There are three parts to this assignment. Describe how you would organize daily practice for the early season (prior to the first contest), mid-season (half of games completed) and post season (preparation for championship game.

Incorporate the XYZ situation into the six steps of instructional planning discussed in Chapter 9. Be sure to use your own words when defining how you would execute each step of the process in order to develop XYZ into a successful program.

Please click here for some good insight by Bill Parcells on the process of turning an organization around.

Link https://hbr.org/2000/11/the-tough-work-of-turning-around-a-team

BOOK

Six Steps to Instructional Planning* 

As with building a puzzle, using a systematic approach can help you put together your season plan. After you have articulated your philosophy, you can begin planning for the season ahead by following a simple six-step procedure called “Six Steps to Instructional Planning”: 

Step 1: Identify the skills that your athletes need 

Step 2: Know your athletes 

Step 3: Analyze your situation 

Step 4: Establish priorities 

Step 5: Select the methods for teaching 

Step 6: Plan practices 

*Reprinted, by permission, from R. Martens, 2004, Successful Coaching, 3rd Ed. (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics), 237. 

Step 1: Identify the Skills That Your Athletes Need 

The first step in organizing the season plan is to identify the specific skills that the athletes must be able to execute for the team to be successful, as shown in column one of figure 9.1. This list of skills is based on the technical and tactical skills in this book as well as the information on communication and physical, character and mental skills from Successful Coaching, Third Edition. In the following steps, you will be examining the list of skills and adding others if necessary. Step 4 of the planning process will then explain further how you can put this list to work for yourself. 

Step 2: Know Your Athletes 

The next step in the planning process is to work with your coaching staff to refine the list of skills that you are planning to teach, based on an evaluation of the strengths, weaknesses and ability of the athletes in your program. For example, assume that you want to run an option offense because you think that it creates strategic advantages on the field. Before installing this offense, you and your staff must evaluate the ability of the quarterbacks (both the starter and alternates) in your program to determine if they have the speed, quickness and decision-making ability to run an option offense effectively. 

As you learned previously, this evaluation takes place in many forms. You should study videotapes of the previous season’s games, focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of the individual athletes instead of analyzing schemes. The results of off-season testing for speed, strength and agility also provide useful information during this evaluation. Summer workouts, including weightlifting sessions as well as camps and passing leagues, also reveal the ability of the athletes who will be competing during the season. 

Using all this information, you and your coaching staff need to add or delete skills on the list that you began developing in step 1, based on the ability of the athletes in your program. 

Step 3: Analyze Your Situation 

As you prepare for the season, you must also weigh the external factors that will both guide and limit you. Budgetary issues and related fund-raising options will affect scheduling, training facilities, practice equipment and professional development opportunities. Administrative and community support will influence goal setting and expectations. Teaching loads and staffing structure regarding assistant coaches will set parameters for both off-season and in-season programming. Clearly, then, many factors influence your planning.

Step 4: Establish Priorities 

Steps 1, 2 and 3 of the six steps to planning describe general factors that provide an important base of information regarding your players and your program. Now in step 4, you must make a decision about where to start and how to progress in the teaching of skills. Refer back to figure 9.1 and notice the three columns under “Step 4.” You are asked to evaluate each essential skill based on two factors—teaching priority and the athletes’ readiness to learn. To assess the teaching priority, you must think of your overall scheme and plan for the season and, for each skill, ask yourself, “Is this a skill that I must, should or could teach?” Then, you must think about each skill and your athletes and ask yourself, “Are my athletes ready to learn this skill?” 

Take some time now to rate the skills on your form. These ratings will divide the skills into three groups. Skills that are A-rated are obviously priority skills that you must teach immediately and emphasize. Include B-rated skills in the planning process and teach them periodically. Finally, depending on the progress of the season and of the athletes, you can incorporate instruction for the C-rated skills. 

After you have finished your A, B and C ratings, you will want to create an installation schedule, as discussed in “Developing Installation Schedules,” to ensure that during the season you will teach all your A-rated skills, most of your B-rated skills and some of your C-rated skills.

Step 5: Select the Methods for Teaching 

Now that you have a complete installation schedule, you should go through the schedule and determine the methods that you will use in daily practices to teach the skills that you have decided are necessary to your team’s success. As you learned previously, the traditional approach to practice emphasizes technical skill development and usually involves using daily drills to teach skills, interspersed with group and team drills, whereas in the games approach, players learn to blend decision making with skill execution as you add the elements of pressure, competition and game-day nuance to the performance of essential skills. 

