What (else) needs to be real?

A deeper dive into actions, information and interactions for representative learning design.

First, a quick refresher on the topic of representative learning design to kick us off:

Representative learning design (RLD)

What do we mean by ‘representative’?

The goal of RLD is to ‘represent’ the performance environment. If we want to train our learners to perform effectively when it matters, on game day, then we need to find a way to ‘represent’ the demands of game day at training.

What do we need to simulate? Information and movement (actions)

• Action fidelity refers to how effectively the actions athletes perform during training simulate the demands of their performance environment. In other words, are they behaving in the same way that they usually would, or be expected to, on game day?

• Functionality is about ensuring the actions are based on realistic learning contexts or scenarios that would genuinely happen during the game.

Intentions

So what needs to be real?

Our intentions: “Hit the ball over the net” versus “Hit the ball past your opponent.”

This intention is achieved in both versions, but one promotes more action fidelity and functionality than the other.

Ultimately, this is why we apply representative learning design as coaches: we are preparing learners for the demands of game day by effectively sampling and presenting realistic problems that they can explore, discover and exploit at training.

Now it’s time for the new stuff.

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Photo by x ) on Unsplash

Actions

I was a little selective in my flashback to Issue 6 above because I wanted to feature the definition of action fidelity again.

Are they behaving in the same way that they usually would, or be expected to, on game day?

I wanted to highlight here that the training session or task design does not need to look like “the game” to achieve this, and that is why action fidelity is an important factor of RLD.

We can look at this from a variety of perspectives. Physically, if we need people to run at high-speed during a match, then they also need to build up the capacity to run at high speeds at training. They probably also need to maintain a loading over time, so they are never expected to do something on game day that they have not done before in some way, shape or form. We can also look at technical aspects too. In a sport like cricket, there are variety of shots that you can play in response to certain balls that are bowled to you, so being able to explore all those different coordination patterns that you could use in certain circumstances is important.

We may be tempted to look at actions under a microscope, in slow motion, on video so we can pick apart every little thing that may not fit the mould (whatever that looks like), but if you are a community coach, like I am, we don’t really need to do that. I will say that safety is incredibly important, and if learners are moving in a way that jeopardises this, then it is important to step in. There are also some constraints built into sports, such as the degrees of elbow flexion a cricket bowler can have, that we ultimately need to adhere to. But beyond this, I would encourage exploration over immediate success.

Action goes beyond the physical too. Yes, there are undoubtedly important technique elements in every sport, coordination patterns that help learners navigate the complex tasks and environments inherent in sport, but we need to look beyond this too.

If you want people to act in a certain way during a match, then they need to have the space and time to develop that at training. So action could actually cover decision-making and patterns of play as well.

We don’t want to only focus on the human, the learner, the performer in this moment, because we could be missing the rest of the story.

So much of our science in sport is built on only the individual and we sometimes forget that there is a bigger world out there, that our tasks and environment shape our behaviour. As a coach, this is something we need to consider, because that helps us determine the things that we can manipulate to encourage certain actions or to push our learners into spaces they may have never been before, to moving in ways that they may have never considered.

If you will indulge my use of some more technical language from ecological dynamics in skill acquisition: we want to broaden the affordance-scape of the learner, the things that they think that they are capable of based on their opportunities for action and information they attune to. In those metastable moments, where there are endless possibilities, we want to empower learners to find the option (action) that works for them, and hopefully optimises their performance along the way.

The ability to act is therefore tightly entangled with information and interaction, so although I present these things in a somewhat linear progression, I encourage you not to consider them as so.

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Information

This section in particular is underpinned by perception-action coupling, which I covered in Issue 6.

“we must perceive in order to move,
but we must also move in order to perceive.”

J. J. Gibson (1979, p. 223)

If we subscribe to the notion that our information sources in the environment shape our behaviour, then we need to make sure our training environments simulate those same sources.

Once again, it is worth three emphasising hear that they do not need to be exactly the same and representative learning design isn’t about just playing the game. We can intentionally design activities which provide the same information sources, but they might look a little different. Ultimately, the goal is to create a training environment that encourages game-specific actions to emerge.

You can sometimes tell if an information source is missing from a training environment:

Let’s say it’s a Saturday morning and you are watching your team play their weekly game. There is a moment where you perceive something from the sideline and you think to yourself “I wouldn’t have made that decision, I would do this instead”. Even if that source of information is super obvious to you, that doesn’t mean it is available to the performer in the moment.

The commentary I often hear around this is “oh, they just don’t get it”. And naturally, the response is often to drill that moment or movement or decision over and over again, until they “don’t need to think about it”, but that misses the point. They do actually need to think about it in some way; they need to pay attention to something that can inform their action. If they don’t know what that thing could be, how are they supposed to know to search for it?

It can be really tempting here to provide that information for them, to give them the answer and save some time. But, as this brilliant podcast episode highlights in the title (and throughout): “telling people to scan is not helpful”.

We cannot fast-track something as uniquely individual and emergent as educating our attention. We all need different information sources, or to realise them in different ways so they become meaningful to us. The individual nature of our action capabilities, the things that I can do and you cannot (and vice versa) means that part of the learning process is actually about paying attention.

So how can we help our learners to pay attention? By recreating the information sources that they may want/need to pay attention to. I like to think of it as taking ‘slices’ of game day and recreating them at training.

