem identification, enactment of solutions, and evaluation.²⁵

Figure 1.

Three integrative layers of support for the shared reflective process.

Reflection in writing

A template for coach reflection evolved over the course of the study, informed by collaborative reflection and recommendations from the critical friend, with questions and prompts becoming more explicit and focused. The changes over the 2 years are summarised in Figure 2. Typically, reflection contained 600–700 words. The process of writing the weekly reflections provided them with learning opportunities as they reflected on their own practice.

Figure 2.

Incremental changes in written reflection prompts to support a shared reflective process.

Reflection in reading

Each week both coaches shared their own written reflections with each other. Reading Richard’s reflections enhanced the potential learning for Anne as a novice coach. She reflected on her own coaching actions, while Richard’s continued reflection and critique of his own coaching ensured that Anne was not simply learning recycled, normalised practice, which has been highlighted as a possible risk in previous coach learning.¹⁶

Reflection through dialogue

After reading and reviewing each other's written reflections, Richard and Anne met weekly for approximately 90 min to discuss their observations, and to plan for the following week’s training sessions. These reflective discussions, as well as the meetings with the critical friend, provided a contextual impetus and framework³⁸ to support the quality of both coaches’ individual and collaborative reflective practice. The critical friend’s probing questions prompted Richard and Anne to challenge each other more regularly within the secure environment of their coaching collaboration.

Data collection

In this study, both coaches sought to maintain an awareness of reflection in-action and shared reflection on-action²⁵ through informal conversations during, and immediately after, training. Written reflections were completed as soon as possible afterwards, in order to capture critical informal learning incidents that may otherwise have been lost or reconstructed inaccurately over time.³⁹ Given the challenges of reliability of documented reflection in-action, which is conceived as occurring in the crucible of action,⁴⁰ data consisted of reflection on-action (capturing the experiential learning experiences immediately after the training sessions and games) and retrospective reflection-on-action (thinking back on experiences).²⁵ Setting learning objectives, sharing written weekly reflections, and engaging in regular conversations with each other, supported the generation of a rich dataset.

The coaches completed three tasks each week: (1) writing individual reflections, (2) reading each other’s reflections, and (3) discussing these reflections. Once the twice-weekly coaching sessions were completed, they wrote and shared their reflections (in a shared OneDrive folder). In addition, each coach wrote, updated and shared a coaching philosophy document at the start, middle and end of each season. This led to an accumulation of over 80 individual documents.

Data analysis

Hastie and Glotova propose six general steps to qualitative data analysis, but acknowledge that the process “is often non-linear and non-sequential”.⁴¹ In this study, these general steps were refined into three discrete stages. Firstly, the coaches’ weekly reflective discussions and regular dialogue with the critical friend formed the initial stage of data analysis as the researchers became more familiar with the data.⁴² Secondly, all the transcribed data were coded by each author separately, and then reviewed by the other⁴³ while adopting an inductive perspective. At this point, each author probed and challenged the identified codes.⁴⁴ Finally, these codes were discussed and modified, using a deductive approach guided by Fuller’s concern-based model. Both authors reviewed the codes before developing final themes that sat within the framework. This iterative process supported the trustworthiness of the data analysis, in line with established self-study protocols.³⁰ Within each stage, different indicators of learning were identified. These are illustrated with exemplar data in Table 1. Data are presented as Y1 (year 1), or Y2 (year 2), and identified by each participants’ name and the week during which the reflection occurred.

Table 1.

Indicators and exemplar data illustrating the three stages of novice coach learning.

Fuller’s concern-based model	Indicators of concern	Exemplar Data
Concern for Self: As Coach	Self-awareness	• I was tired on Wed evening- glad to be coaching with a team- but perhaps that is laziness…I will need to take full ownership on Friday…
Concern for Self: As Coach	Developing confidence	• I felt inadequate for not knowing the ‘right answer’ to players’ queries about positional movement.
Concern for Task: Coaching Tasks	Managing tasks in Training Sessions	• I find it difficult to ‘think on my feet’. I rely on and use the SSG [small-sided game] conditions to scaffold the player learning… • Richard’s suggestion of a standard grid set up for organising training allowed us to re-shuffle and re-organise groups to maximise use of space etc.
Concern for Task: Coaching Tasks	Challenge of coaching in game settings	• I still feel a little under pressure when trying to give specific instruction / guidance to the team before just before games • While my ‘training’ coaching has improved (I feel), my ‘match/game’ coaching still needs a lot of work!
Concern for Learners: Players	Supporting Player Learning	• I decided to use more of the exemplars of good play by individual players to help the whole group develop improved tactical awareness.
Concern for Learners: Players	Developing Relationships	• Richard makes a lot of time to meet and speak to players between sessions and games. I do very little of this. This additional communication helps to develop a stronger coach –player relationship. • Driving home …I was reflecting on the season, and in particular the improved relationships that I have developed with the players this year. I feel closer to them as a coach…

