Lesson Plans

[Gav]

I'm just saying it's not necessary. Vigorously trying to delineate the 'plan' from the 'work of following a plan'.

Which is really besides the point. Some people might need one - particularly at the start of their careers. Anyone with an iota of fencing experience is going to see that rigidly sticking to a plan won't work. It might make you feel better to point it out time and again (well done you) but having a few "stage notes" is not inherently harmful.

For those that don't understand that, well ... it's a classic "monkey" problem. They're not going to be good coaches. You know that, I know that and Allen [for example] knows that. I hope everyone who reads this thread knows that too.

A comedy show is not a list of jokes or stories. Give me Chris Rock's complete list of jokes and stage notes, and I promise you I'll perform his routine without getting a single laugh (at least not a laugh in the way it was originally designed - there's something particularly morbid about people who are not Chris Rock doing Chris Rock material).

The show isn't the jokes. The fencing lesson isn't a list of footwork exercises and parry drills.

Which is not what I said or implied.

The point is that it's how you do it (and we agree on this point) that's important. But at the same time there's nothing wrong with prepping yourself properly.

You are not Chris Rock so you can't do his act. But that doesn't mean that Chris Rock doesn't take notes or prepare for his act.

As an aside: I actually don't know if he makes **** up on the spot but I'd be surprised if that was the case. Very few comedians do. But the point is that he probably plans to be entertaining.

Not sure where 'creativity' wanders into the discussion. There's certainly a great deal of on-the-fly adaptation going on constantly as part of the interactive process. I'm not sure how creativity (whatever that means in this context) is constituted or considered. Unlikely that a revolution is underfoot. More likely just strolling through well worn paths and warm cozy corridors with elegant ease. I'm trying desperately to avoid using 'art' and 'artfully'.

You're just being a jerk with this point. You know exactly what I am talking about.

I'm primarily responding to Allen's initial comment about coaches working without plans. I'm using it as an excuse to talk about things that I'd like to talk about. This is the coaching technique of telling folks the answers to questions they should have asked instead of questions they actually ask - which are frequently unanswerable and betray a misunderstanding of the entire business they are about. ;-)

"Teaching" (in the very narrow sense) is actually part of the coaching process - how else do you get beginners to learn their guard and basic movements? Osmosis?

I prefer to think coaching anything higher than beginner level is better described as mentoring* which I get the impression is what you are aiming at. We agree.

*though there's a problem with this term. More properly it's coaching - but everyone is already talking about different things anyway so what the heck.

[Mr Epee]

http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc...=rep1&type=pdf

Suchman (1987) shows the importance of differentiating between work and representations of work like plans and process models. Plans are representations of situated actions produced in the course of action and therefore they become resources for the work rather than they in any strong sense determine its course. Suchman emphasises action as essential situated and ad hoc improvisations, which consequently make plans rational anticipations, before the act, and post hoc reconstructions, afterward. The theoretical work on situated action, and the studies underlying it, seems to have attained so much attention that the importance of plans and protocols as guidance of work has been neglected. Recently, at the CSCW '96 conference in Boston, Suchman herself commented that an unfortunate, but typical, mis-reading of her work was that plans do not exist. Plans do exist and should be viewed as "an artifact of our reasoning about action, not ... the generative mechanism of action."


Nevertheless, in medical work, pre-hoc representations of work like plans, checklists, schedules, protocols, work programmes etc. have proved extremely valuable as mechanisms giving order to work. Such plans support handling complex work situations, involving coordination and collaboration among several health professionals. For example, the patient's diagnosis and the associated treatment plan are essential coordination mechanisms, which convey information to the involved staff about the nature of the illness and how the treatment should proceed. Without this plan, extensive communication has to take place in order to inform all involved personnel about the patient, his illness and how the physician in charge intends to cure it. Thus, plans as pre-scriptions of activity are valuable, and indeed used, within organisations like hospitals to carry out work. This makes Schmidt and Simone (1996) raise the rhetoric question to Suchman of "What is it that makes plans such as production schedules, office procedures, classification schemes, etc. useful in the first place? What makes them 'resources'?" (p. 169).


