Teaching Styles of Girls' High School Basketball Coaches

Purpose

Lacy and Martin (1994) argued that research examining the instruction of coaches over the duration of a season would be an important addition to the literature on coaching effectiveness. The purpose of this study was to determine whether the teaching styles of girl's high school basketball coaches changed during different phases of a season. It was hypothesized that coaches would employ more direct styles of teaching at the beginning of a season when they focused on skill learning/sharpening and fitness. As the season progressed, however, and coaches focused increasingly on tactics, strategies, and players' decision-making, it was hypothesized that they would shift to using more indirect styles of teaching.

Methods

Participants were 20 coaches. During the early, middle, and late phases of one season, one practice coached by each participant was videotaped. Practices were coded by three coders for teaching style use with the Instrument for Identifying Teaching Styles, an interval recording instrument which records the amount of time spent in eight teaching styles described by Mosston (1981) and in management. Inter-observer reliability was established at 87%. Tapes were randomly assigned to the three coders for coding.

Analysis/Results

Descriptive statistics were calculated for each teaching style across the three phases of the season. One-way repeated-measures analysis of variance tests were utilized to determine whether the percentages of time in which coaches used the eight teaching styles and managed their players changed during the course of the season. Results revealed that the coaches employed the practice style for the majority of time allocated for instruction (82.67%). This meant that their main mode of operation was to present tasks and provide feedback while the players practiced at their own pace. Conversely, they spent very little time using the command (2.53%), reciprocal (6.20%), self-check (0.35%), guided discovery (1.59%), and divergent (0.20%) teaching styles or managing (6.46%). Moreover, they spent no time using the inclusion or going beyond teaching styles. There were no significant differences in teaching style use across the three phases of the season.

Conclusions

These data indicate that there was no shift from direct to indirect teaching style use during the course of the season. Possibly, this was because the coaches were pedagogically limited or not interested in their players learning about tactics and strategies or making more decisions. Alternatively, it may have been that they focused on skill acquisition throughout the season because they were working with players of limited ability.