Source: Adapted from Fuller’s concern-based model.

Findings and discussion

Trajectory of novice coach learning

Fuller’s concern-based model provides a framework within which to explore Anne’s journey as a novice coach. Potential learning that was identified at each stage is presented along with evidence of how this contributed to her transformative learning.⁴⁵ The following indicators of coach learning were identified at each stage:

Concern for self: self-awareness and developing confidence.

Concern for task: coaching in training and game settings.

Concern for players: developing relationships and supporting player learning.

As previous research has found,¹³ Anne’s outward trajectory (progressing from focus-on-self to focus-on-players), was also accompanied by evidence of inward learning, supported by the collaborative reflection.

Concern for self

Concern for self was evident in Anne’s self-awareness as a coach and through developing her self-confidence. Low self-awareness and a focus on tangible concerns may be evident at the outset of coach reflection and learning,¹⁸ while stressors experienced by coaches have been categorised as athlete-related, coach–related and organisational.⁴⁶ Accordingly, the coach-related stressors Anne experienced included being a new coach, making decisions, living up to the standards of others, and questioning if she was doing the right thing. Being a coach in an adult setting challenged her coaching confidence and self-efficacy. In written reflections at the beginning of her coach learning journey, much of Anne’s concerns were focused on herself: “I continually noticed that I was ‘cheerleading’ a lot … as opposed to coaching” (Week 1 Y1) and “I was tired on Wednesday evening- glad to be coaching as a team- but perhaps that’s laziness … ” (Week 4, Y1). Significantly, in her coaching philosophy statement written at the start of the season, she identified that she was “in a hinging position between player and coaching roles”. In describing how she still felt more like a player than a coach, she acknowledged that this transition from playing to coaching at an adult level was uncomfortable and caused her to doubt her own coaching ability. She noted how during the training sessions she found herself “often identifying … as a player rather than as a coach”, and perceived this as a weakness. Having discussed this with Richard, however, she wrote later about how “this empathy could be useful in supporting players and facilitating development” (Beginning of Year 1 philosophy, annotated). This suggests that her access to a knowledgeable peer⁴⁷ supported her reflection on her evolving identity as a coach, and even at this early stage a shift was evident from a concern for self to a more outward understanding of how she could help the players. As the season progressed, Anne began to get a better sense of how she could contribute, noting that:

The players do accurately perceive Richard as the ‘head’ coach. [Coaching collaboratively] is not about developing a parity in our coaching roles, but rather learning from and complimenting what each coach can bring to the team’s development. As the more novice coach, I need to be more aware of what I can bring and how I can do this (Week 9, Y1).

Nevertheless, the following season she still lacked confidence in her own ability to respond to players’ questions: “I felt inadequate for not knowing the ‘right answer’ to players’ queries about positional movement … I felt that my advice was unclear, and then perhaps unhelpful” (Week 6, Y2). Confidence⁴⁸ and increased self-efficacy⁴⁵ have been identified as key indicators of transformative learning. Later in the season and following discussions with Richard, she realised that her dilemma aligned with the assertion that “acknowledging the situated and social complexity of the coaching process, we are never likely to be in a position to offer specific prescriptions”¹⁸ for a range of coaching behaviours. Subsequently, she reflected on an incident where she had taken an in-action decision to deviate from the session plan: “ … perhaps my judgement will improve. In reflection on this week, I think I should have done as planned … ” (Week 15, Y2). This suggests a deepening awareness of her own practice over time. This was also noticed by our critical friend who commented:

I just see a completely different person to the reflections I read earlier in the year. You’re much more confident and assertive in how you reflect, you’re not questioning yourself half as much as you used to, you’re building relationships … So to me that shows that you’ve gone out of the novice side of things now and I think you’ve fully acknowledged that yourself (Critical Friend, Meeting 3, Y2)

When Miksza and Berg¹¹ used Fuller’s model to examine the experience of music teachers, they concluded that “no category of concern will ever be likely to disappear altogether”. Our analysis of Anne’s experiences suggests that her concern for self did not follow a linear pattern over the course of these two seasons. Instead, as some issues were resolved, others surfaced and were discussed within the context of the collaborative coaching context.

