PROVIDING A POSITIVE EXPERIENCE OF LEARNING: AN AUSTRALIAN FOOTBALL (AFL) EXPERIENCE

It was nice to be invited to write a chapter for Light and Harvey's latest instalment of the Positive Pedagogy interpretation of Game Game Sense coaching. 

In 1994, I commenced a Level 2 Australian football (AFL) coaching course during which, the concept of coaching game sense was introduced to me in a meaningful way through the work of Rick Charlesworth, and his concept of ‘designer games’ (Charlesworth, 1994). This was a ‘light bulb’ moment for my teaching and coaching[1]. I began to play with the idea of designer games initially in my sport coaching, and then in my teaching. Not long after this, the Game Sense coaching approach was introduced in Australia as the preferred pedagogy (Australian Sports Commission, 1996). The Game Sense coaching approach matched with the beliefs that I had developed about sport coaching and teaching sport in physical education (Pill, 2015a). Upon reflection, I had developed from a transmission-focussed coach to attempting to be the sport coach as educator (Jones, 2006), with an athlete-centred focus (Pill, 2018a) on positive pedagogy (Light & Harvey, 2017a). In particular, the move to asking questions to generate dialogue and learning in a Game Sense approach (Light & Harvey, 2017b) to effect the development of thinking players (den Duyn, 1997) became a focus of my continuing coach education.

Light and Harvey (2019) explained that positive pedagogy enhances the inherently positive experience of learning that game-based approaches promote and that the notion of positive pedagogy for sport coaching draws on the Game Sense framework. The session I recall in this chapter came after 20 years of ‘playing with’ the idea of Game Sense coaching, and coming to understand the Game Sense approach as a positive pedagogy for sport coaching.

The session

I ran this session in a semi-professional State League training season. I was an assistant coach, however, for this training session I had responsibility for session design and implementation. It was the main session of the week and lasted for nearly 120 minutes. It occurred late in the pre-season during which trial games were being played and the playing system (Grehaigne, Richard & Griffin, 2005; Pill, 2015b) was being consolidated. The purpose of the session was to further develop players’ understanding of the midfield-forward connection, and was part of a training block focussed on the midfield- forward connection. Pre-season had begun with players initially training to develop understanding of strategies for defending opposition forward entries, and then progressed to developing strategies associated with the defense-midfield connection. In this way, the teaching of the teams’ system of play and players’ tactical decision making had been “periodised” (Pill, 2015b). 

I gained very positive feedback from players after the session, with one recently retired from the elite national AFL football competition and now back to finish his career at this his starting league club telling me the session was 'AFL standard' as we left the change rooms and walked to our cars at the end of training. Thanks Richard and Stephen for the opportunity to recall this moment by writing the chapter on a Game Sense coaching as a positive pedagogy.

Applied Positive Pedagogy in Sport Coaching is available here

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[1] Rick Charlesworth is arguably Australia’s “best ever” national sport team coach, with eight world coach of the year awards (Charlesworth, 2016).