Jake Hall
How can you alter your style of teaching to meet the demands of different practice and competitive situations for individual, racket and team sports?
In this assignment I will be looking at the different styles of teaching that are needed for different sports practices. For each different practice there are certain skills needed and so which different style you use is vital to how well the performer will do it. ‘Skill is the learned ability, through training and practice, to bring about the result you want with maximum certainty and efficiency’ (). There are two classifications of skill; open and closed. An open skill is when the environment around where you are performing continually changes e.g. passing in football, whereas, a closed skill is where the environment doesn’t alter much e.g. penalty in football.
‘In 1986 Mosston and Ashworth identified a range of styles, which were characterised by the amount of decisions that the teacher and learner made in the teaching/learning process’ (Honeybourne et al). It is important we use this because of the diversity of the students and how they all learn in different ways. Also, the fact that all the students will be of different abilities. In the spectrum there are 10 different styles, see appendix 1, they differ from ‘command’ to ‘self-teaching’, which basically is suited towards the ability of the group. However most coaches/teachers use a different variety of the styles based on the students. Below is a table of the different teaching styles in the spectrum.
I will now focus on just 3 of the styles and go into detail about each. With command style, the teacher will make all the decisions for the learner as it will be a complex skill they are doing or a new skill were the teacher will know what is best for the learner. At the start the teacher would probably show them a demonstration of what to do then talk them through as they were doing it themselves. It is also good for practicing closed skills as the environment isn’t changing it means students don’t have to think about the surroundings much like in the skill they would perform. For example, in trampolining, if there was a person who was just starting, the teacher would make sure the learner did everything they said, as they know best, otherwise, if the learner was in discovery mode they would probably injure themselves not knowing how to bounce or land properly.
Whereas, if you doing a racquet sport such as tennis you would probably use a styles C-F where you are now more focused on telling the learner how to improve as the skills are less complex. The styles between C-F are all pretty similar where the teacher will set students an activity and the students would learn from their mistakes on how to improve through a partner or the teacher. Also it doesn’t have to be the teacher who tells them but a friend or partner can correct them. The teachers could use reciprocal style of teaching when the task is simple and does not require much responsibility from the students such as passing back and forth in tennis and so this way the teacher still has control of the class. However, the students should be at a suitable age such as high school as they would know how to analyse and will have more influence over their friends than the teacher.
