Unlocking the most valuable resource, letting them drive & more
Here's some Skill Acquisition content to explore this weekend. Hope you enjoy
Research Insight: The power of representative co-design
Podcast Snip: Skill Development, Fancy Dress and Letting the players drive the car
Putting it into practice: The Perceived Representativeness Scale
Research Insight
Representative co-design: Utilising a source of experiential knowledge for athlete development and performance preparation (Woods et al.,2020)
This week’s newsletter looks at ‘representative co-design’ which is an idea that has really helped me in my own coaching. It brings insights from the players into the practice design process which has huge benefits. It not only helps too create more effective practice tasks but also helps develop ‘intelligent performer's' that have more ownership of their learning
1)In the last newsletter was ‘showing them where to look but not what to see’ and this insight ties in nicely with this. We’re going to be guiding the players by our use of constraints when designing practice tasks. Through our skillful manipulation of constraints we can make certain options more appealing and encourage (or nudge) the players to explore them. The important thing is that the other options are still there for them to use, they are just less appealing.
Quote
"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."
2)To develop the player’s ‘attunement’ they need to be regularly exposed to representative learning tasks. Perceptual attunement is where player’s learn where to look and what to notice to help take advantage of the opportunities for action in the environment. We design tasks that spotlight the key information to help them to explore and learn to ‘attune’ to this in Representative Learning Tasks.
Quote
"It is constant exposure to representative practice task constraints that will help athletes progressively attune to specifying properties of relevant affordances within their environment through the detection of information to support actions."
3)When we think of an ‘intelligent performer’, they are responsive and adaptive and consistently achieve their task goal. The insight highlights nicely how an intelligent performer can adjust their behaviour based on the problems they are facing based on their past experiences
Quote
"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."
4)Representative co-design bring players into the practice design process. Insights from the player’s can not only helps us design better learning tasks but also gives them greater ownership of their learning.
Quote
"We introduce the concept of representative co-design... framing how personal insights and experiences of sport performers... can be negotiated within the design of practice tasks that seek to faithfully simulate interacting constraints of competition... empowering individual performers to take greater ownership of their learning activity designs, promoting a deeper understanding of their expertise domain."
5)By utilising representative co-design we ‘unlock’ one of the most valuable and underutilised resources available to us as coaches. The player’s insights can offer us a unique point of view that we wouldn't have access to other wise. At the same time, players take greater ownership of their learning, which helps them develop a deeper understanding of their environment—and with it, the adaptability of an intelligent performer.
Quote
"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”
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.
Podcast Snip(s)
I couldn’t decide between these two snips so I decided to include both.
I love the fancy dress analogy that Craig talks about here and I think it’s really applicable to getting started with the process of co-design. As this may be new for both the players and the coach, I think about how much co-design would different players be comfortable with. For some players, it might only be small little pieces at first (equivalent of wearing coloured socks) while for others we could get them more involved straight away.
The next snip also gives some excellent insights into how to think about using co-design with the players. It’s not just about giving the players complete control over a session, if we let young people choose what they ate every night they would pick maccies (McDonald’s). One nice way to start using it would be to use directed choice instead— I often give players a choice of what colour tennis balls they use during a task (difficulty relates to ball colour in tennis). With co-design we want to give opportunities to drive the car sometimes rather than the coach being the driver all the time.
Putting it into practice
In the paper, the authors propose a ‘perceived representativness’ value that could help to improve the current task design and future iterations of the task
“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”
This is a great way that I’ve used since reading the paper to introduce some element of co-design into sessions. I’ve posed the question ‘how does the activity feel compared to the problem in the game’. Some of the insights that I’ve gotten back from the players have been really helpful in improving the task.