One-to-One Feedback Sessions

The first chapter in (Hughes and Franks, 2008) is titled .  Feedback is critical because without it, we can’t improve in anything we do.  As a coach and analyst for the Celts, most of my feedback is came from the body language of the players and the judgements I made about them.  There are many limitations to this feedback alone such as making incorrect judgements on body language.

As part of my journey to be a reflective practitioner (see blog post), I decided to undertake one-to-one sessions with the Celts players (taken from my time in Germany – see link).  I am a huge proponent of this because it is a rich source of feedback that should be tapped into.  Rather than inferring from body language, they tell you their thoughts on the various aspects you want to know about.  That’s amazing right?  Questions like what is your personal opinion of my coaching overall?  Which parts of my coaching did you like best?  What parts of my coaching could be improved?  What is your personal opinion of the statistics I gave you?  These questions are answered first-hand by the players themselves.

So what did I find out?  An enormous amount!  I won’t be writing specifics on this blog.  However, the benefits can be seen.  It reinforced what I knew needed improvement.  It raised issues that were more critical than I first thought.  Some great ideas for improvements can come out of it which I intend to use.  It also allowed me to have that face-to-face time with players, which allowed me to know the players better, which in turn should allow me to get the best out of them.  It also allowed the players to hopefully get to know  better as a person and coach.

As another quick source of feedback, I handed out questionnaires to the Wales School Team (retrospectively completing one of my improvements – see link).  Having been with them for only a week in Germany, they can tell me their first impressions of my coaching and analysis work.  It was a short questionnaire but it was definitely worthwhile because it gave me a unique insight into how I could improve my practices from the start.

Both the one-to-one sessions and questionnaires, it has informed my future coaching and analysis practices.  It has also informed me that those procedures need to be improved so I get the exact information I want out of it.  The only shame now is I won’t be able to apply it specifically to either situation because I am leaving Cardiff in mid-June once my Master’s modules finish.  However, this exercise was definitely worthwhile and I recommend everybody who wants to improve their practices to utilise this feedback resource.