Coaches love to ask questions to help their athletes understand the decisions they must make during performance. This is especially true in group invasion games like soccer (football), rugby, basketball and hockey–games that require an especially high degree of coordination and shared decision-making. One potential problem with asking questions of athletes is making sure that the…
I was down in Florida earlier this week talking to coaches in U.S. Soccer’s Academy Director’s course… a high-level training for men and women who run–and design instruction at–top tier clubs. We talked a lot about asking questions of players- how important it is to build their attention and focus and cause them to think about…
I’ve been reading up on Cognitive Load Theory quite a bit lately. Two of my favorite discussions are this one by Adam Boxer and this one by the New South Wales (Australia) Dept of Education. It’s been useful among other places in my personal life, where I’m in the midst of teaching two teenagers…
Few things are more important to learning than vocabulary. To have a word for something allows you to conceive of it, to perceive it, and to grow your knowledge of it in discussion with others. An example: Let’s assume that a story about the Inuit–that they have fifty words for snow–is true. This means they don’t…
Teaching players to see and understand what’s happening around them is a critical issue in coaching–especially in soccer. It’s something I’m writing about in an upcoming book on the topic and it’s something I’ve tried to share other coaches‘ ideas about, especially the idea that some of the work of building perception can happen in…