I have spent much of my professional life thinking about how people learn.

For more than twenty-nine years, I have worked in education—as a physics teacher, university professor, researcher and school administrator.

Somewhere in there I became a hockey coach. You would think I would have connected those two worlds immediately.

I didn't.

For years, I did many of the things coaches do. I collected drills. I watched other coaches. I built practice plans. I attended clinics. I tried things that worked, abandoned things that didn't, and occasionally convinced myself that a practice must have been good because everyone looked exhausted when it was over.

Eventually, though, the educator in me started asking the hockey coach some uncomfortable questions.

What are my players actually learning? Why can they perform something perfectly in practice and then seemingly forget it two nights later in a game? How much should I tell them? When should I let them struggle? Why is it so difficult to coach differently than I was coached?

And how do I know whether any of this is actually working?

Those questions have become the foundation for these conversations.

The Tuesday Night Coach

I'm writing primarily for the coach I think about most often. The "Tuesday night coach".

Maybe you're a parent who volunteered because someone needed to step behind the bench. Maybe you've coached for years. Maybe you played hockey at a high level. Maybe you didn't. You probably don't have a video coach, a performance department or unlimited practice time.

You have sixty minutes. Maybe half the ice. A bag of pucks. Some cones. A whiteboard with at least one marker that has inexplicably dried out but it’s in your rink jacket anyways. And a group of kids who deserve a really good experience.

I think there is an enormous amount we can learn from educational psychology, learning science, skill acquisition and great teachers about what happens during those sixty minutes. The challenge is translating those ideas into something useful at the rink.

That's what I'm trying to do. Not as someone who has solved coaching. Quite the opposite.

I'm writing as a coach still trying to understand it.

How These Conversations Work

Each conversation begins somewhere familiar to me: at the rink. Usually with something that didn't go quite the way I expected. From there, I'll try to understand what happened through ideas from education, psychology, learning science and coaching research.

But I'm not particularly interested in theory for theory's sake. I'm interested in what the theory changes. So each conversation eventually comes back to the ice.

What This Doesn't Mean is where I'll try to resist turning a useful idea into an absolute coaching rule.

What I Changed is exactly that: what the idea made me reconsider in my own coaching.

Tuesday Night brings everything down to one practical thing you might try at your next practice.

Continue the Conversation points toward some of the researchers, writers and coaches whose ideas have challenged my own thinking if you want to wander further down the rabbit hole.

And My Notebook is where I'll leave the question I'm still wrestling with.

Because that's really what these are. Not twelve answers. Twelve conversations.

Where We're Starting

The first few conversations begin with something I've slowly come to recognize in my own coaching: Learning and the appearance of learning aren't always the same thing.

A busy practice can look like learning. A perfectly executed drill can look like learning. A coach delivering a brilliant explanation can look like learning. A smooth practice without mistakes can look like learning.

Sometimes those things are evidence of learning. Sometimes they aren't.

Figuring out the difference has changed the way I coach.

So that's where we're going to start. With a Thursday night practice, a sweaty U11 hockey player, a $1.50 bag of candy, and a question I couldn't shake on the drive home: What did my players actually learn tonight?

See you Tuesday.  

We’ll pick up the next conversation next Tuesday! In the meantime, if this one got you thinking—or you just want to talk coaching—I’d love to hear from you. Reach me at coach@wheatlandhockey.ca, and follow what we’re learning on the ice at Wheatland Hockey.