The traditional method might cover all the techniques of football adequately and may even cover most of the skills that players would typically use during games, but it does have at least two glaring shortcomings: First, traditional practice sessions by their very nature emphasize techniques at the expense of tactics, and, second, they involve too much direct instruction. Typically, a coach explains a skill, shows the players how they are to perform the skill and then sets up situations in which the players can learn the skill, without placing that skill in the context of game-day, tactical decision making. 

Recent educational research has shown that students who learn a skill in one setting, say the library, have difficulty performing it in another setting, like the classroom. Compare this finding to the common belief among coaches that today’s young players don’t have football sense, the basic knowledge of the game that players used to have. For years, coaches have been bemoaning the fact that players don’t react as well to game situations as they used to, blaming everything from video games to the increasing popularity of other sports. But external forces may not be entirely to blame for the decline in football logic. Bookstores offer dozens of drill books to help coaches teach the technical skills of football, and teams around the country practice those drills ad infinitum. If drills are so specific, numerous and clever, why aren’t players developing that elusive football sense? Perhaps just learning techniques and performing drill after drill creates not expertise but the ability to do drills. 

An alternative way to teach football skills is the games approach. As outlined in chapter 1, the games approach allows players to take responsibility for learning skills. A good analogy is to compare the games approach in sports to the holistic method of teaching writing. Traditional approaches to teaching students to write included doing sentence-writing exercises, identifying parts of speech and working with different types of paragraphs. After drilling students in these techniques, teachers assigned topics to write about. Teachers used this method of teaching for years. When graduating students could not write a competent essay or work application, educators began questioning the method and began to use a new approach, the holistic method. In the holistic method of teaching writing, students wrote compositions without learning parts of speech or sentence types or even ways to organize paragraphs. Teachers looked at the whole piece of writing and made suggestions for improvement from there, not worrying about spelling, grammar or punctuation unless it was germane. This method emphasized seeing the forest instead of the trees. 

This forest-versus-trees approach is applicable to teaching football skills as well. Instead of breaking down skills into their component parts and then waiting until game day for the athletes to put the pieces together, you can impart the whole skill to the team and then let the athletes discover how the parts relate. This method resembles what actually occurs in a game more than the traditional drill method does, and learning occurs at game speed. These latter two concepts are crucial to understanding the games approach. 

This method does not take you out of the equation; in fact, you must take a more active approach. You must shape the play of the athletes to get the desired results, focus their attention on the important techniques and components of the game and enhance the skill involved by attaching various challenges to the games played. 

You can use the games approach to teach almost any area of the game. For example, instead of having quarterbacks and receivers work endlessly on route timing drills and one-on-one drills against a defender, you can create games around pass routes and reads, and encourage competition. 

Step 6: Plan Practices 

At this stage you should sketch out a brief overview of what you want to accomplish during each practice for your season. You will pull all the information that you have gathered from the previous steps. Your installation schedules should also help you greatly at this stage in the process. 

Figure 9.4 shows a season plan for the games approach, using a 12-week season plan that includes a two-week period for postseason playoffs (for a sample traditional approach season plan, please refer to the Coaching Football Technical and Tactical Skills online course). Although this season plan was created in isolation, you can use it in your season planning. You may find that you are more comfortable teaching blocking using the traditional approach but that the games approach works best for teaching pass reads. Use these season plans as templates to help you to create the plan that works best for you and your team. 

In the sample season plan, you will notice that the first two weeks are completed. After the games begin in the season, the practice plans are more open ended so that you can focus on problems that may have occurred in past games and can develop practices according to your game plan (we will discuss this further in chapter 11). You will also notice that we have identified some technical and tactical skills that are important to teach during those later practices. Keep those skills in mind as you are further fine-tuning your practices during the season. The main objective of your practices at this point is to focus on your game plan, but as time permits you should fit in these key skills to help your players continue to learn throughout the season. Keep in mind that this season plan was based on the skills in the book rather than on an individual installation schedule. Although this season plan provides a good example, you should use your installation schedule and the information that you gained in the other five steps of the process to create a detailed plan tailored to your program. 

After you have developed your season plan, you can further refine individual practices. We will help you do that in the next chapter by showing you the components of a practice and providing a sample practice plan for the games approach.

 Question for Discussion #7 – God and Proof

Compare the efforts made by Anselm and by Thomas Aquinas to argue for the existence of God. (Anselm’s proof is on p. 189, Aquinas’ on pp. 192-196.) In what ways are they similar and in what ways are they different?

