She Got Skills — or does she?

In addition to everything else, I coach little kids in basketball and soccer. It is a lot of work, but it is also the joy of my week.

I just realized why I like coaching small kids…I can teach them skills and parents love it. When I coach my kids, I just teach fundamentals–no trick plays, no strategizing about the upcoming opponent, no real sense of starter and scrubs. Instead, we work hard on learning to dribble, pass, shoot, and defend (both sports!). Now, I really enjoy all of the strategizing and gamesmanship that occurs at later stages of development, but I recognize that you can’t run trick plays with kids that don’t know how to pass.

Unfortunately, not everyone sees things the way I do. I watched a group of older kids playing and the coach was tearing the kids down because they kept screwing up this elaborate play that he’d designed. Regardless of the fact that the kids had a hard time understanding the play, the kids on his team are never going to be able to efficiently run the play because his kids are very poor ballhandlers and passers. He is coaching as if all of the kids have the fundamentals and, when confronted with the reality that his players don’t have those skills, he simply coaches the same way…but LOUDER. He wasn’t having very much fun and neither were his kids.

It occurred to me that this ends up looking like a lot of classrooms. The teacher assumes (perhaps rightly) that students have certain basic social and behavioral competencies and prepares elaborate lessons designed to run with kids who can work together, share ideas, and resolve disagreements. However, when confronted with the reality that her kids do not possess those basic skills, there is not explicit teachng (and re-teaching) of the basics. Instead, in a similar way to the coach above, everybody just ends up loud and angry. My philosophy is that the basics are the basics for a reason. The fundamental skills should be fundamental to your instructional planning and your facilitation of learning experiences. If your students don’t have the skills you expect, the only real choice you have is to teach the skills explicitly.

It doesn’t mean that your students won’t eventually be able to function in the way you imagine. Quite the opposite…somewhere in Wilmington a few decades ago Micheal Jordan was an unexceptional little boy trying his best to simply learn how to bounce the ball.

Greetings friends!

Welcome to the blog, How to Catch a Fish. A very special welcome to all of my friends from the NC Behavior Support Summer Institute who inspired me to do this. I hope this will be a place for us all to share about how we create school environments and learning experiences that lower anxiety levels and engage students. Let’s go fishing…