STOKE CITY'S globetrotting Community Coach Warren Leat is back on his travels again . . . having flown out to Kenya to spend a week delivering the Premier Skills Course Phase Two.
Following the success of a similar visit to Senegal in the Autumn, Warren has joined up with Adam Lea from Portsmouth and Head Coach Gareth Prosser from Wolverhampton Wanderers for this latest trip.
He will be keeping stokecityfc.com in touch with the whole experience of coach education in Kenya on a daily basis. Here is his account of day three:
Kenya Day Three
Day Three began at 8.00am and the morning session involved practical activities at the Moi International Sports Stadium under the theme of inclusion. The weather for the morning session was raining and cloudy, but this did not affect how well the sessions went.
The sessions that were delivered by Gareth, Adam and myself with a coach centred style. Also the participants delivered sessions in groups around how they can develop the use of Inclusion in not only their own sessions but they sessions of the coaches who worked for them in their communities. Therefore we were starting to guide the participants towards seeing how they could mentor their coaches to use inclusion and how to provide feedback through questioning which was done in the afternoon classroom workshop.
The practical sessions also focused on ways to differentiate the learning of all those would take part in their sessions. The STEPS (Space, Task, Equipment, People and Speed) process was used and we delivered this in an interactive style, and engaged the participants to use their experiences to provide examples through giving them generic scenario's and asking them to be creative to come up with ways of differentiating. This had a very positive effect on the participants who started to begin to think about not only ways of ensuring all players had good learning opportunities at their level, but to instil this into their coaches in the communities.
After lunch we developed the concept of the participants becoming mentors through a couple of activities around their community projects. The activity was aimed at helping them to ask good questions when mentoring coaches within their community, in order to help another person reflect and review on their practice, and to find ways for them to improve.
In pairs they took a turn each to talk about their projects whilst their partner wrote notes for the second part, which involved them devising open questions to establish how their partner thought their project had performed. The third part involved them taking turns to use these questions to get feedback off their partner.
This activity proved very successful as the participants felt more confident in knowing what type of questions to ask, in order to gauge their partner's views on their projects, and they also saw the importance of listening skills, eye contact, giving praise, asking open questions about what challenges they faced and providing feedback. This was a good starting point as later in the week they will have to provide feedback to young leaders who will put coaching sessions on to children.
