AASP Newsletter - January 2019

Peter Kadushin

Peter Kadushin, PhD, CMPC®, Boston University

Imagine for a moment: You’re sitting on the bleachers, waiting for your first day of practice. You may be nervous; after all, these are your first real moments as a college athlete. The floor shines with possibility, the basketballs glow an inviting orange as they sit, waiting for you on a rack at half-court. When coach walks in, the room falls silent, out of respect, or nerves, or both. This is it! Then he says to take your shoes and socks off…

Many of us may be familiar with this anecdote – the legendary John Wooden walking his athletes through how to wear their socks and tie their shoes so they could avoid blisters and prevent injuries. This may also seem ridiculous – grown humans working on the most basic of the basics, and if this were an isolated incident, there probably wouldn’t be much learning taking place. However, in the broad constellation of experiences that the athletes at UCLA had, this was simply one of many lessons that spoke to Wooden’s grander themes. Ideas like intentness and alertness were a part of the team’s bigger vision, and within that broader framework, learning how to tie their shoes had its place. When we look closely, there seem to be several crossovers between sport and education settings. By combining the concept of Backwards Design with a couple of ideas taken from the sport context, the goal of this article is to provide a framework for creating more purposeful and coherent courses, units, and lesson plans in the teaching of sport psychology.  

Backwards Design (Wiggins & McTighe, 2005) provides a framework for the understanding and creation of educational experiences. Simply put, the model asks educators to start first by explicitly outlining their learning objectives (LOs), followed by identifying the ways their students will demonstrate progress towards those LOs.  Only then would an instructor start to think about the content and activities necessary to create the opportunities for students to achieve those objectives. Interestingly, if we replace learning objectives with goals, students with athletes, and activities with drills, this sounds a lot like how an effective coach would construct their practice plans! 

While the structure to Backwards Design feels familiar and seems straightforward, implementing it is anything but easy. When speaking with graduate students and young professionals who teach, it seems we usually start with a textbook and some content we plan to cover, add some interactive activities to the schedule, and then think about assessment after the fact. This design process can result in an attachment to “covering the content” and underemphasizes what we’d like students to be able to think, feel, or do once they leave our classroom (i.e., demonstrate achievement of their LOs). If we can combine this clear emphasis on purpose-driven course planning with the use of progressive resistance, we can begin to craft educational experiences that build consistent student success.

Like Backwards Design, the concept of Progressive Resistance isn’t revolutionary either – all you have to do is watch “Pumping Iron” to see that consistently challenging our musculoskeletal system creates physical adaptations. By transplanting this idea into the educational sphere, I propose that we can develop curricula that help build student confidence, while offering increasing challenges as students become more proficient with their content knowledge and understanding.  

Drawing from Bloom’s Revised Taxonomy (Anderson & Krathwohl, 2001), educators could think about how to structure their course in a way that first targets a student’s ability to remember facts and concepts. As competence is established and confidence is built, activities and assessments can move towards measuring a student’s understanding, applying, analyzing, evaluating, and creating with their new-found knowledge. By purposefully managing how much “weight” is on the bar early in the semester, we can focus on the form of these “educational athletes’” (i.e., the quality of their thought process), and only then can we start to move towards more complex applications of the content we are sharing. 

When taken together, these two ideas can help provide educators with an opportunity to create coherence throughout their courses. Much like how coaches and trainers use macro-, meso-, and micro-cycles to create a consistent thread throughout training, teachers can also think of the course, unit, and lesson as an opportunity to create lasting change with their students.

If Coach Wooden had stopped with the life lessons after that first day, we wouldn’t hold him up as the titan of coaching that we do today. Similarly, in isolation, a terrific lecture or dynamite activity makes us feel competent, and yet can still leave our students wondering how it all fits together. By shifting away from a content-focused style of teaching, and instead constructing the learning experience with an eye towards your big picture LOs, you can increase the likelihood that students leave your course not only having been taught but also having learned.

References

Anderson, L. W., & Krathwohl, D. R. (Eds). (2001). A taxonomy for learning, teaching, and assessing: A revision of Bloom's taxonomy of educational objectives. New York, NY: Longman.

Wiggins, G., & McTighe, J. (2005). Understanding by Design. (2nd Ed.). Alexandria, VA: ASCD.