Both Anselm and Aquinas were men of profound faith. Why, then, were they trying to prove that God exists, when they already had faith? Do you believe that any of these arguments could inspire faith in someone who does not already accept a monotheistic religion?

Discussion Assignments have the following objectives:

1. Identify and describe key concepts presented in textbook reading material, video lectures, and other assigned content.
2. Draw connections between assigned content material and practical areas of interest.
3. Explore ideas in philosophical depth beyond the presentation of course material.
4. Draw connections between philosophical discourse and one’s practical life.
5. Engage in respectful philosophical conversation.
   1. This objective will be measured according to replies posted to other students or to professors.

When completing discussion assignments, please remember:

• Your main post should take a minimum of 300 words. Explain and support what you say.
• Any sources that you use must – including textbook and video lectures – be cited and referenced responsibly. (APA)
• You should post at least two substantial replies to other participants.
• Please refer to the syllabus and grading rubric for more guidance.

Now that your cookie business is well underway, you are going to use the knowledge that you have gained in this course to evaluate the financial information for the company. You will be creating a series of reports and analyzing the results using the templates provided to guide you through the project. The learning objectives of this project are as follows: 

1. Apply accounting concepts and standards to the creation of accounting information and reports. 
2. Analyze accounting information used to make strategic business decisions. 
3. Apply ethical behavior to accounting-related situations.
4. Make business decisions based on analyzing accounting data. 

Using the  Unit VII Final Project Template(attached) , prepare a three- to four page written report (including spreadsheets) with at least three scholarly sources. Your report will provide the following information:

Introduction 

Part 1: Based on the data presented in the  Unit VII Spreadsheet Template(attached) in Excel (CM Breakeven tab): 

• Calculate the contribution margin (CM) for each of the three products sold at the cookie business. 
• Calculate the weighted average CM. 
• Calculate the breakeven point.

Complete your calculations by filling in the highlighted cells, and embed a copy of the completed spreadsheet into this report. Discuss the results based on your calculations as far as which type of cookie you think is the most profitable, which has the highest CM, etc.

Part 2: Based on the data presented in the Unit VII Spreadsheet Template in Excel (Full Variable tab), complete the calculations listed below. 

• Calculate the value of ending inventory under full or absorption costing. 
• Calculate the value of ending inventory under variable costing. 

Complete your calculations by filling in the highlighted cells, and embed a copy of the completed spreadsheet into this report. Discuss the results, and comment on which method you think is more helpful to managers and why. 

Part 3: Based on the data presented in the Unit VII Spreadsheet Template in Excel (Special Order tab), calculate the net increase or decrease in profit if they take the special order. Complete your calculations by filling in the highlighted cells, and embed a copy of the completed spreadsheet into this report. Discuss the results and comment on if you think the cookie business should take on this special order of cookies for a wedding. Business has been slow the last few months, and the offer is less than the usual selling price for the cookies. As part of your discussion, include both quantitative (based on the numbers) and qualitative (not based on numbers) factors that would go into the decision to take on the special order.

Part 4: Based on the data presented in the Unit VII Spreadsheet Template in Excel (IRR tab), calculate the internal rate of return (IRR) for the new equipment purchase. Complete your calculations by filling in the highlighted cells, and embed a copy of the completed spreadsheet into this report. Note: the PV Annuity table is provided for you. Discuss if you think the cookie business should accept or reject the purchase of the new equipment and why.Additional information has come to your attention regarding the equipment purchase. One of the partner’s brother owns the company that sells the equipment and insists the equipment is needed. Discuss any ethical concerns you see with this type of transaction. 

Part 5: Based on the data presented in the Unit VII Spreadsheet Template in Excel (Cash Budget tab), calculate the cash receipts for the first quarter of this year. Complete your calculations by filling in the highlighted cells, and embed a copy of the completed spreadsheet into this report. Discuss your observations about the way cash is collected if the company needs $150,000 per month for expenses.

 Part 6: Based on the data presented in the Unit VII Spreadsheet Template in Excel (Variances tab), complete the following calculations. 

• Calculate the material variances. 
• Calculate the labor variances. 

Complete your calculations by filling in the highlighted cells, and embed a copy of the completed spreadsheet into this report. Discuss your observations about the variances and ways to plan to improve any of the variances. 

