Focusing on the function

Teachers love visuals and visual stimuli. Elementary school teachers often work really hard to set up a classroom that has a lot of things that draw the attention of the students. Biology teachers have complex graphics that demonstrate the process of photosynthesis or the different types of macromolecules. 

These visuals are both attractive and information dense so that you can get a lot on a page and students can "see the whole picture." I used to love these types of visuals as well because they can quickly convey information to my students and I can say- "just review the visual, everything is there." 

Unfortunately it turns out that the novice student sees this kind of visual and thinks there is too much info and they will never understand it. Cognitive Load Theory says that the learner needs to be able to focus their attention on something in order to begin to process it. Keeping the visuals simple with a limited amount of information actually increases the likelihood that the content will be learned. 

Oliver Caviglioli (www.olicav.com) creates visuals for a variety of purposes and focuses on conveying information efficiently and effectively. Here is an example from his powerpoint series on Rosenshine's Principles of Instruction: 

As you can see, there is a lot less information on the visual and the graphics and words support each other in ways that are easily understandable to the novice learner. 

In youth soccer, I often see the same thing and have done the same thing myself for many years. I recently reviewed a coaches manual for U6 players that I made back in 2001 and compared it to the coaches manual I gave my coaches this season. The '01 manual has some great ideas and it represented what I knew back then, but I don't use most of it anymore. 

Currently, I am playing more attention to the coaching environment in a practice and during games. As you know if you have read anything else on this blog, then you know that I don't want my coaches to spend the game living in the moment of the game and responding to every event that occurs. I want them to observe and then communicate with the subs or bring the players to the sideline for specific instructions. I also want my parents to stick to cheering and not try to provide support to their children during the play. 

Our games are too demanding for our adult parents and coaches to add to that environment by screaming at the players and trying to solve every problem. While we have less of that in our practices, there is still a lot of adult-directed instruction to the players and interruptions to the play. 

The design of our activities can also play a role in making the training environment too complex. If an activity takes a long time to describe and the players cannot execute it without a lot of intervention by the coach, then the activity is too complex and the value to the player is diminished. The coach can see evidence of this when the players become frustrated or exhibits behavior problems during the exercise. 

So when choosing an activity, it might be good for you to consider what it looks like from the child's perspective. I've seen several videos that have a camera on the chest of a referee in a professional game so that you can see what happened in a pivotal moment in a game. I'd love to do the thing with our players so that we can see what they see in some form so that I have a better idea of what they get and don't get about an activity. 

This kind of information will make it easier for you to discern if an activity is having it's intended effect. The other way for you to assess the effect is to see whether the players can transfer it to the game. For example if you were working on using the inside-inside move to dribble past an opponent, how often to players attempt to do it in a game? If they never attempt to use it, then your transfer rate would be zero. 

So, let's get back to the activity and the idea of focusing on the function. In soccer, the problem the player has to solve is what to do with the ball. How many times have you seen a player make a great read on the ball and then take one touch and whack the ball as far as possible. Often, the player is rewarded for this behavior by appreciative comments from parents and coaches as they marvel at how far the ball traveled or how hard the player hit the ball. The problem is that the ball is no longer in the possession of the player who made such a great initial move to get to the ball first. In fact, it is far more likely to end up in a turnover than in a positive play for the players' team. 

What we would rather see is that player controlling the ball, moving it away from pressure and then making a positive decision such as dribbling or passing the ball to a teammate. That is the function we want to focus our training on. Essentially, players need to learn how to control the ball under pressure, move away from pressure and then play the ball by either dribble/pass or shoot. 

With that in mind, our training should focus on the key elements and then combine those elements into a fluid movement and finally put the player under pressure and see if they can do that movement against a defender or on a specific part of the field. So when you are doing skills work, it should always be framed in the kind of situation the player might encounter in a game. Then the practice activities should ask them to combine one or more of the skills before finishing by adding pressure of defenders and space and goals. 

So, as coaches, let's focus on the function more as we design and implement practice activities and spend more time trying to "see through the eyes of the players" so that we can improve their transfer from the practice to the game.