Abstract:
Skill learning and adaptation takes time. Despite this, the social norms of sport coaching promote making sessionby-session judgements. These judgements are often underpinned by folk pedagogic biases, such as‘ practice makes permanent’ and‘ grooving good habits’. These socialised rules of thumb are at odds with increasing recognition of the centrality of error to skill learning. To meet the needs of athletes and coaches, we suggest the need to be clearer with the intentions for our coaching practice, moving beyond vague intentions. This paper outlines the recently developed‘ exploreexecute taxonomy’, an evidence informed approach to help the coach consider their intentions for desirable athlete-activity interactions within skill learning and adaptation.
Keywords: Skill acquisition, intentions for impact, sport coaching
Introduction
In coaching, it can be difficult to understand whether we are making a difference. This has led many to rely on an athlete’ s apparent improvement within a single session.‘ Traditional’ practice in many sports tends to involve constant, massed practice of a single skill, or a
‘ part-progressive’ approach where smaller chunks of performance are gradually built into a whole. Additionally, many socialised assumptions about the‘ best’ way to coach, involve coaches minimising and correcting errors( examples in Cushion et al. 2012). These tendencies may promote fluency within a single session rather than learning or transfer( Williams and Hodges 2005). Responding to this, coach education has often promoted coach professional identities based on whole activity design and minimising intervention( for example, becoming a game-based coach). Consequently, the field has reflected ongoing debates in education, with a shift towards minimal guidance and pure discovery learning( Taylor et al. 2023). The problem at both ends of this spectrum is short term, session-by-session thinking. This contrasts with other professional roles such as strength and conditioning coaches, who would never frame impact through an athlete being stronger or faster by the end of a single training session.
Based on professional judgement and decision making, an alternative approach involves using what Abraham and Collins( 2011b) called‘ nested planning’. The idea being that coaches“ begin with the end in mind”( Till et al. 2019, p. 13),
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