THOUGHTS ON LEARNING EFFICIENCY

When on the pitch, on the sideline, in the dressing room or on the street, learning opportunities can present themselves in different ways. The coach should utilise all opportunities and methods to get the message across. Learning can be by example, demonstration, video, picture, use of IT resources or via diagrams and words in a book, slide etc.

There is a plethora of research articles, books, theories, workshops etc. both in hard copy and online on the subject. However, this short explainer might help a coach, parent or player get the message or concept across.

This is not exclusively for young players, but across all levels of learning and competency. When players or coaches think they know it all, then the end beckons. Horst Wein was a very successful international hockey coach, bringing Olympic success to at least 3 different countries. He presented in Ireland many years ago. Some of his ideas are reflected here along with the authors experience and knowledge over many year of trial, error, success and failure in a number of sports.

• 1.Acquire Good Habits: Bad habits quadruple the amount of work a coach or teacher must do. First, they must suppress the poor technique and then instruct the player to relearn the correct technique by retraining the stimulus (muscle memory, physical action and go through the cognitive, associative and autonomous process until it embeds in the muscle memory.

• 2. Confront players with problems that are within their capability: Skill execution, positional play understanding, movement efficiency are areas that have basic or slightly more complex elements that once explained and guided through by the coach, the player can work on and master themselves. When players are aware of their capability, receive positive praise on their success, learning becomes enjoyable, fun and will stimulate a great desire to progress even more.

• 3.Help players learn to recognize the result of every play immediately after the action is over:“Hard luck,” “unlucky,” etc are comments that echo around playing pitches across the country. Not good. The “Hard Luck” is almost 100% due to poor skill execution, poor decision making, incomplete teamwork, poor preparation. The few % that is not in the “hard luck” category is usually down to good play by the opposition.So, pausing activities during training to focus on things that went well and went poorly is time well spent. Highlighting mistakes and good play or movement or skill very shortly after the execution is the best time to achieve learning. Questioning the players on the relevant aspect should happen here too.Practice the individual elements of a situation or play to ensure understanding before moving onto the nice element. Progress until the full play is understood and who does what, when. The first phase of learning is to recognize a game situation, this is composed of various elements. American football works this in detail. So too in Basketball. GAA teams are no different, but it takes time and we generally skip the detail, and hope for the best after a few tries.

• 4.Practice to embed: Repetition is vital to learning. A few repetitions succeed in activating only short-term memory. It does not stick and when tired is completely forgotten. Transferring information to long-term memory requires repeated repetition of the same practice. As they become embedded, the coach can slide in a few small variations in order to test memory and to also allow for in game modifications by the players, in reaction to the oppositions moves. One practice is not enough for this to be embedded. Depending on the capability of the players and the complexity of the “play” it could take anything from 3 session repeats to 3 months of attention.

• 5.Variation: This is a principle of training. It is also essential to avoid boredom, monotony and loss of concentration. The coach should try and vary the practice but still retain the essential element being developed.

• 6.Motivation: Meaningless praise is bad for the players. The player quickly identifies bulls**t. Praise should be specific and have true value. Quality motivational praise or activities interests players and supports learning.

• 7.Stimulate both the body and the mind: Bulgarian scientist Lozanov (1970s) [1] discovered a “super learning” method. Maximum learning occurs when the teacher / coach uses activity to stimulate both the left and the right hemispheres of the brain. The right hemisphere is where the creative capacities, intuition, and space and time orientation. So, while the basic skills are developed (left side), or the Pass level is rooted. The real higher honours level of play and performance is where better decisions, defence splitting passes and use of space and time makes the difference between ordinary and extraordinary. Players who dream, who play imaginary games and actions in their head, in the garden, and try things out in training and sometimes in games, should be worked with rather than criticised.

 [1] Georgi Lozanov (Bulgarian: 22 July 1926 – 6 May 2012), known as 'the father of accelerated learning', was a Bulgarian scientist, neurologist, psychiatrist, psychologist and educator, creator of suggestology, suggestopedia (or 'suggestopaedia', an experimental branch of suggestology for use in pedagogy).

He identified that there are 4 predominant learning styles: Visual, Auditory, Read/Write, and Kinaesthetic. While most of us may have some general idea about how we learn best, often it comes as a surprise when we discover what our predominant learning style is.