NEXT LEVEL COACHING - THE FORGETTING CURVE

I would read as much content teaching/learning as I do anything because as a coach you're essentially a teacher, just not in an actual classroom.

Instead of questions that need to be answered in words or numbers, football problems need to be solved with a mix of technical, physical and tactical solutions but in an extremely time sensitive situation.

The forgetting curve is something I found from UK Basketball coach Alan Keane earlier this year and it's definitely something all coaches should be aware of.

Here's a very basic image of what it looks like:

                                              

As you can see you've got "content" on the vertical axis and "time since learning" on the horizontal axis.

The crux of the forgetting curve is that as soon as you teach/learn something, they/you begin to forget almost immediately.

You'll see 4 lines in the image with the blue line being the 1st learning repetition, the red line being the 2nd repetition, the blue squiggly line being the 3rd repetition and the red squiggly line being the 4th repetition.

On repetition 1, you learn something new but in minutes you've already begin to forget some of the details, with what you learnt an hour ago now becoming hazy to the point where only little initial learning is retained, indicated by the blue line.

If learning stops there on that specific subject or skill then you can see just how little content has been retained, learnt and stored in long term memory, compared to the level of content.

The level of content is ultra important as low retention of content means you've tried to fit too much content in too early, of the relatively small amount of content you have used only a fraction of it is being retained, or you're somewhere in the middle.

Ultimately without another exposure to this content, limited long term learning will take place.

Repetition 2, which contains the same content level as repetition 1, is attempted shortly after (i.e the next day) where the learner goes through the same process but uses a scaffolding of learning process where they build on what was retained the day before and hopefully adding new content on top of that for a higher level of retention then yesterday, as indicated by the red line.

Repetition 3 (blue squiggly line) and repetition 4 (red squiggly line) repeats this process an you can clearly see the scaffolding learning effect taking place over repeated exposures to the SAME, not different content.

I capital-lettered same because once the content changes then you're back to repetition 1 again and if that content is itself scaffolding on the previous content, then learning will be limited at best as learner's now start to skip learning steps that will result in gaps in knowledge or performance.

Lots of learning opportunities also means a lot of forgetting which is a a crucial part of remembering funnily enough as forgetting is another opportunity for (re)learning which will present learning and forgetting dips throughout the entire process which is messy but it drives clean performance over the long term so you must be patient enough to get through the struggle.

The easiest way go about this is to simply review yesterday's content, not preview today's content but being exposed to content 3 times can result in learner's being able to predict w/ 80 - 85% accuracy whether they have successfully learnt it or not, sliding right into the 15% failure rate that optimises learning.

So for coaches in season 2022, if you decide to implement new tactical aspects into your game model then make sure you take the learning curve into account and teach it accordingly by allowing ample opportunities for players to learn/retain basic tactical content before add more content on top of that which will require to you to really break down your tactical play before introducing it.