Informing Game Sense Coaching Pedagogy with a Constraints-Led Perspective

Sport is dynamic and complex play. Both skill acquisition theory (e.g. ecological dynamics) and education theories (e.g. constructivism and complex learning) relevant to sport coaching have been used to suggest that it is preferable to retain the logic of play by simplifying the representation of the game as the focus if not the majority of the learning to play experience, especially with novices. When I was undertaking my teacher training in the early 1980s, the sport coaching discourse was dominated by people with an education background and the instructional practice of simplifying the representation of the game as a pedagogy would be described as modification of game rules or conditioning of the game environment. In recent times, vigorously asserted by coaching scientists is an ecological dynamics understanding of game learning from which comes a constraints-led description of pedagogy that represents to players the dynamics of play for player learning determined by the coach. From a pedagogical perspective, what I find interesting is that observations of approaches coming from different disciplines (education and skill acquisition) end up 'looking' and 'sounding' similar (often even the same) when observed in their delivery.

As an academic interested in pedagogy and a practicing coach, I have maintained a pragmatic approach to theories and as such, I am not attached to explaining, defending and expanding a theory as a coaching scientist understandably would be interested in doing. Instead, I have mostly attempted to reconcile competing narratives for what in practice I observe as at best nuanced versions of a similar pedagogical expression. For example, in the work Informing Game Sense pedagogy with constraints led theory for coaching in Australian football I attempted to exemplify how a constraints-led perspective is a useful heuristic for Game Sense approach, using Australian football to illustrate and blending Grehaigne and colleagues work on the dynamics of play with football considered from a dynamic system perspective.  

In recent work published in Richard Light and Christina Curry's Game Sense for Teaching and Coaching International Perspectives I have attempted  a non-verses comparison of the Game Sense approach as a pedagogy for sport coaching and a constraints-led approach to further the idea of reconciling what to theorists are different because of divergent theoretical backgrounds but to practitioners often look the same due to the expression of practice engaging the same cluster of teaching styles, and similarly pedagogical terminology to explain the expression of practice. I set out an argument that I began in the 2014 Informing paper and elaborate upon in this chapter that the Game Sense approach and constraints-led perspective may have different ontological starting points but appear to share an alternative epistemology to the traditional coaching approach often explained from a behaviourist perspective, of  purposeful simplification and representation. Simplification is the idea that different components of dynamic environments, like sports, can be learned in unison. Representation is the idea that practice tasks retain representative features of the game for information-movement coupling. In essence, from a pedagogical lens I reckon that the Game Sense coaching approach pedagogy of purposeful game modification and the constraints-led perspective pedagogy of deliberate activity design through constraints management share the same idea of manipulating relevant determining factors (conditions vis a vis constraints) to guide players’ game development.

Game Sense approach                                                                Constraints-led approach

*Representation by game form                                   *Representative task design

*Purposeful modification                                           *Task simplification

*Purposeful use of questioning to develop                *Player attentional focus by coach questioning

'thinking players'                                                            to develop attunement to affordances

If you would like to delve a little more in this comparison and you don't have access to the chapter in Game Sense for Teaching and Coaching International Perspectives, in this blog here I explain a Game Sense approach pedagogical connection with affordance theory.