Now, I’m usually the last person to suggest we ‘deconstruct’ the game, because this inherently leaves out some important interactions (more on that later). But, if we run with the slices metaphor as slices of pizza 🍕, then we can still maintain the complexity of game day but on a smaller scale. If you’re lucky, when you order a pizza it arrives in eight somewhat-evenly sized pieces. Each piece should feature a sampling of all your favourite toppings, so that each bite is a mini version of the pizza as a whole.

We can think of information sources as the toppings on our pizza. Without them, it’s just sauce and dough, maybe some cheese. Not quite the full flavour gamut you were hoping for. If you only ever ate this very impoverished version of pizza, and then suddenly bit into something rich, complex, and full of flavour, it would be a little overwhelming. If you’re like me and often overestimate how much spice you can handle, maybe you even forget that this pizza has jalapeños on it, and you get a rude reminder when your mouth starts to burn.

Okay, I’ve definitely exhausted that metaphor for now, but it does hold an important lesson buried underneath all those toppings and cheese: if we want our learners to respond to something on game day, they need to explore it at training. We can design those information sources into training, but we also need to remember that as adults, or experienced past/present players, we may notice information sources that are not available to our learners.

I love to remind coaches (including myself) that we are not out there when our learners are playing the game. I think that is such a powerful thing. They finally get to be themselves, to experience the richness of the sport in its entirety, without our interference. What if training was like that too?

Are we giving learners information sources that are not going to help them solve the problem when it matters because we keep stepping in as coaches to do so? It’s a fine balance and it’s one that I constantly struggle with, even though I have all of this theoretical exposure and academic training and coaching experience under my belt.

The balance between enough success, information and variability is probably something that I will continue to explore and experiment with forever. But at the end of the day, my north star, my guiding light is the experience that the people have with me at training and what they need from me in that moment.

Sometimes they will pick up information sources that I don’t know exist. They pay attention to things that would’ve slipped my mind, that I wouldn’t even know where to search for. I start every sporting season and training session with the gentle reminder that I am not the same person as the learners in front of me, sometimes to remind them that we are unique but also to remind myself. I want them to feel safe enough to explore with me, not because I told them to.

I use the word search here intentionally because there is so much more than just the visual information available to us: I can feel how far away my teammate is, I can see a lot, but I can still gain information even if I can’t see everything that is happening; I can feel the ground underneath my feet, I can hear somebody’s footsteps behind me. I don’t want to take those sensations away from my learners just because I used the word “look”.

That in itself is an information source. I’m not saying you need to walk on eggshells, but it’s an interesting point to consider.

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Interactions

I want to say that I’ve saved the best for last, but really I think this section is one of the hardest to write because it is messy and entangled and a realistic reflection of the busy world we live in. Words on a page never feel like quite enough here.

I’ve seen this written as inter-actions before, and I kind of like that space in the middle. To me, that is where the magic happens. That little hyphen is a lovely reminder that our actions are connected, nothing ever happens in isolation, and if we give ourselves over to the uncertainty of that, it’s somewhat liberating. It forces us to go beyond a cause and an effect: if I do this, then this will happen.

There is no guarantee that it will happen exactly as you intend it to. You may move in exactly the same way, down to the millimetre, or molecular level (although I doubt that), and achieve an entirely different outcome. This kind of variability is inherent in a system that is as a complex and adaptive as the marvellous human body.

If we can never do anything in exactly the same way, then where do actions stop and interactions start? Can we ever say that an action is separate from the interaction? From the perspective that I subscribe to, I don’t we can. And I think its futile to try. The whole notion of perception-action coupling is the inextricable link, the perpetual loop. And if that’s the case, then anything we learn in a training environment is never just the result of the action we just performed - it is a result of many inter-actions.

These interactions can be entirely our own: the experiences we have, the relationship we build with sport and physical activity, the way we learn from our unsuccessful outcomes and push beyond them. They can come from others, like social relationships, coaches, mentors, friends, family, teammates. I could be talking about these concepts more broadly but they all equally apply to our sporting experiences too.

Interactions can act as information sources, which ultimately shape our behaviours, but they can be far more difficult to explicitly observe and manipulate because it is difficult to distinguish when they start and stop.

Instead of acting as a rule to follow, I find the interaction component of RLD is more like a litmus test - a way to indicate that we are intentionally designing-in some of the more complex components of the performance environment at training.

In my familiar space of cricket, this looks like the interactions between a batter and a bowler, especially when they are genuinely competing with one another. You then have the interaction between the batter and the open field, the fielders trying to stop the ball, and the broader context of the game. We often miss the latter when we train in enclosed environments like nets, but we may be able to simulate this information and interaction in a ‘something is better than nothing’ way.

I’ve tried this in creative ways by placing ‘fielders’ as plastic stumps woven into cricket nets, guided by the batter in their batting stance so they can adjust where they would appear in their visual field as they look up.

I particularly love the end of this interview for the Coaches Corner, where Craig Morris gives a great example of how a paddler interacts with the different stages of a course.

Well, that is my very literal take on a ‘narrative’ review for representative learning design. I hope you’ve found this interaction valuable, and I cannot wait to hear how these concepts emerge in your own sporting and/or coaching endeavours.