PES6252 Chap.3 Learning Theories Behind Coaching Practice
Learning Theories Behind Coaching Practice
Five words, four incompatible theories
The session opens a long way from sport, with a question about vocabulary: which words do we associate with learning? Transfer, correction, self organisation, computing, participation. Those five do not belong to one account. They belong to four, and a coach who uses them interchangeably is holding four incompatible views of what they are trying to cause.
None of the four is presented as correct. They are presented in historical order, each arriving because the previous one could not explain something, and knowing the order tells you what each was built to fix.
Behaviourism, and the word coaches drop
Learning here is an outcome, the end product of a process, and it counts only when the output can be seen.
Operant conditioning is the version a coach uses daily: reinforcement follows the response and the response becomes more likely. Three operational words follow. Repetition builds the response. Generalisation makes it available across contexts it was not practised in. Discrimination is the capacity to tell one stimulus from a similar one.
The stated consequence is that practice has to be both regular and varied in its settings, and the second half of that sentence is the half that gets dropped, which is the commonest reason a well drilled skill does not appear in a match.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Five everyday words about learning, and the four theories they come from
- 02
Behaviourism: stimulus, response, reinforcement, and learning as visible change
- 03
Repetition against generalisation, and why varied practice is not optional
- 04
Cognitivism: the black box, the transmission model, memory and attention
- 05
Constructivism: active engagement, guided discovery, and the stages of development
- 06
Social theories: community of practice, newcomers and old timers, informal learning
Diagnose one failure from four theories, then discriminate
- 4State one diagnosis per family, in one sentence each.
- 4Name the evidence in the case that rules a family out.
- 4Give the prescription the survivors converge on, and say why convergence matters.
Key terms
- Operant Conditioning
- Learning in which a reward or reinforcement follows a response and makes that response more likely, which is the mechanism behind most coaching praise.
- Generalisation
- The availability of a learned response in contexts it was not practised in, which the source treats as requiring varied practice rather than more of the same.
- Discrimination
- The learned capacity to tell one stimulus apart from a similar one, so that a response is produced in the right situation rather than in every situation.
- Transmission Model
- The cognitivist picture of teaching in which the coach is expert and the athlete novice, and content moves from one to the other.
Learning Theories Behind Coaching Practice FAQ
Do I have to choose one learning theory to coach by?
The course does not ask you to, and the worked case in this chapter shows why choosing would cost you something. Four families produce four different accounts of the same observed failure, and using them together works as a differential diagnosis: each one names a different mechanism, and the case evidence rules some of them out.
Coaches are often advised to pick a philosophy and be consistent, but consistency about a mechanism you have not tested is not a virtue. The useful discipline is being able to say which family a given failure belongs to.
Why does the course spend so long on Piaget stages?
Because the age bands are a coaching constraint rather than a psychology detail. Abstract, hypothetical reasoning is a formal operational capacity that arrives from about twelve, so a tactical explanation pitched at a squad of nine year olds is a stage error rather than a communication failure, and repeating it more clearly will not fix it.
The same reasoning underpins the instructional model choices in the next chapter, where models differ sharply in how much abstraction they ask of the learner.
Assessment move
Take one drill you have run or watched and write what each family would say it is for. The exercise takes fifteen minutes and it surfaces the thing this chapter is really testing, which is whether you can hold four accounts at once without merging them into a general belief that people learn by doing.
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