YOUTH LEARNING WITH DARREN WENSOR

                                                    

When any football player, but especially a junior football player goes to football training, they are going to learn.

The activities that a coach designs and uses for their players is the content.

How that content is being taught/interpreted by the players depends on how delivery that content and how you have them try and put it into action.

It really is an outside school classroom with varied abilities throughout the entire group and thus the need to individually teach a lot of those players in some way, shape or form.

I believe sport coaches should read what they can on classroom learning, as well as school teacher's reading up on sports coaching, with a mix of the 2 being a brilliant base to work from as a coach or a teacher.

These notes on "kids learning" as I titled it, comes from a Twitter thread from a Coach Developer based in Sydney, Darren Wensor and he has a nice little weekly newsletter you can sign up for too. 

This a solid, short and simple round up some of the things to take into account when you're teaching kids.

• They can only process a limited amount of information at any 1 time so limit what they need to pay attention to to ramp up learning
• When teaching new content be sure to not overload the working memory
• Practice/eventual automation can reduce the burden of working memory which frees up space to learn new information
• Cognitive Load Theory refers to the working memory (what you’re consciously thinking) such as carrying out instructions from a coach
• Cognitive Load refers to the amount if information the working memory can hold at 1 time
• If an athlete tries to think about too much at once then their working memory becomes overloaded which lowers the ability to think and remember
• Beginners are already overloaded and are less able then experts to direct their attention
• Limit cognitive load via decreasing coaching cues (less is more, more concise), alter what feedback you provide (less is more, provide some athlete processing time), shield them from distractions (non-relevant information/narrow their focus) and be careful with novelty (too much novelty can make things over-complicated as they try to remember the skill and the drill)

A lot of these points really fly in the face in what a lot of us currently do as coaches and also barracking parents with constant talking/yelling which is our best interests but is probably just making things harder for our kids n the heat of the moment of game time when it's chaotic enough.

Happy to discuss and clarify any of these points if anyone needs/wants to.