Coaching using Play with Purpose

Published 12/03/2012

Updated 30/01/2021

In my role as a teaching and coaching 'academic' I get to see a lot of physical education and sport teaching/coaching, at both primary and secondary school level and in community coaching settings. While I see many teachers and coaches have adopted elements of game-based play with purpose to develop general game skills and sport specific movement skills, what I still mainly see is what is often called a “traditional” physical education (PE) method. That is, students/players in lines waiting for turns to move off markers in defined movement patterns using prescriptive (what some call textbook or stylised) techniques under almost exclusively directive coaching/instruction. Where coaches have moved to more use of game informed practice, often it is an open drill rather than game form practice, and match simulations still occur at the end of the training session. This is reminiscent of the drill-drill-drill-game structure that the introduction of game-based coaching in Australia in the mid-1990s was intended to disrupt and displace. Therefore what I see, is that the transfer from practice to game play and player skill learning is at best ad-hoc, at worst presumptive on behalf of the teacher/coach. 

The literature from a dynamic systems perspective of games as complex changing systems emphasises the need to create practice situations that are representative of the performance context at all levels of game development. This is described as information-movement coupling, in order to intentionally facilitate transfer of learning from practice to play. 'Those who have been around for a while' will see parallels in the observed pedagogy of a constraints-led perspective with the old maxim 'practice as you want to play' and the idea of conditioning game rules that structure the playing environment, what players can do, and how a game is scored deliberately to achieve a 'teachable moment' - a metaphor for the learning intention of the activity. Modifying games to achieve specific learning intentions is a feature of the Game Sense approach.

Involving students/players in game play is not the end of the story. The play must be purposeful. Players may learn by figuring it out by simply being outside and involved in play, but the asterix here is that the movement models while adaptive are likely to be what Alan Launder (author of Play Practice) would call 'dead end' techniques. For sure, some will learn by mimicry and careful observation of top level players accompanied by attention to the 'bunker' analysis of performance available while watching televised broadcasts of elite sport. But this is leaving player development to chance.

Education research is clear that practice which is structured and deliberately designed to be progressively and coherently complex stimulates learning. In the world of PE and sport, physical activity (PA) stimulus is not PE, and while you can’t have PE or sport without PA, you can have students in PE or players in club land engaged in PA and no education occurs, only performance. That is because learning implies improvement and adaptation on behalf of the individual resulting in an improved state of performance over time. 

To achieve performance improvement over time teachers and coaches need to be clear about the target concepts and capabilities that game-play is designed to develop – I call this designing play with purpose. Some of the elements which contribute to play with purpose are:

Practice is game-centred, but not game only: Play is the core element of training/lessons, but directive teaching is not excluded. The pedagogical skill is in knowing when and with which students/athletes/players to use directive teaching methods with, and for what purpose.

Practice features small-sided game play: Less players means more game engagement for each player and therefore more opportunity to consolidate movement understanding and capability. With young players, small-sided games is a tool to accelerate game development. With older and more expert players, small sided games may be used as a warm-up to focus on 'retrieval' or 'activation' of specific technical and tactical skills that will be foregrounded in match-simulations or phase play practice that follow. Small sided games may be used to teach game moments, or typical scenarios that commonly occur in a game.

Designer games are used to package technical, tactical and fitness outcomes*: Teachers/coaches can manipulate game constraints (from an ecological perspective: task, performer, environment elements) or game conditions (rules of play impacting what players can and can't do) to focus learning on particular game outcomes, such as a principal of play or a strategy (team) or tactical (individual) game behaviour. I was familiar with this deliberate, intentional manipulation of the parameters of play (some now call constraints) as Shaping Play 'back in the early 80's'. 

