In our fourth week at placement, Mrs. Lowe took a team to a cross country competition, so she wasn’t in school. The children were acting up as they thought they’d get away with more silly behaviour. When this happened, we stopped and had them sit in silence for one minute to demonstrate that they were wasting their own time. This improved their behaviour, although after reflecting on-action, there may have been better ways to deal with it.
One theory – SCENE (Gano-Overway & Guivernau, 2018) – suggests that coaches should nurture care in athletes and teach kind behaviour. As this was the first time we’d taken a session without the teacher, it was the first chance the participants got to see how we dealt with situations. Using a punishment when the behaviour got challenging may not have come across as caring. Sitting them down and having a friendly talk with them may have been viewed as a more caring way of dealing with the situation.
By being more patient and talking to the participants rather than giving a punishment straight away, we would be adhering to the caring coaching model (Fisher et al., 2019) which suggests that when a coach demonstrates care, the athlete gives more effort and therefore increases their sporting performance and develops holistically.
I think the problems were increased due to our lack of experience with this class. We hadn’t been working with the class for long, so hadn’t yet developed quality relationships with the participants. The personal assets framework for sport (Cote, Turnnidge, & Evans, 2014) suggests that this is one of three elements needed to get performance, participation and personal development from the participants. Because of this, I believe that if this had happened after we’d been with them for a few more weeks, they may not have messed about as much and we’d have controlled it better.
References:
Côté, J., Turnnidge, J. and Evans, M. B. (2014) ‘The Dynamic Process of Development through Sport. / Dinamični Proces Razvoja Prek Športa’, Kinesiologia Slovenica, 20(3), pp. 14–26. Available at: http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/login.aspx?direct=true&db=s3h&AN=101535985&site=eds-live&scope=site (Accessed: 4 March 2020).
Fisher, L. A., Larsen, L. K., Bejar, M. P., & Shigeno, T. C. (2019). A heuristic for the relationship between caring coaching and elite athlete performance. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 14(2), 126.
Gano-Overway, L., & Guivernau, M. (2018). Setting the SCENE: Developing a caring youth sport environment. Journal of Sport Psychology in Action, 9(2), 83–93.
Nathan Westwell - Coaching Blog 