Thread by @PsychScientists

Some thoughts on verbal instruction in coaching (seems to be a key point of disagreement between ecological and non-ecological types) 1/n

Coaches want to be able to give their athletes instructions. Usually, this is about technique; ‘place your feet here’, ‘angle your club like this’, etc. This fits with the idea of coaching as imparting knowledge

Ecological coaching approaches tend to veer away from verbal instruction like this, and focuses on creating constrained environments players find their own way through

This becomes a key point of contention. From the traditional POV it makes no sense to not verbalise instructions.

So what’s the ecological motivation for avoiding this?

First, verbal instructions about technique come from coach intuitions and experience about how best to execute a movement. There isn’t really any overarching evidence base that constrains their choices. This is a problem

Our intuitions about where behaviours come from and how they work are generally pretty bad. This is why we do science on this stuff. A specific example comes from the literature on learning & transfer

People have studied learning and transfer for 100+ years. It swings in and out of fashion, as the field tries to figure out when learning would transfer to a different context, fail, lose interest, then try again 30 years later

Learning transfer when two task have meaningful overlap. From Thorndike all the way through to analogy researchers, everyone has tried to map that overlap based on common sense task analyses

For example, surely learning to balance on a slack line and balance on a beam both require ‘balance’; or surely learning to program should train logical thinking in the wider world.

Turns out, no. Like, not at all. Something is wrong.

What’s wrong is the task decomposition. How we actually do stuff is not particularly accessible to common sense, and so common sense is a very limited basis for identifying important parts.

What does this imply for verbal coaching instruction? It suggests that if it is based on common sense task analyses it just won’t help the athlete. Worse, it will actively get in the way!

We need a more evidence based way to decompose tasks. What does the science say?

First, the science says there is no such thing as ‘the correct technique’. Because of motor abundance, we have many ways to achieve any action. Some are better than others, some are just wrong, but even the right basic solution has huge flexibility available

Second, there are no behaviours, only behaviours-in-contexts. Remember ‘balancing’? Turns out there is really ‘balancing-on-slack lines’ and ‘balancing-on-beams’ and they have so little in common training on one doesn’t help on the other

Third, if context is part of the makeup of a behaviour, then we need to think about perception and how it connects us to those contexts, and we need to include those contexts in our instruction.

Already we’ve learned that the principles guiding typical verbal instruction will be guiding people to focus on the wrong things (foot placement, rather than achieving the task goal in a context). Which reminds me...

...science has learned that where attention is focused affects learning and performance! Internal, body centric focus is generally detrimental, while external, task centric focus generally helps.

So what’s a task, if not what we think it is?

This is where ecological approaches begin to show promise. Our notion of task is not rooted in intuition but in an analysis of the ecological scaled physics of the context. What is there? What does it afford? What information does it create? All real things, not intuitive guesses

We call this analysis ‘task dynamics’ (psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2012/11/task-d…) and, at least for simple tasks, it works gangbusters (cognitioninaction.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/golonk…)

Task dynamical analyses are bloody hard, and get harder fast as the complexity of the context increases. This is why scientifically, we stick to the paddling pool tasks. But these teach us lessons that coaches can start to apply, which is what eco-dynamics and CLA are

These analyses reveal that tasks don’t split into parts that fit intuitions. They also reveal the crucial importance of information in supporting learning & transfer. Couple this to motor abundance and you start talking about learning as increasingly skilled engagement w contexts

Can verbal instruction still be a tool? Perhaps, if treated as a way to implement constraints designed to guide attention to real aspects of actual tasks. But right now, that’s not what non-eco coaches are doing. What they need is our task analysis to guide their use of language

Lots of science still to do, as always. But that’s the issue as I see it right now; this is why eco people think verbal instruction is problematic and overrated, and why we shift our attention to developing constrained but representative training contexts

/end