THE "INTENTIONALITY" OF TEACHING
The best coaches are often the best teachers. They take great pride in the practices -- which are well designed and often take more time to construct than to execute. It takes time to develop a great practice plan because of the "intentionality" of selecting the drills that are necessary to improve upon the habits of your team. What is important to the success of your system? I've always made the comment that while watching video and scouting a team, you could tell what is important to another coach and therefore select what she drills and emphasized in her practices. One of the first examples that comes to mind would be offensive rebounding by Tennessee under coach Pat Summitt. No team that I've coached against hit the offensive boards that way a Summitt-coached team did. Without ever attending a Lady Vol practice I can guarantee that it was something that was worked on in drills...that it was something that was emphasized in whole method play...that it was something that she talked to her team about constantly -- in practice, in the locker room, in timeouts, and the video room. She was intentional in teaching it and emphasizing.
There are two things that the master teacher does in creating habits. He is "process oriented" -- he knows it is in the details of the specific skills that makes it effective or not effective. You just don't tell a player to block out. You teach them the specific footwork, handwork, and timing to successfully blockout. The second thing a master teacher excels in is in the "emphasis" of what is important. One of my favorite Don Meyer quotes is that "It isn't what you teach, it's what you emphasize." Making it important in the mind of your players creates an increased focus for them.
In the book "Practice Perfect," written by Doug Lemov, Erica Woolway and Katie Yezzi, they have this to say about the intentionality of practice:
It is more accurate to say that practice makes permanent IN practice you can master a skill thoroughly or not at all, and what you master can be the correct method of one where you knees are locked. Either way, what you don is likely to become encoded -- it will be instilled in muscle memory or mental circuitry and become habit -- for better or worse. Practice all the wrong moves and your team will execute the wrong moves when it's time to perform. Practice without intentionality and you will perform without much intentionality. A critical goal of practice, then, should be ensuring that participants encode success -- that they practice getting it right -- whatever "it" might be. While that may sound obvious, practice that encoded failure is common. There are a lot of reasons for this, but two seem especially pervasive. First we can fail to observe our practices carefully and strategically enough to see whether participants are getting things right, and second we can put participants in situations that make failure likely in a mistaken effort to steepen the learning curve.
Running effective practice requires a systematic attentiveness to particpants' rate of success. "You haven't taught it until they've learned it," Wooden liked to say, and the best teachers test to see how much students have learned -- a process called "checking for understanding" -- every few seconds.
Practice should be designed so that a participant who fails to succeed at an activity tries it over again.
