Learning through sport - Play with Purpose

Coaching and PE teaching interactions should encourage players to start, stop, increase, decrease, or modify behaviours that contribute to their game performance effectiveness. The aim of the PE teacher or sport coach should be one of assisting players to successfully sustain existing effective behaviours, and assisting players to successfully sustain new or altered behaviours:  in other words, creating new habits. Deliberate, varied, purposeful, and ongoing 'practice' has been associated with the successful behaviour change of forming new habits and improving existing effective habits. Simply put, the behaviour change we are aiming is for the players  we teach or coach to 'get better'.



To this end, Andres Ericsson uses the term 'deliberate practice' to describe the focused, structured, detailed and continuing practice at 'getting better'. Ericsson's work is often mistakenly taken as the 10,000 hour rule; that is, it takes 10,000 hours or more of de…