Concern for task

Teachers’ concern for task typically involve issues relating to planning and delivery of lesson content.⁴⁹ In Anne’s coaching context, similar issues were most evident during Season 2 of her coaching. Over the two seasons, Anne became progressively more involved in the planning stage, gradually taking more ownership of different parts of the session. Her familiarity with the planned sessions contributed to Anne’s confidence as a coach. Following discussions about Richard’s intention of improving his own communication skills, Anne also became more focused on how she then communicated with players at games and training:

I tried to give individual feedback to players during the game … I was happy that I communicated my observation from the side-line to the players on the pitch in real time. In training … I felt more opportunity to ask specific questions to players (Week 8, Y2)

Her growing confidence was tested, however, when she coached during competitive games throughout this season, and she commented: “While my ‘training’ coaching has improved (I feel), my ‘match/game’ coaching still needs a lot of work … ” (Week 17, Y2). On numerous occasions, Anne felt her coaching actions in game settings were ineffective:

I still feel a little under pressure when trying to give specific instruction/guidance to the team just before games … . I think my contribution was little value. I need to be better prepared for specific cues and ways to focus players appropriately at times like this (Week 13, Y2)

There was an evident distinction in Anne’s learning between her coaching actions during training sessions and those that occurred during competitive game settings. She identified problems and challenges in her coaching within her written reflections, through reading, and during discussions with Richard. His feedback on her written reflections helped Anne to incorporate strategies to support her coaching actions during training sessions. These task-oriented strategies such as being organised, and planning questions in advance, have also been identified in previous research.⁴⁶ During the reflective discussions, Anne and Richard specified coaching cues and prompts for each activity. Anne began to use these as a scaffold to support her coaching action: “Having these coaching prompts and foci helped me to be specific in my coaching feedback- despite feeling tired, rushed and unorganised on Monday night” (Week 9, Y2). Having the opportunity to observe, and reflect on those observations subsequently, helped Anne to gain a better understanding of how to manage coaching tasks. This was evident when she noted:

When we were coaching during Wednesday’s session, I noticed that during the game time, Richard did not give any instructions to ‘his’ team. He only gave updates of the time and score. I could see how his team took better ownership to communicate and make decisions than ‘my’ team, who I did call & instruct at some stages (Week 11, Y1)

While identifying gaps in domains of knowledge and addressing a multiplicity of challenges demonstrate novice coach learning,⁴⁵ there gaps were more evident during game situations. Coaching during competitive games is a more complex task, and thus is more challenging for a novice coach. The reflective dialogue with Richard, and subsequent written reflection, helped Anne to become aware of how this challenge was limiting her coaching effectiveness: “I certainly got caught in the moment- watching every kick- rather than having the presence of mind to stand back from the game as coach” (Week 12, Y2). It has been suggested that coaches operate on a “continuum of learning” and their position on this continuum impacts their ability to reflect.⁴⁷ In Anne’s case, it appears that her particular contextual environment had facilitated a deepening understanding of how she implemented coaching tasks, and heightened her awareness of areas for improvement.

Concern for players

The final stage of Fuller’s model relates to the impact made.¹² For Anne, this involved the development of her concern for the players, and centred on her concern to develop relationships with the players, and to support player learning. Existing research identifies that dealing with player disappointment challenges coaches.⁴⁶ Anne’s awareness of players’ disappointments during the season highlighted the need to develop a relationship with the players to communicate team selection decisions etc.:

I found it hard to see the disappointment on the faces of a number of girls when they were substituted … We have decided to talk to a number of players who will not start on the team to explain what they can offer to the squad and to help maintain positive team culture (Week 11, Y2)

Anne learned how to improve her relational skills through observation of Richard, throughout the season:

Richard makes a lot of time to meet and speak to players between sessions and games. I do very little of this. This additional communication helps to develop a stronger coach –player relationship. I need to try make time for this where possible (Week 11, Y2).