Representation (from an ecological perspective) or coherence to the logic of play (from a cognitive perspective): Transfer from practice to play is facilitated when the practice task is representative of the game context at all levels of game development. "practice as you want to play"

Teach for transfer: Games from the same game category (Invasion, Target, Net/Court, Striking/Fielding) ask similar “questions” of players from the configurations of play (from a cognitive perspective that the pattern of play can be recognised - a mental representation or model). The tactics and specific strategies developed in response to game “questions” or “problems” learnt in one game/sport can be applied in another game/sport in the same category, so the PE teacher should deliberately scaffold for this transfer to occur. For example, in Australian Football (AFL) defence will attempt to get the opposition kick in from a point score aimed towards the boundary where they are more likely to be able to adopt a defensive shape the contains the ball in a position the team in position will find it hard to exit from. Similarly in basketball, from a defensive rebound there is an outlet pass to the boundary as the opposition has defended the central corridor of the court. Different sports, same defensive and offensive principles of play in action. In the sport I do most work with, I have heard David Parkin telling the story of recognising in the early 1990's Australian Football evolving from a positional game to an open field game as Lacrosse had earlier done, and getting in lacrosse coaches to inform his football practice design whilst at Carlton FC. Former Sydney FC coach Paul Roos is talked about as bringing basketball zoning and pressing tactics into the defensive structure of Australian Football, while I have heard Hawthorn FC coach Alaister Clarkson talk about what he has learnt from association football (soccer)

Read here Clarko's lessons from abroad

Positioning players as problem solvers - developing 'thinking players': To achieve this outcome, learning is scaffolded by the deliberate use of questioning to lead players to 'discover' target concepts. It is assumed that when a player discovers a solution they are more likely to retain the new knowledge and understanding than if being told. Being able to shape the play and focus the play on the purpose for the play through well designed questioning is an important, but perhaps the most difficult, pedagogical skill of an ecological constraints-led coaching perspective and a game-based coaching approach (like the Australian Game Sense approach). Part of the difficulty is knowing if the question is promoting player recall of understanding or truly guiding discovery of understanding. Questioning is a nuanced teaching skill, in that questioning may be deliberately closed to focus on a right answer to remind a player what to do, or what a rule is, or what their role in the team structure was in a moment of play. The questioning may be designed to converge on what the coach/teacher considers to be the 'right' answer, or the coach may be seeking to stimulate creativity or option generation by open-ended divergent questioning. Mosston's Spectrum of Teaching Styles contains useful descriptions of the distinctions and when each style of questioning is most appropriate. 

Focus the play: Practice tasks should be purposefully focused on game concepts or player tactics. Often this achieved by being clear with players what the learning intention of the game is. In education, we call this 'explicit teaching' or visible learning, in that the purpose of the game is visible to the players. This doesn't mean players are necessarily told 'how' to achieve the outcome/intention. Another way to focus players is by informing and forming the thinking of players through the coach use of cues and questioning

The objective of learning in this game-centred environment can be considered to be Game Sense, also called game intelligence, which is referring to the players decision-making and execution ability. While technique is the visible display of movement, in a Game Sense informed learning environment filled with play with purpose, Skill is understood as Technique + Game Context (den Duyn, 1997). Therefore, knowing what to do, knowing how to do it, and being able to do it are not separate but rather intertwined components. 

If these ideas interest you to know more about them and their application in coaching, these coaching resources may interest you. Available from the ACHPER Resource Portal here except for the Lacrosse resource which you can DM me to receive it. Available from my Research Gate site are further 'theory-into-practice' examples across a range of sports, and papers stemming from my research in this area.

Reference
den Duyn, N. (1997). Game sense: Developing thinking players. Belconnen, ACT: Australian Sports Commission.

Notes

*I am of the generation before sport scientists, skill acquisition experts, and coaching scientists where physical education was an outcome that could occur in sport settings, the YMCA, summer camps - not just the school subject PE. The sport club PT's or 'fitness coaches', which might now be the role of an S&C coach, were often a 'phys-edder'. The coaching researchers and pedagogue writers were usually (at least in Australia) PE teachers or ex-PE teachers and practicing coaches themselves. 

*Rick Charlesworth used the term Designer Games to describe practice games that package technical, tactical and fitness training into a modified game or situational game practice. Sport Coach, 17(4), 30-33.