Conclusion and Recommendations 

Summarize the key observations that you have made about the cookie business based on the calculations you have performed, and present any future recommendations. Be sure to use APA formatting throughout, and reach out to the Writing Center or the Library for assistance with research, writing, and formatting. Include at least two resources from the CSU Online Library in your report. 

For the future courses I embark on, I will have to add grit and time-management to my best self. Throughout the course there has been many great topics we have discussed but grit and time-management have stuck to me the most. Having the grit to go through a situation is all we can hope for because life is full of unwanted and tricky situations. As we count down the final days of this class, I have already been assigned my next classes. I will admit, I was pretty overwhelmed just like the first time few days of this course. I stuck it through and learned how we can adapt to almost anything in life. I’m sure my fellow classmates and I will do great as we continue to take on classes as long as we keep moving forward with a positive mental attitude. In the time I have took this course I have made a variety of schedules until I found the one that suited me well. I took the lessons learned from the time-management module on how to help me surpass this class and I am confident I can do the same with future classes. 

Reflection on the past is how we move forward in life and make better decisions. Having a clear vision for the future is only possible by understanding the past. As I stated earlier, I have adapted now to the class modules and time-management. I can only understand how far I will go, by understanding how far I have come. When I encounter a great challenge, I can reflect on my past and how far I have come to encourage myself that I can succeed in future obstacles. 

When Greg Fowler stated the series of questions, all of them were great, but one touched my soul. “Am I being the person I want to be?”. Everything that motivates me now is becoming the person I have always wanted to be. I hated who I was in my teenage and early adult years until I learned that I can break free of the shackles people had on me. People around me told me that I wouldn’t amount to anything and that stuck with me and played a big role on how I saw my future, but not anymore. I can become someone who my nephews and maybe even my future kids look up to and come for help because I never had any one to be there for me. I want to be someone my family can be proud of for their sacrifices because they didn’t get the chance to all these opportunities that they have blessed me with. 

Write an essay on one of the topics below.   Be sure to have or develop a main idea.  

Your essay should be 2-3 pages long (about 600-750 words), typed, double-spaced, on Microsoft Word, Pages, Googledocs, or whatever other platform you feel comfortable with. (If it’s a platform I cannot download for some reason, I will let you know.)  E-mail your essay to me by Wednesday night, Feb. 17, 11:59 pm (just before midnight). Know that you will have the opportunity to revise it and improve it after receiving feedback from me and/or your fellow students (your peers).

Your topic should be developed out of one of our readings on the theme of technology. For example, you can write on ONE of the following topics:

1. Smart Houses: How does the house in Bradbury’s story compare with “smart houses” that we have now? What is similar, and what is different?  Would you like to live in the house described by Bradbury? Why or why not? 
2. Robotics:  How does Bradbury describe the robots in the house in his story?  How intelligent are these robots?  Do they have feelings?  What are their advantages and limitations?  How do you feel about robots in general?  Can robots turn out to be dangerous? (You may use other sources, such as movies, to discuss this question, if you want to.)
3. Nukes: How accurate is the description of a nuclear attack in this story? What evidence might there be today that we are indeed heading in the direction of the world described by Bradbury after a nuclear attack?  Could this story come true?  Why, or why not? 
4. “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” What is meant by “stupid” here? Is this true? Or is Google making us smarter? Is access to so much information good or bad for humanity? 
5. “Adoption”:  On the model of this reading, choose a topic that can lend itself to the question of what’s good and bad about the Internet in general, or Social Media in particular.  How the Internet has affected adoptions is one possible topic. How it has affected dating could be another—or looking for a job, or gathering a group of people for a meeting or a demonstration, or almost any other activity you can think of.  How do social media help or hurt humankind?

These are suggestions. If you think of a different topic relating to these readings or issues, feel free to pursue it for your first formal essay; or you can combine topics if you wish. You also don’t have to take up every subtopic within a given topic. Ask if you aren’t sure your plan is appropriate for this assignment. Again, the purpose of choosing a topic is to move on to developing a main idea:  What about this topic?  

This is not your research essay. You do not necessarily have to consult other sources than the readings themselves (or just one of them) in order to write a good paper, but if you do choose to do so, you must give your sources and add a “Works Cited” page. Even if you just use one of these readings as a source, try adding the “Works Cited” page, because it’s good practice. This is true even if you summarize or  paraphrase the words of a source (that is, put them in your own words, whether briefly or at some length).  If you quote a source, you must also use quotation marks.  Please be very careful not to plagiarize!  If you have any questions concerning the proper use of sources (or anything else), please ask me during our Zoom class, or by e-mail.