Reflecting later, she provided examples of how she made intentional efforts to develop relationships with the players: “I gave [Player A] contact details for a physio to help with her fallen arches. I spoke to [Player B & Player C] after class about their game” (Week 16, Y2).

Anne had very low self-efficacy as a coach at the beginning of Season 1 but over time her confidence improved, and she adopted a broader perspective: “I feel closer to them [players] as a coach. This may be due to the fact, I now know some of the girls for a longer time, but also, I am making a greater effort to ‘get to know’ them. This has helped my coaching” (Week 18, Y2).

Her own reflections-on-action²⁵ illustrate her improved attempts to support players’ learning:

During Monday’s session, I used examples of defenders’ ‘near hand tackle’ and attackers’ pace through tackles to share with the rest of the group. It was evident after I specified these actions with the whole group- other players starting using these good tactical practices. To me, this was evidence of some player learning (Week 8, Y2)

Some evidence in Richard’s written reflections also highlighted Anne’s ability to support player learning:

From what I saw of Anne’s interaction with the players this week, I noticed that there were really clear messages delivered … and there was a lot of questioning and encouragement of player problem-solving … This, I think, stems partly from our discussions over the past few weeks (Richard, Week 16, Y2)

Significantly, the collaborative reflective processes helped Anne to develop an awareness of her coaching impact that extended beyond her concern for self to a definite concern for players:

It is my responsibility as coach to ‘meet’ the players ‘where they are at’, but enable them to develop confidence in their ability to firstly recognise, then achieve and perhaps exceed their own expectations (End of Year 1 Philosophy)

This suggests a progression through Fuller’s stages as she gained experience, identifying a deeper understanding of her coaching practice. That progression, while non-linear and complex, also suggest an underlying commitment to being an empowering athlete-centred coach.²⁹

Implications

The findings presented in this paper outline how a collaborative approach can support learning within a quality reflective process. Consequently they support the idea that coaching “is a socially constructed activity”, where reflective practice is an inherently social process.²³ As the coach is a part of, and cannot be separate from, the social context of coaching, the complexities of coach reflection and learning are also intertwined.⁵⁰

Building on previous research that has provided valuable insight into individual coach’s reflective practice,¹⁸ this paper explicates a collaborative approach to support reflective practice and coach learning. It has extended Fuller’s concern-based model beyond educational contexts to exemplify indicators of coach learning: concern for self, concern for tasks, and concern for players. As each collaborative relationship is unique,⁵¹ the authors are hesitant to present the findings of this research as a model for shared and collaborative coach reflection, or to propose any generalisations. Instead, they present their experiences as an insight into the ways that shared reflective practices supported their learning. Specifically, Anne’s reflections on her experiences as a novice coach provided her with new perspectives on her coaching journey, becoming more confident and proficient, within the context of the supportive environment where she became more athlete-centred.

While Fuller’s model was very useful as a framework to investigate Anne’s potential learning over the course of two seasons, we agree with other research that critiqued the sequential nature of the stages of development¹³ and acknowledge that learners’ experiences overlap across stages in a more non-linear manner.¹¹ Specifically, we concur that concerns are “likely to be context-specific rather than universal”.⁴⁹ In this study, the collaborative nature of the coaching relationship appeared to support the novice coach’s learning and while it is useful to map this learning onto Fuller’s framework, it is also important to acknowledge the complexity of a process that is more spiral than linear. This was particularly evident in the early stages of the research where Anne’s concerns for self were influenced by her evolving identity as a coach rather than as a player. Understanding this complexity may assist coach educators to support informal learning in volunteer club settings, through interactions are accessible, contextualised and meaningful.³³ Nevertheless, the overall findings suggest the model can be a useful means to explore novice coach learning in similar ways to more widespread approaches such as the community of practice perspective.⁵²

We suggest that a shared reflective process, focused on concerns, may be valuable within coaching settings, where personal beliefs and perspectives are challenged through critical and reflective discussion, with a view to facilitating change and meaningful learning.⁵³ Through discussion of Anne’s learning, this paper provides evidence of how the written, read and dialogic reflection supported her learning when faced with a range of concerns,⁴⁶ and supports existing research that suggests working with others to seek solutions is indicative of transformative coach learning.⁴⁵

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iDs

Anne O’Dwyer

Richard Bowles

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