CONTRAST LEARNING 5/5

                                           

1. Simpler activities/games can serve to necessarily decrease the complexity/difficulty to enlighten situations/problems and guide decisions. Grouping players ensures you can meet most them where they are within training activities.
2. The decision of how you teach the game lies in putting your team in place to win the next game v developing smart players over the long term. Are you balancing both of these correctly?
3. Cognitivism and construictivism can satisfy the needs of learning in competition or academy-type training where cognitivsm features more directiveness from the coach. Constructivism is meant to be more beneficial for the individual but should also be relatively efficient as long as it’s harmonised in terms of the conditions/contents of the game.
4. In that sense coaches need to make clear what they want to achieve with their players and the interaction they want to add over the experience of the play itself. And as importantly, be clear with yourself so you're not aimlessly jumping from 1 to the other.
5. Coaches need to refrain from adapting prescriptive behaviour for the development of tactical behaviour even if it can look more efficient to correct actions or to prepare the team to perform. In fact, behaviour would not contribute to the development of full potential/adaptive play. Provide numerous scenarios/situations for your players to train in and at most, simply provide them an end result and let them self organise their own movements and behaviours around those constraints.
6. Players also need to develop key competencies, like creativity, in order to be resourceful in responding to specific situations of play. This is also reflected in being able to find solutions to problems subscribing to your game model/plan as much as performing disruptive solutions for the same principle. Allowing room for creativity in and around your preferred game model gives he most creative players an "out" when confronted with tough situations where instead of using excess psychological resources to find a solution around your  game model's contraints, players can use their own creativity instead at a far lesser cost as creativity is instinctive and is essentuially "thoughtless".
7. Approaches associated with interactionism (constructivism/ecological/socio-cultural), thus fit the needs to instill such autonomy in players as opposed to teaching with the aim to assimilate all solutions, drilling a player with a rich environmental process.

So there it is - 46 points and over 2000 words on contrast learning but if you're new to this type of coaching then give this as many re-reads as you need if you're feeling extrelmy motivated, give the actual review article a read.

As always let me know your questions on the socials.