These studies of work seem to leave us with what can be called the planning paradox: On the one hand, due to the contingencies of the concrete work situation work has an ad hoc nature. Plans are not the generative mechanisms of work, but are 'merely' used to reflect on work, before or after. On the other hand, we find that plans, as more or less formal representations, play a fundamental role in almost any organisation by giving order to work and thereby they effectively help getting the work done. Within a hospital context this tension between informal practice and formal procedures for work is also discussed by Symon et al. (1996):

"[A]ny investigation of work coordination should look beyond formal procedures to consider

contextual factors (i.e factors that may give rise to informal practices), while at the same time
taking into account the use and influence of formal procedures" (p. 3, emphasis in original).
This planning paradox is addressed in this paper. First, the theoretical understanding

[keith]

Back to fencing. I have worked with a variety of coaches that range from Beck system rigidity to very student driven and experimental. I got a lot out of both approaches with some coaches and very little out of both with other coaches. The coaches I got the most from were quick to target which conceptual or mechanical shortcomings caused an action to fail, then spent targeted time fixing those issues. The ones I did not get much from wanted the action to look exactly like their other students and tried to squeeze me into a specific mold. Some students need to be molded like that, but for many students the flexibility to stop the planned lesson to fix an unforeseen issue is key. I have also had lessons, some of which have given me a year's worth of material in one lesson, where we started with one action and then the coach and I both decided that was a poor choice of material and he developed a new lesson by the seat of his pants that blew my mind for months.

What's interesting here, and I'd agree, is how (regardless of the teaching/coaching method) the individual lesson exist as the thing that the parts revolve around . It can be used differently but there really isn't much of a conceptual difference. It's an interesting idea to think of what a fencing club would look like if it really broke with that sort of a model; a Montessori* fencing club perhaps?


*not quite right but it is the easiest brief descriptor.

[AaronK]

I am a little late to the thread- but to answer the original question...I use lesson plans completely within the spectrum of: not-at-all to a highly-structured 3-page-outline (per class).
I have taught fencing long enough that I can improvise my way through just about any class without having written or rehearsed the specifics of what I am going to teach. Most likely I have done the exact lesson, scores of times before...some parts of class I have repeated hundreds of times. I went to school to learn to be an educator- originally in art-education, but later also physical education. Writing lesson plans was a part of the curriculum in both, but I think that a fencing coach can find them useful as well.
There are two specific instances in which I write very detailed lesson-plans, and continue to find them useful:

First, the times that I am writing a lesson plan usually involve teaching something in a new way, or when I am working in the short-term and need to accomplish specific goals, a.k.a. objectives. I keep all of these records because I am not likely going to remember exactly how I presented information at a certain camp or clinic unless I have some reference. I wouldn't videotape my camps/clinics because it would be impractical to watch an entire video just to reference one single spoken phrase that might have been key, but it is easy enough to write down a quick note on the plan itself during or afterwards. Also, I take notes so I can evaluate what I did that worked best, and what I need to change for the next time. Because I am actually writing on the lesson plan that I had prepared, I will be able to find it in the future when I look up that lesson. My summer camps are always new because I know in detail what I taught in previous years, but I can also build on certain ideas or themes to give repeat-kids a deeper connection to the material.
Example: I know that I presented a segment of a coaches clinic that had to do with teaching footwork. At the top of my lesson plan was a reminder- actually one of the "lesson objectives"- the objective was to teach something about TEACHING footwork, not doing footwork. Simply writing that down helped me avoid giving a presentation on simply doing footwork. I felt that although I had demonstrated a variety of ways to execute specific fencing steps, I did achieve my objective- if not wholly at least in part.
That being a couple of years back, I can tell you that I don't remember EXACTLY what I did, or how I did it...but I can go check my lesson plan and I am certain that I can give the same presentation better than I had the first time.

Second, when I was a beginning teacher/coach I found that when I made highly detailed lesson plans for each and every class...these were very scripted even including dialog I was going to use in class...teaching was almost effortless. I knew what I was going to do, when I would do it. That is not to say that I didn't deviate from the plan...that almost always happened in the beginning. It freed me up to teach instead of stumble along thinking of stuff to do and then a way that it should be done. When I was teaching classes on the fly, I felt that my success was hit-and-miss and I had to rely on more activities that served to fill time rather than achieve an objective.
When I was first being mentored by another coach, he INSISTED that I write a lesson plan before giving a private lesson (which he was observing and critiquing). It was extremely helpful until I had gotten a little more experience with giving lessons and had a generic "lesson format" that I could perform from memory. It's not that I referenced the plan during the lesson, but it was exactly like writing a speech...I was able to mentally rehearse it before I had to do it.

Lesson plans are a tool...like any tool they can help you, but not everybody is going to need them, and many may not even use them. It's up to the individual instructor to find a practice that they are most comfortable with, and hopefully, the most effective.