Are you helping — or taking their turn?

There is a particular temptation in knowing how to do something: I can mistake the speed of my answer for the quality of my help. The task moves forward. My timetable approves. But I may never find out where the other person was actually stuck.

Imagine a player asking where to stand in a practice situation. I could put them in the right place. Or, if they know the basics, I could first ask what they are watching and where they think they need to move. Their answer would give me something to work with. Perhaps a missing piece of information. Perhaps a reasonable choice I had not considered. I should probably hear it before improving it.

The same temptation follows me into coach education. Imagine a coach asking how to change an activity that has stopped working. I could redesign it for them, complete with numbers, rules and the satisfaction of a job done. Or I could ask what they want the players to learn and which part of the activity is getting in the way. Then they could propose one change before I offer mine.

This is not a request to turn every answer into a guessing game. If somebody needs a rule explained, explain it. If they have no useful starting point, give them one. Withholding information while looking thoughtful is still withholding information.

The timing is what interests me. In the first experiment in Manu Kapur’s 2014 paper, 75 teenagers learned standard deviation—a way of measuring how spread out numbers are. One group received an hour of teaching, then an hour tackling a problem. The other tackled the problem first, then received the teaching. The teacher, materials and time were the same.

On the test immediately afterwards, both groups did similarly well at using the calculation procedure. The problem-first group did better at understanding the concept and applying it to unfamiliar problems, even though none had found the correct method during their initial attempt.[1]

These were maths students, not volleyball players or coaches. The result does not establish how long I should wait on court, or prove that struggling is always useful. Both groups received instruction. I take it as a reason to consider an attempt before an explanation, not permission to leave someone stranded.

For my own teaching, I would start small: a familiar situation, a manageable decision, enough information to have a go. Let the player show what they are noticing. Let the coach suggest an adjustment. Then help with the specific gap their attempt reveals.

That may mean a clear answer after all. Good. The point is not to protect my record of asking clever questions. It is to make the help fit the person’s actual difficulty.

I also need to notice when my question is merely a slower way of demanding my answer. If I keep asking until somebody says what I was thinking, I have made them guess the contents of my head. There are better uses for a training session.

I can offer what I know without doing all the thinking. But that requires hearing an unfinished answer without immediately finishing it myself.