⏳ Read Time: 7-8 min, 1,570 words
📌 What’s inside:
🧠 Why most coaches lack a learning system
🔁 The feedback loop you’re experiencing every day (and likely ignoring)
🧪 Why your classroom might be your best coaching lab
⚠️ The mistake that keeps coaches from actually improving
📊 Five simple ways to start building your own learning system
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📖 Anecdote: My Time in the Classroom
Pardon me while I do a little more story-telling than normal.
I’ve been reflecting a lot on my time in the classroom.
I say that as if it’s in the past. But I still teach today. Part-time. I love the classroom. I can’t get away from it. It’s one of the best lab experiments on human behavior and learning that exists.
I’ve been lucky. I’ve been able to teach at two different schools that both gave me the freedom to explore. To try stuff and see what sticks. So much so that they even asked me to be the “guinea pig” teacher.
“Try whatever you want. Collect good data on it. As long as when you’re done, you come back and teach the rest of our teachers what you learned.”
So my classroom was quite literally a laboratory of human behavior and learning.
And the thing about teenagers (this very much ties into our purpose at BETTER) is that they wear their feelings on their sleeves.
You don’t have to guess what’s working.
You can see it.
When you’re in the classroom, you have a built-in feedback loop on your communication and teaching.
You are getting real-time feedback on engagement during a lesson.
What engages people? What doesn’t?
(Don’t believe me? Try teaching a leadership class to freshmen.)
You can literally feel the room.
But it doesn’t stop there.
You then get feedback on how well you actually taught the material because those same students take quizzes and tests on it.
One of the biggest mistakes many teachers make is considering those assignments to be only tests for their students. Then blaming them when it goes poorly.
I’ve always lived by the old John Wooden adage:
“You haven’t taught until they’ve learned.”
That was always my guiding principle.
Standing up in front of the room, talking for 45 minutes, then putting a quiz on their desk and blaming them when they fail?
I’ll give you a hint.
It isn’t the student.
I was thinking about this most recently while watching the final lecture by Patrick Winston at MIT.
(Coaches, please don’t stop reading just because I admitted that I watch lectures.)
Final lectures are fascinating. You get to see what some of the world’s smartest thinkers believe actually matters.
Sidebar: Let’s make “Final Practices” a thing. I’d love to see the same version from some of my favorite coaches. Wouldn’t you?
Winston taught some of the world’s most successful engineers for 50 years and chose to spend his final lecture on the art of speaking. About communication.
As I watched, I realized something.
Many of the ideas he was teaching had become natural to me. Things like…
Don’t tell jokes at the start. Tell stories. They’re getting used to your cadence, rhythm, and the rules of engagement.
Tell them what they’ll know by the end.
What is obvious to you is invisible to others. Explain the obvious.
The first 5 minutes determine whether or not people will listen to the rest.
Build a fence around your idea. Tell people what it is NOT before you tell them what it IS.
Wait 7 seconds after asking a question. Give time for the audience to process.
Never read your slides. Your audience can read. They cannot listen and read simultaneously.
Write down the things that are most important. Never too much. Your point will be clearer.
Nobody learns from someone they are not inspired by. When in doubt, inspire.
End by telling the audience what they can now do because they listened.
I agreed with them. I could point to recent talks and lessons where I was doing exactly what he described.
But I didn’t have names for them. I couldn’t teach them like he had. I hadn’t studied “Speaking”.
I had just… learned them.
Where?
You guessed it.
The classroom.
But here’s the thing. Not all teachers develop those skills.
Not all gravitate toward understanding attention, behavior, and learning. And that’s what I’ve been thinking about the most lately.
Why?
Why did I learn those things?
Why did my school tap me on the shoulder to train other teachers?
Was it something I had?
Or something I learned?
And most importantly - how do I help others do the same?
I think it comes down to a remarkably simple idea. Reflection. A system of reflection.
Here’s what it looked like:
I taught a lesson.
I got feedback both in real time (engagement) and after (performance). And I reflected on it. I built in adjustments that I would make sometimes by the next class period. Sometimes not until the next year when I taught that lesson. Some informed the rest of my lessons that year.
Not just “How did the lesson feel?” But “What actually happened?” The data mattered just as much as the experience.
And that’s when it clicked for me.
Most teachers don’t lack talent. They lack a system for learning from what they do every day.
The irony is this: Coaches spend their entire careers in environments filled with feedback. And yet, they rarely (unfortunately for their athletes) build systems to learn from it.
One of the saddest things for me to hear is a high school coach complaining about the teaching they have to do, like it’s getting in the way of their coaching.
No, my friend.
Your classroom might be the best coaching lab you’ll ever have.
You want to get better at communicating? There’s your lab.
You want to understand attention and engagement? There’s your lab.
You want to learn how people actually learn? There’s your lab.
But the same is true on the field.
Practice is feedback.
Games are feedback.
Film is feedback.
Your players’ performance is feedback.
The question isn’t whether or not that feedback exists. It’s whether you’ve built a system to learn from it.
🧠 5 Ways to Start Building That System
1. Exit Tickets
At the end of practice, don’t ask questions that your players are able to nod their response to.
Ask:
What was today’s emphasis?
Can they demonstrate it?
Did it show up in scrimmages?
If the answer is no, don’t assume they’ve got it.
2. Have Pop Quizzes
Why do we do a drill to work on a skill, and then when they do it right, assume they’ve got it?
It’s not whether they’re able to do it once. It’s whether they can do it AGAIN.
Start today’s practice with yesterday’s emphasis. See how well it transferred into their learning. You could even do this within the same practice.
Work on something, scrimmage or play, then go back to the first thing with a “test” 10-15 minutes later!
3. Track Engagement in Real Time
Each practice, silently pick 3 players:
One high performer
One average
One struggling
Watch only them for 5-10 minutes:
When do they lock in?
When do they drift?
That’s your engagement data. Adjust your coaching based on that.
4. Turn film into feedback on YOU (not just them)
When you watch a film, add one column:
Player mistake → What did I teach (or not teach) that led to this?
If the same mistake shows up 3+ times, it’s not a player issue anymore.
5. Use a 5-minute reflection system
Immediately after practice, write:
+1: What worked (keep doing)
–1: What didn’t (needs adjustment)
→1: One change for tomorrow
No paragraphs. No overthinking. Just clarity.
🏁 A BETTER Summary:
The people who get better aren’t the ones with better opportunities.
They’re the ones who build better systems for learning from the opportunities they already have.
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