Friday 9th March 2012

Observation, do we as coaches see everything?  

During week 5’s lectures and tutorials the focus of our discussions was observation and augmented information.

Keith explained that argumented information is given by a coach to athletes to assist with sensory experience, this is a distant perspective. This augmented information is not feedback but feedforward, a new concept that I was fascinated by. Feedback is what they didn’t do or what could have been done better, but why look backwards when you could focus of the future, feedforward supports the decision not the action, which works on where the athlete is going not where they have been. We looked at an example of having a camera on a helmet of a disabled child trying to learn how to ride a bike, this video analysis is a form of feedforward, as opposed to a coach viewing the activity from a distant standpoint. The feedforward allows the coach to see what the child sees, and create a pathway of how he could be, which in this example lead to positive results.   
With the innovative idea of feedforward, it raises the question as to why coaches sit up in coaching boxes so far away from the game, wouldn’t this impairs their observation?

It may be one of the most important skills as a coach and that is Observation. As coaches we need to decide when to just observe and when to share our expertises. Looking at coaching styles, one that stood out is “self teaching” it is surrounded around the idea that an athlete has sufficient space allowing an athlete to teaching themselves. So an expert pedagogy could be seen as invisible, observing and recording.
Another approach that was briefly explored was Bandwidth which is acceptable boundaries that are set by the coach, where a coach will not provide any feedback. This approach can allow a coach to step back, and observe.  

Thinking outside the box art appreciation, is a tool used that can put someone outside their comfort zone, changing perspectives and allowing a different perception on things.

To conclude my blog I would like to leave you with the idea of errorless learning a concept I was just introduced too today. Errorless learning is a decision to change a learning pattern before it is embedded in the muscle memory to failure.  Keeping this principle in mind, if an athlete fails twice at a new skill, should you change the stimulus? How many trials does it to take to embed failure?