Representative co-design: Utilising a source of experiential knowledge for athlete development and performance preparation

Link to my detailed Notion notes if you want to take a deeper dive into the paper

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Representative co-design: Utilising a source of experiential knowledge for athlete development and performance

🚀 Article in 3 Sentences

1. Discusses how the role of the coach has been re-conceptualised to a ‘learning environment designer’ of representative and meaningful tasks.
2. Introduces he concept of Representative Co-Design and how this can help enhance our design of practice tasks
3. Discusses it’s importance in PE and High Performance settings and present two case examples of this in practice.

🤝Impressions

This was such an insightful read and I think it’s a very powerful concept that coaches should try to apply to their coaching. It can facilitate the development of deeper knowledge of the environment while also increasing the athletes motivation by giving them more autonomy in the learning.

👨‍🏫Who should read this?

The different examples in the paper means that coaches working across all settings could benefit from reading this paper.

🎾How Article will influence my coaching

• This is something that I need to take advantage of more in my own practices.
• Co-designing the PE curriculum could really enhance my PE Lessons.
• A perceived representative value is something that could help enhance the design of more representative practice tasks. Gives a value rather than just a discussion.

📃Takeaways for coaches

• Different timescales of practice
• The main goal of practice is to foster a functional, evolving relationship between each individual and the competitive performance environment.
• The design of practice tasks can be enhanced by the performers being actively engaged in the learning process rather than passively receiving instruction and direction.
• Representative co-design frames how personal insights from performers can aid with the design of more truly representative task designs
• The planning of practice is supported by the theory while being brought to life by the experience and knowledge of the practitioners and performers
• The role of a coach is that of a learning environment designer. The coach needs to be aware that certain affordances are more appealing to individual athletes at different timescales. The coach must design the environment to match the current capabilities of the players.
• The coach is able to make certain affordances more appealing and less relevant affordances less appealing through their practice design
• The form of life describes how the social, cultural and historical constraints shape the everyday decision making in the organisation.
• The coach and athlete work together to co-design learning environments that are full of specifying information that will inform their actions

🥇Top Quotes

💡 In doing so, performance preparation models would be underpinned by rigorous theoretical constructs, while being presented, or brought to life, in a way that is rich in meaning from the ‘lived experience’ of practitioners and performers. 

💡 Contemporary perspectives on this idea suggests that with experience, continued exposure, and informed design, performers enhance their decision-making by becoming increasingly competent at realising the most soliciting or inviting affordances within their ecological niche 

💡 This idea captures the skill of practice design, indicating how an expert practitioner (learning environment designer) can ‘nudge’ a developing athlete toward the acceptance of certain affordances while rejecting the less relevant opportunities or invitations for action 

 💡 Here, the term ‘intelligent’ refers to a highly adaptive, emotionally engaged and motivated performer who learns quickly (i.e., constantly (re)adjusting behaviours during learning and performance to achieve an intended task goal based on prior experiences), and who relies on cognitions, perceptions and actions to function effectively in sport and physical activity 

💡 In contemporary models of athlete development and performance preparation, the coach and athlete are envisioned as working in unison to co-design learning environments replete with critical information sources that solicit affordance realisation, supporting the development of self-regulating perceptions, cognitions, emotions and actions 

💡 Framed through representative co-design, however, intelligent athlete(s) and coaches work together to share rich experiential knowledge surrounding performance principles or tactics 

💡 Importantly, a player could be prompted to offer a ‘perceived representative value’ which (s)he felt reflected how ‘game-like’ the design was. This arbitrary value could be presented on a 0–10 scale (0 being ‘not competition conditions at all’, and 10 being ‘complete competition conditions’), and used to inform the design of future task iterations. 

💡 Concurrently, we argued that through representative co-design, contemporary sports organisations would not only unlock a source of experiential knowledge of use for development and performance preparation, but they would empower performers (at all developmental stages) to take greater ownership of their learning environment 

Podcast Episode

Representative Co-Design with Dr Carl Woods

Link to full paper

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/344435386_Representative_co-design_Utilising_a_source_of_experiential_knowledge_for_athlete_development_and_performance_preparation

Reference for Paper

Woods, C. T., Rothwell, M., Rudd, J., Robertson, S., & Davids, K. (2021). Representative co-design: Utilising a source of experiential knowledge for athlete development and performance preparation. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 52, 101804.