Earlier in the week I posted about the forgetting curve and how you should review the previous day's content as soon as possible, to scaffold learning for long term retention.
Retrieval practice is one of the best ways to do this and here are some noted I gathered from education expert Doug Lemov on the subject, obviously in a student-teacher context,but it transfers to coach-player easily.
As mentioned in my earlier post, the process of forgetting contains seeds of its own solutions.
If you ask students to recall what they learnt yesterday then they will struggle to remember but once they are successful, that struggle will more deeply encode the material in their long term memory and they will remember a little more and forget a little less relatively quickly.
You need to ask students to pull information from long term memory which helps them remember more, for longer and with greater accuracy.
Every time they're required to retrieve, it makes it easier for them to recall this knowledge when they need it as it strengthens the connections to previous learning and the ability to apply it in different contexts.
The very best time for retrieval is once you start to forget it and as we now know that forgetting starts right away, start retrieving content shortly after learning it, then a day or so later an again a few days after that - each time with more fun and engaging questions or learning aids.
In football world, coaches only have maybe 3hrs per week split into 2 separate occasions to present content so using various teaching methods (diagrams, infographics, vision etc) in a group chat can be used for the time between training sessions.
A very important note to remember is to keep retrieval practice as exactly that, practice, with no marking for accuracy or shame for forgetting the content but with immediate feedback - it's simply used for teacher and student to know where their level of understanding is currently at which can guide the teacher an student to the relevant information during future retrieval opportunities.
Students remember more of what they are learning if they are required to think about meaning so ask them to respond to questions that cause them to consider the content in different context, applying vocabulary specific words in different ways and settings, where the meaning of the same words/actions can be altered.
Use retrieval practice routinely so it'snot a surprise when it happens, encouraging students to try and put more to memory faster.
Other retrieval practice methods include studying with flashcards, answering checks for understanding, weekly cumulative quizzes, mid lesson pauses where the teacher allow students to capture notes on what was just said and brain dumps (this very blog essentially!) where they write down everything they can recall about a topic.
Whatever modes you choose is not an issue but make sure you vary them to help transferring what they know into different contexts.
True retrieval practice is closed book so it is not what is coined as "studying" where students simply re-read content - it should be effortful and at times, a struggle.
Use bouts of spacing (smaller chunks of learning broken up v large chunks of content all ingested at once) as the brain actually needs hours, or even days, to consolidate/cement new knowledge and commit it to long term memory.
Going back to the forgetting curve, each repetition of retrieval results in remembering meaning for longer they can now go longer between each round of retrieval.
To create a retrieval progression simply make every 3rd question in a problem set on a previous topic, allowing you to continuously scaffold content until you get through it all.
You should also build quizzes around the current and previous content and make every 2nd problem in their classes and homework from today's content, 2 problems from the previous lesson's content and another 2 problems from even earlier content.
Lastly 1 final teaching aid you can use is the retrieval grid where each question has it's own color based on how long the content was covered such as the darker the color the further back it was covered (black/old to white/current) where students love trying to complete the grid, especially the darker squares.
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