(Part (II), Continued from yesterday
The second and more common reason that many coaches neglect teaching component skills is because they are in a much different and more advanced stage of learning. Coaches can easily overlook component skills because they simply don’t think about them anymore.
The vast majority of coaches, particularly coaches who work in high-performance contexts such as high school varsity, college, Olympic, and professional sport settings, accumulate thousands of hours as athletes themselves. Studies of successful American high school and college coaches in sports such as basketball, football, softball, volleyball, and track and field show that coaches averaged more than 3,000 hours of participation as athletes before they became coaches.
Those years spent practicing the skills they now are attempting to coach often result in what is referred to as an expert blind spot. People with a lot of experience and knowledge in an area tend to overlook basic steps when trying to teach skills to others that they now perceive as easy. Expert or experienced coaches are highly susceptible to forgetting what it was like to try to learn basic sport skills.
A description of skill development stages helps illustrate why coaches often work with an expert blind spot. On the path toward mastering a skill (expertise), learners progress through several stages. In the common three-stage model of skill mastery athletes start in the mental stage (thinking about how to perform the skill). In the second stage athletes focus on using what they learned in the mental stage to refine and improve their skill. This stage is referred to as the practice stage. Finally, with increased and appropriate practice, athletes may reach the automatic stage of skill mastery, in which they can perform the skill more reliably and with less conscious effort.
A more recent extension of this basic three-stage model is the four-stage model of skill mastery that illustrates how learners move from not knowing what they don’t know to not thinking about what they know how to do. In the first stage, unconscious incompetence, novice athletes are unaware of what they need to know to perform and master the skill. In other words, they don’t know what they don’t know.
In the second stage, conscious incompetence, athletes have developed awareness of what they are supposed to do and the component skills needed, but they have yet to master the ability to perform the skill. They have now progressed to knowing what they don’t know. When athletes have learned to perform the skill using their knowledge of how to perform it, they have shifted into the third stage of mastery, conscious competence. Although they can now perform the skill, they still have to think about many of the steps needed to perform the skill successfully. Finally, with many hours, and often years, of focused practice, athletes may become highly proficient in performing the skill and achieve the fourth stage of skill mastery, unconscious competence.
The stage models of skill mastery and the fact that coaches typically spend thousands of hours learning sport skills as an athlete explain why coaches can easily fall victim to the expert blind spot when designing learning activities (see figure 6.4). Most coaches will have achieved some level of automaticity in the sport skills they are trying to teach, whereas most of their athletes will be attempting to learn the skills from a starting point that requires considerable mental processing.
This excerpt is taken from Coaching Better Every Season: A Year-Round System for Athlete Development and Program Success by Wade Gilbert and reprinted with permission from Human Kinetics, Inc.
To order a copy of the book Coaching Better Every Season, visit the Human Kinetics website at www.HumanKinetics.com or call toll-free at 800-747-4457.
