Towards a Contemporary Player Learning in Development Framework for Sports Practitioners

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Towards a Contemporary Player Learning in Development Framework for Sports Practitioners

                                                     Photo by Abigail Keenan on Unsplash



If you want to take a deeper dive into the paper here are my more detailed notes

Towards a Contemporary Player Learning in Development Framework for Sports Practioners

🚀 Article in 3 Sentences

  1. This paper aims to overcome the challenges of interpreting the ideas of Ecological Dynamics and make it easier for coaches to implement. They use Adolph’s notion of ‘Learning in Development’ to frame to CLA in a user friendly way
  2. The paper looks at how to develop knowledge ‘in’ the game rather than knowledge ‘of’ the game. Learning can be understood as ‘Wayfinding’
  3. In Phase 1 the coach’s role is to encourage player-environment interactions through co-designing tasks. They take the role of a facilitator. Phase 2 of the framework is based around developing skilled players from an ecological dynamics perspective. The 3rd phases focuses on the effects that the training is having on the players over different timescales.

🤝Impressions

This paper looks to try implement key ideas from Ecological Dynamics in a user friendly way and I think that they do it in a very nice way. Definitely a must read paper

🎾How Article will influence my coaching

  • Have an idea of what the affordances are that you want to really highlight and use constraints to shape their intentions.
  • Make sure that it’s the knowledge in the game your are focusing on developing with the players
  • Guide the players to discover their own unique solutions.
  • What is the meaning and value of the opportunity for that person? We can design our sessions to make certain opportunities more valuable
  • The foundation for task design image is really nice. What would this look like for tennis?
  • It’s important to use constraints to shape the players intentions. This will help guide their perception and actions
  • Incentivise behaviours but don’t rule behaviours out
  • Think about how you can manipulate the practice design to shape the behaviours of the athletes before giving instructions.

🥇Top Quotes

💡 The key point here for practitioners is that in this framework, learning is based on an active engagement and interaction of an individual with a performance environment, as they learn to attune to environmental information matched to their action capabilities.

💡 An important contention of this paper, though, is that practice tasks need to be designed by practitioners with an extensive knowledge about the game, as this knowledge about collective and individual performance can inform practice designs to support the development of a performer’s knowledge in the game 

💡 Moreover, practice tasks should help individuals learn how to self-regulate perceptions and emotions to exploit emergent affordances for action. This can be achieved through the deliberate designing in of key affordances with which learners can interact during practice. 

💡 Based on the tenets of the CLA and NLP, the coach manipulates task constraints, being responsive to environmental and socio-cultural constraints, to shape intentions that frame the players perception and action 

💡 Given this attunement to information to regulate action, learning, within this framework, can be understood as wayfinding – an explorative process in which an individual learns to solve problems by detecting information in their environment of use for specifying (regulating and (re)organizing) actions 

💡 The key point here is that phase one of this framework conceptualizes the coach’s role as fostering player-environment interactions through carefully co-designed practice tasks. Constraints used in this conceptualization should guide, shape or encourage actions, not necessarily eradicate, prescribe or dictate them.

💡 Something for the coach to reflect on when planning practice task designs throughout these different timescales (weeks, months, years), is that the perception of affordances changes as an individual’s capability for action changes. This is because, although an affordance is always available in the environment, its value and meaning for each individual may change as the individual matures, develops and grows.


Reference for Paper

Sullivan, M. O., Woods, C. T., Vaughan, J., & Davids, K. (2021). Towards a contemporary player learning in development framework for sports practitioners. International Journal of Sports Science & Coaching, 16(5), 1214-1222.


Link for paper

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/17479541211002335 

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