Nonlinear pedagogy and its application in school football co-curricular activity coaches

Skill acquisition theories plays a foundational role in the development of skilled performance as coaches attach themselves to beliefs about skill learning and coaching practices based on theoretical explanations of skill acquisition (Parry & O’Rourke, 2023). Coaches believe that their practices “work” but what ‘works” must be framed in the form of skill transfer where players can effectively apply what they practice during game performance (Coker, 2017). This is where some forms of practices fall short as players fail to make an effective transition into game situations. For example, the game of football is full of complex interactions between players in a dynamic performance environment which something that a repetitive isolated and prescribed practice do not replicate.

Over the last decade, research in skill acquisition have provided strong evidence to underpin coaching practices that account for the dynamism and complexity inherent in learning a sports skill (Chow et al., 2021) An implication of such findings are that coaches should redesign training to include tasks that offer opportunities for players to explore and adapt movement solutions that closely represent competitive sports performance.

Adopting such a coaching perspective that centres on the player interacting with the performance environment brings about the emergence of Nonlinear Pedagogy (NLP). NLP is defined as an “application of the concepts and tools of non-linear dynamics” that provide coaches with key principles to design practice pertaining to the structure of practice tasks, delivering instructions and providing feedback (Chow et al., 2013). Those principles include representative learning design, development of meaningful information-movement coupling, relevant manipulation of constraints, reducing conscious control of movement through attentional focus and leveraging on functional movement variability.

The focus of this programme of study was on investigating the actual application of the principles of NLP in coaching by quantifying the degree of nonlinearity of coaches’ practice, at a micro-level of coaching (i.e., during the session) and through the different pedagogical channels (i.e., practice, instruction, feedback). During a training session, all the three pedagogical channels could be used by coaches at the same time. The main challenge when looking at quantifying pedagogical practices is the strong interactions between the different pedagogical channels that occur during coaching. To overcome this challenge, this study used a newly designed NLP observation tool that applied Random Forest machine learning algorithm to the raw analysis of a coach activity (e.g., focus of attention, analogy use, demonstration, task decomposition), to account for interactions between input variables.

In this study, the NLP observation tool was used on 14 secondary school football coaches to observe their pedagogical activities within the three pedagogical channels of practice, instruction, and feedback to obtain the Nonlinearity Index of coach (NI of coach) for each coach. Further analysis was then undertaken to examine the pedagogical channel of each coach for interactions of their Teaching Actions (TA) that affect the nonlinearity of the pedagogical activity (PA).

Four out of the 14 coaches recorded a 0% NI of coach while only one coach recorded a 100% NI of coach. The other coaches had 33% (2 coaches), 40% (2 coaches), 60% (1 coach), 67% (2 coaches), 86% (1 coach) and 87% (1 coach) NI of coach. In total, eight out of the fourteen coaches (57%) had less than 50% NI of coach. Examining the pedagogical channel of the coaches, 13 out of the 14 coaches had ‘Isolated skill’ practice and was the most common TA in the pedagogical channel of practice. In the pedagogical channel of instruction and feedback, the TA of ‘Movement outcome’ were given by all 14 coaches in the study and was the most common TA in these two pedagogical channels. There were different ways to affect linearity (LP) or nonlinearity (NLP) in a PA. The most common way to affect an LP decision was when a coach designed an ‘Isolated skill practice’ and ‘Repetitive task’ for practice and provided ‘Movement outcome’ as instruction. On the other hand, the most common way to affect an NLP decision was through the combination of ‘Game representative practice’ and ‘Room for variability’ for practice organization and providing ‘Movement outcome’ as instruction.

The findings provided insights on the current practices of coaches in school football CCA such as on how they structured practice and delivered instructions and feedback. The information on how coaches structured their practice provided new knowledge on how coaches can achieve nonlinearity in their practice. Furthermore, the NI of coach was a useful tool to benchmark current practices and to further guide coaches in increasing the degree of nonlinearity in their sessions.