Showing them where to look, enskilling & more
Here's some Skill Acquisition content for you to explore over the weekend
Surprise—A Sunday newsletter. I'm currently traveling in Malaysia and just after leaving the wonderful city of Kuala Lumpur which is why this is a bit delayed.
I'm going to be keeping up with the newsletter/twitter as much as possible while travelling. It's something that keeps me occupied and stops me mindlessly scrolling/watching stuff while completing some of the longer journeys. In fact most of this newsletter was completed on a ferry journey to Tioman Island. Here's the view as I'm sending it out now👀
This week at a sconce
Research Insight: Developing ‘Enskilled Performers’
Podcast Snip: Accentuating not dictating
Putting it into practice: Showing them where to look, not what to see
Research Insight
Enskilment: An ecological-anthropological worldview of skill, learning and education in sport (Woods etc al.,2021)
This is a paper that I come back to quite regularly as everytime I read it something else stands out. One thing that I thought would be nice to explore before jumping into the insights is what is an ‘enskilled performer'
An ‘enskilled performer’ is one that develops their skill through interacting with their environment. An important distinction I'd like to point out straight away is that we are saying ‘develops’ rather than ‘developed’. This is because skill isn't ‘fixed’. Rather skill is about adaptability shaped by the context, activity and culture. An enskilled performer is skilled at adapting their behaviour as they have become highly attuned to the opportunities for action around them
1)There’s so much to unpack in this insight so I’m going to focus in on learning being ‘embodied and embedded’. This means that learning occurs in a body that is in a physical environment-changes to either of these alter the possibilities for action. When the paper talks about a “progressively deepening embodied-embedded attentiveness,” it’s highlighting how players become more adaptable over time—more attuned and behaviourally flexible as they learn to respond to the changing demands of the game.
Quote
"From this worldview, what is learned is not an established body of knowledge, transmitted into the mind of a passive recipient from an authorised being, but is a progressively deepening embodied-embedded attentiveness, where an individual learns to self-regulate by becoming more responsive to people and environmental features by ‘looking, listening and feeling’."
2)This definition of skill acquisition captures the essence of embodied-embedded attentiveness—where skill is seen as a dynamic and evolving fit between the performer, the task, and the environment. From this view, learning is about helping players adapt and attune their actions to the demands of the moment (become enskilled)
Quote
"Rather, skill ‘acquisition’ is viewed as pertaining to a dynamic and evolving fit between the action capabilities of an organism, the task to be achieved, and the environmental niche which they inhabit."
3)Becoming enskilled means learning in context, not in a controlled or sterile environment. Players need to be exposed to the noise, uncertainty, and complexity of the game, because that’s where real skill takes shape.
Quote
"Thus, becoming enskilled cannot occur separately, in isolation from context or experience, as it grows in the messiness of the noisy ‘real-world’."
4) The role of the coach is going to be more one of a learning designer or learning guide that leans more into ‘soft pedagogical acts’ that guide the learners. The aim is to create the conditions for learning, not to control how it unfolds. We explore this a bit more in the podcast snip below
Quote
"In sum, the role of the coach in an enskilment approach is predominantly one of guidance, and while at times this guidance may require slight nudging or even showing, it rarely starts and ends in the ‘hard pedagogical act’ of instructing, engrained in a specific way of doing."
5) One way that we can guide the players is through the use of effective questioning. The phrase ‘show them where to look, not what to see’ is a fantastic way for coaches to think of designing activities and we'll be taking a look at how we can do this in practice in our scenario at the end of the newsletter
Quote
"For example, in helping a young tennis player learn to wayfind through the emergent problems of a competitive match, a coach could use carefully targeted questions that show the player where to look, but that do not prescribe what to see."
Reference
Woods, C. T., Rudd, J., Gray, R., & Davids, K. (2021). Enskilment: An ecological-anthropological worldview of skill, learning and education in sport. Sports Medicine-Open, 7(1), 1-9.
Podcast Snip
Accentuate don't dictate
This is a snip from a brilliant podcast with Carl Woods, the lead author of the research paper above. There were some really nice insights here into our role as a coach when putting the ideas into practice.
The first is that we should use constraints to accentuate rather than eliminate options. This is also known as ‘constraining to afford’. The idea is that the performer makes the decision to act, rather than being forced into a specific action. We might make an option more appealing, but players still have alternative choices. But how do we do this?
Carl talks about using scoring (or incentives) to encourage the players to explore hitting into a specific area. This is one of the most effective ways to use the idea of ‘constraining to afford’ in practice.
Putting it into practice
Showing them where to look and not what to see
To help put some of the ideas into practice I'm going to describe a scenario and ask you to come up with some solutions before I provide some of my own ideas. I'm trying to give examples from a variety of sports, but you can easily adapt this one to any invasion game of your choice. Get ready to get your thinking caps on 🧢
One of the common themes across the research about where expert players focus their attention in games is that experts pick up information earlier , while novices tend to wait and react to the ball flight.
A brilliant example of this can be seen in a study on field hockey players by Jamie North and colleagues. They found that expert hockey players were able to pick up information like body orientation and stick position to help them anticipate where the pass was going while novices tended to focus on the ball after it left the stick
Scenario Description
You’re observing a field hockey activity (substitute in any invasion game of your choice). It’s a 2v2 game where there is a temporary overload for the attacking team. The defending team are struggling to stop them scoring as they are reacting to late to the pass.
Coach Prompts
- How could you nudge players' attention toward useful information without explicitly instructing them where to look?
- What types of task, environment, or equipment adjustments could help players start picking up cues earlier?
- What constraints could you put on the attacking team to provide more opportunities for the defenders to intercept?
These are some solutions that I thought of here and I'm sure some of you came up with much better ones. It's really important to note that there is no ‘perfect solution’ here and we will have to adapt them to our own unique contexts.
Award extra points to the defenders for intercepting a pass (worth 3 points), whereas dispossessing with a tackle is worth 1. This will give the defender a clear intention
Reduce the advantage of the overload by changing the starting position of the defender to put more pressure on the pass
Put brightly coloured bands or tape (something that can be changed easily) on the attacking players stick to draw the defenders attention towards the attackers stick
Award bonus points to the attackers for passing before scoring (3 points also) to encourage them to use the solution more which will give the defensive players more opportunities to practice intercepting
I'd love to hear some of the solutions you have come up with below