The Spectrum of Sport Coaching Styles

 

Sometime in the early – mid 2000’s (I forget exactly), ACHPER Victoria invited me to Melbourne to keynote and workshop an event. Mitch Hewitt, who was doing his PhD thesis on tennis coaches perceived use of a game-based Game Sense approach and actual observed teaching styles, using a Spectrum of Teaching Styles analysis, heard I was going to be in Melbourne where he is based, and emailed asking to catch up. He thought I might be able to help with some questions he was having about discussing and theorising his findings. 

Mitch introduced me to The Spectrum of Teaching Styles used in a sport coaching context for coach development. Mitch and I kept in contact, discussing a Game Sense coaching approach for tennis and The Spectrum of Teaching Styles as providing a useful insight into the diverse way the idea of  'questioning' players could occur when using a Game Sense approach. These conversations led us to wonder why The Spectrum of Teaching Styles had not been adapted to the language of sport coaches to be useful in coach development as a Spectrum of Coaching Styles. We discussed writing the idea in a book, This is how The Spectrum of Sport Coaching Styles (available here) 

Over a 40 career, Mosston argued that pedagogy requires a framework for consistency to prevent discrepancy between 1. What academics might see as important and what practitioners (in this case, sport coaches) might see as important; 2. What academics say should occur happens and what really happens in the field; and 3. Claims social agencies or prominent people might seek to make, criticise or attack the profession or an individual’s practice (Mosston & Mueller, 1969). In response to these three challenges, Mosston proposed The Spectrum. He defined a style of teaching by the decisions made before, during and after the act of teaching. We argue this is the same for the sport coach, and hence we can adapt The Spectrum to the field of sport coaching as it is an educative endeavour. To that end, the decisions made by the coach in design of a practice activity create an order and give rise to a sequence of events within the practice activity. The decisions determine the limits of the activity and result in mutually exclusive outcomes. Thus, like teaching, sport coaching can be understood and explained as the deliberate act of pairing appropriately a coaching style to an activity outcome (Mosston, 1966). As a result, a fundamental question arises for the coach in planning their coaching sessions: “Which style(s) would be efficient with which activity?” (Mosston, 1966, p. 4).

 Mosston called on the work of Bruner (1966) to explain the philosophy of The Spectrum, and specifically, the role of teaching as developing students to think for themselves (Mosston, 1966). This in part explains the layout of The Spectrum “from Command to Discovery” styles, which we represented circular rather than horizontally to emphasis that it is mobility ability within The Spectrum that is teaching mastery, and that The Spectrum is not a 'hierarchy' of teaching styles. 

If interested in knowing  The Spectrum of Sport Coaching Styles the book is available here. Mitch Hewitt's thesis examining the teaching styles of tennis coaches is found here or you can find papers from his thesis and extended work explaining tennis coaching from a teaching styles perspective via Research Gate here