After finishing my undergraduate coursework in 2017, immediately jumping into graduate school was simply the next step. I had known I wanted to earn a Master’s degree and with the internship being a requirement to getting my teaching certification, it made sense to keep continuing the coursework I was already doing. I had the beginnings of teaching philosophies and ideas for the classroom blooming, and through that year of student teaching and graduate coursework I was able to create and refine lesson plans, begin forging basic teacher-student relationships, figure out classroom management strategies, and other things of the like. I figured that once I started taking more advanced coursework on my way to earning my Master of Arts in Education (MAED), I would be able to hone in on some of those skills and apply them in my own teaching context. Once I finished the internship and began job hunting, I decided finding (and getting comfortable) in a job was probably more important than finishing the last four semesters of credits I would need for my degree, so I put finishing my own schooling on the back burner in exchange for beginning my career; I figured that my credits were good for another five years and that I would get to it when I got to it.
And then COVID hit and threw everything for a loop.
My time during the pandemic was easier than the experiences of most, but it did hinder my ability to get back into my college coursework. I finally had the time and desire to get back into it, but trying to navigate new ways of doing things (both in life and educationally) pushed things back even further. I got an email early in the 2022 school year about expiring credits and knew that I had to get things in motion to complete the degree that I had begun four years previous. What happened between the spring semester of 2023 and now can best be described as “completion” and “growth”. The advantage I had, although not knowing it at the time, was that I had ideas and notions of what I thought education, coaching, and leadership best looked… and that many of these were misconceptions. Having unrefined ideas and misconceptions but possessing a willingness to learn can be a big asset for any learner, and I fit this bill. I have always liked learning more and going through school, but the last four semesters in the MAED program have tested me, stretched me mentally, and forced me to learn and attack things from new and different perspectives than I had before. I learned different methods of what leadership looks like and how to become a better, more effective leader under my refined definition of it. I was able to grow in my teaching and educational context through learning about different forms of educational research and how to best answer the questions that I have about my students and this helped me in better understanding them so I can cater to their needs better. I have been a football and basketball coach since 2019 but learned more in the three coaching classes I took over the course of a year and a half than I had in the field for the last five; being able to apply what I was learning in the classroom to what was going on on the field has helped me in my coaching context immensely. Learning about the ins and outs of athletic administration and taking classes towards advancing my knowledge in the legal and administrative realm is helping me to take the next steps in my career.
In all, I took thirteen courses that apply to my Master of Arts in Education degree, with focuses in P-12 Leadership and Sport Coaching and Leadership, I am also obtaining my Sport Leadership and Administration certification. These three courses, though, are ones that I had the most growth and takeaways from in my educational, leadership, and coaching contexts.
KIN 857: Promoting Positive Youth Development Through Sport
I have been coaching in some capacity since I graduated from High School in 2012, so I felt that I knew a thing or two about working with young athletes. Especially since I paired that experience with six years of teaching, I thought that I was pretty well versed in positive youth development and in my practices and ways of bringing about that development. Boy, was I wrong. It did not take long in this class for me to revisit and rethink everything I thought was important when it comes to coaching middle school and high school athletes. Sure, coaching athletic skill is good and will be a good judge of effectiveness, but through this class I learned the importance of implementing the teaching of life skills into our organizations and even into drills in practices. We studied the Developmental Assets Framework involving life skills and used most of them in our practice and organization planning. Being able to pair this with teaching has been transformative for me in that we were tasked weekly in using assets new to us in our teaching and coaching contexts to apply what we were learning and use them in our reports and projects in the course. In learning about the relevant life skills, I have been able to create content for my classes and lesson plan with them, allowing me to be intentional about what I would like my students to learn and how it is being done. Further, I have shared the list of assets with them and have let them create content for what they think is relevant to their own contexts and situations, giving them ownership of their own development. To wrap on this, one cool experience with this class that I had was that we were to pick a local organization to research and look further into for how they implement Positive Youth Development and their models. We were given a list of organizations in the greater Lansing area and of the four we were given, I volunteered with three of them during my time in undergrad. When I was volunteering with these organizations, I just sort of felt like I was working with youth, not realizing really what I was doing. Once I was able to put names to the ideas, tactics, models, and life skills we were teaching, it made me reflect more fondly on my time in those organizations. This class definitely helped me to grow both as a coach and as a teacher, and was probably the most influential of any that I had taken during my time in the program.
EAD 801: Leadership and Organizational Development
I knew I wanted to be a leader in some capacity in my career so taking a leadership class was definitely something on my radar, but I did not know what to expect, so I went in with a pretty open mind. This class was the introductory course for the P-12 Leadership concentration, but I think taking it later into my academic program gave me a big advantage going into the course by virtue of already having a little knowledge of leadership and skills I possessed. The biggest takeaway from this class happened right at the very beginning; the first lesson we did that revolved around types and attributes of leadership allowed us to analyze ourselves as leaders and help us to identify our strengths and weaknesses. My mom had always told me that grad school was just showing and telling what you already know, and the lessons in this leadership class were part and parcel of that; I had already been doing some of these things in the classroom and in my school, but learning more about the tactics and methods in which I had been leading helped to put a name and definition to what I had been doing, and this helped to deepen my understanding of the leader I am and the leader I was becoming. I was a tad bit disappointed while I was taking this class- not about the class itself, but that I took this class during the summer semester and was not able to put the new methods and ideas that I was learning into practice right away. Learning about practical leadership theories and strategies was great and was something I really valued (and use effectively in my context now), but the one wish I had while I was taking this class was that I could have tried the strategies we were learning about in real time. Since getting back into the classroom for the year, learning about myself as a leader and being able to employ the strategies I learned about last summer has only enhanced my effectiveness in the classroom and has given me more confidence as a teacher and a leader as a result.
KIN 849: Theory and Practice of Sport Leadership
This class could simply be viewed as a continuation of the Leadership and Organizational Development class that I took the year prior, but the things that stuck out the most about this class was that I was able to think about my leadership methods and tactics and apply them to situations I will be seeing when I take the next steps in my career as an athletic director. This class took scenarios that small colleges and high schools went through and walked us through their solutions and why they worked out or why they did not. It built on some of the same leadership principles that I learned about in EAD 801 and allowed for practical applications of them in sports. This class has been beneficial in more ways than just one. What I liked most about this class is that the scenarios that we were given in the modules and projects helped us to apply our new leadership ideas to our individual situations (coaching, teaching, leading departments, etc), and gave us the chance to see what worked best for us as leaders that were learning how to best be effective, by our own definition. At the time of this writing, the class is still ongoing and does not wrap for a few more weeks but I can already say that this was one of the more influential and informative classes that I will have taken of all of the Sport Coaching and Leadership program.
The practicality of this program is astounding and the doors my newly acquired knowledge will open are numerous. In advancing my career into an administrative role, applying the leadership skills I have learned will be second nature and the adjustment curve ought to be lessened because of the experiences I have had over the last few years in the program. The program encouraged me to reflect upon my lessons and previous knowledge and pushed me to expand my horizons and thinking into new, different directions that will allow me to be effective in whatever role I will find myself in. I have taken thirteen classes over the five years I have been working towards this degree and each one of them has afforded me invaluable experience in adding items to my toolbox and sharpening the skills I already do have. I am incredibly grateful for the experiences I have been afforded through the last few years and look forward to paying the program back the best way I can- by putting my experiences and knowledge to good use by enriching others.