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Pioneering New Frontiers in Coaching Verbal Feedback
Investigating coaching interactions and how coaches can use verbal feedback to guide athletes' search for performance solution
Investigate how coaches can use verbal augmented information (Feedback) more effectively to guide the attentional search of athletes in football, to explore and create their own adaptable performance solutions.
Looking to collaborate on research surrounding coaches use of feedback, practice design or another topic?
Learn About My Research
What is the PhD Research About?
The Aim of the Study: Investigate how coaches can use verbal augmented information (Feedback) more effectively to guide the attentional search of athletes in football, to explore and create their own adaptable performance solutions.
Since 2020, my PhD research focuses on a pioneering "Transitional Learning Model" (TLM) for football coaches to enhance the efficacy & impact of their use of verbal augmented feedback. Integrating ecological dynamics and a constraints-led approach, TLM guides players' attentional search, refining decision-making & skill adaptation.
What is the Problem with Current Feedback Methods?
Verbal feedback is a dominant coaching behaviour displayed by coaches, and yet used ineffectively, often failing to support long-term learning and performance. Some of challenges with verbal feedback provision is that it may not always translate into recipient comprehension, with some athletes found to recall around 50% of summarized feedback and less than 6% of all feedback a week later. Football (soccer) coaching like most sports is guided by a reproductive, coach-led approach that subjects athletes to receiving high frequencies of prescriptive information in the form of error correction, in reference to an optimal movement template shaped by the coach to address dynamic and random game problems. Overuse of poor verbal feedback has led to significant athlete dependence, where excessive reliance on prescriptive feedback discourages athletes from exploring and solving problems independently, limiting their autonomy during performance. Additionally, misaligned learning occurs when feedback focuses on idealized movement patterns rather than situational adaptability, creating a disconnect between training and the unpredictable nature of dynamic sports like football.
How Well do we Check for Understanding?
Coaches share a lot of their information verbally but how much of this information provided to athletes encourages autonomy support? self-regulation and adaptability? How well do we check for understanding?
Newell - Learning as Searching
Important position is agreeing that "LEARNING as SEARCH" and "Practice is Search" meaning that Perception-Action is coupled. We learn through our constant interaction with the environment and we are in environments where we have to search for information to optimally identify key information sources, in order to use that information to discover and implement our own adaptable and unique movement solution.
Newell - Transitional Information
Existing feedback approaches fails to consider the complex, dynamic and nuanced nature of sports, such as football. Football requires constant decision making and problem solving, as athletes must interact with and search for information from an environment that is unpredictable and forever changing. This is where an alternative approach to providing augmented information known as ‘transitional' can help coaches, as transitional information can be shared concurrently (during action) or terminally (after action), by using feedback to channel the athletes search for information, which they can use to discover their own adaptable performance solutions. This conceptualization views ‘learning and practice design as search meaning, environments that promote the process of athlete’s actively exploring and seeking out information and solutions through inquiry, experimentation, and problem-solving, compared to relying solely on the coach’s idealistic solution to every problem.
What is the Goal for Feedback
What can be described as a contemporary non-linear approach to coaching, aligns with calls from Woods, Rudd, Robertson & Davids that re-position the role of the coach as that of a Learning Designer, an individual who designs decision-rich environments that use feedback as an informational constraint, to guide an athlete’s attentional search for movement solutions. By using Newell’s views within a constraints-led approach which also draws from Gibson’s perception-action coupling in that perception and action are coupled, my PhD Research proposes a Transitional Learning Model (TLM) to prevent athletes (soccer players) from becoming dependent on augmented information, instead helping them develop the relevant skills and capacities to explore practice and game environments for their own functional and adaptable solutions.
Study 1 "How Coaches Use Feedback in Everyday Environments"
Study 1 - How coaches use feedback in their everyday coaching environments through semi-structured Interviews
Interviewed 22 coaches across Grassroots, Development & Elite environments
Across Two Parts
Select group of individuals selected for Part Two based on their responses to the first-part of the study, to take part in a Listening Rooms approach
Select group of 10 coaches who unpacked key findings further across 6 Themes: Feedback Approach, No Feedback Model, Social & Cultural Influences, Player Centered Focus, Use of Experience & Knowledge and Feedback Periodization Strategy
Key Findings from Study 1
No clear feedback model or framework with coaches not planning with intentionality what their feedback strategy in training or matchday environments will and should look like. Coaches heavily influenced by unknown socio-cultural constraints as well as considerations linked to Periodization of workload. Consistent Philosophical Discord between methods used, with coaches making contradicting statements surrounding their use of feedback. Universal agreement for a need to have a model or framework that guides coaches use of feedback that taps into the perception of the athlete to solve game problems through the discovery of their own solutions