Understanding Skill Acquisition

Every interaction opens the possibility of a new future.

Learning and development is a personal journey, and individuals progress based on a number of intertwined factors and dynamic relationships. 

Several factors can influence individual development, including physical, psychological, biological and emotional factors. You will also need to take the environment, socio-cultural influences, and each situation, practice and competition into account.

These can all impact on perceptions, decision-making, actions selected, and choices in learning, practice and performance contexts.

Creating a holistic, learner-oriented and interleaved experience for participants is crucial to their growth and development. Importantly, you also need to recognise the need for practice that can help them revisit, adapt and continually modify skill development through ongoing developmental changes and challenge.

Can’t move, can’t play!

The fundamentals of skill development are based on a participant's ability to pick up information from their environment, make sense of this and coordinate their actions more appropriately.

An holistic programme including athletic development will provide the foundations that progressively move from general to sport-specific skills, enabling the development of a wide range of movements. Through increased movement capacity and coordination, participants progress their journey to becoming physically literate. This provides individuals with the confidence and competence to be physically active throughout life.

Explore how you can design progressive activities for your participants as they learn and develop. It will be useful to develop a wide range of skills and physical tools to enable your participants to learn to solve the puzzles, and find solutions through sport and physical activity.

Your participants will only be as good as the challenges that they interact with. 

Understanding the motivations, goals and current competencies of those you coach will support you to create the activities, puzzles and games that challenge the individual to improve and are integral to practice design.

Make sure to explore the components that build an effective practice environment, and understand how to design, develop and deliver to meet the needs of your teams, groups and individuals within them.

It will also be valuable to explore concepts and experiment with how to design practice activities that will support long-term learning and translate from practice to the competition environment.

You can’t adapt to an environment that you don’t inhabit.

Discover how to create activities and practices that challenge your participants through adjusting, manipulating, and tweaking activities to enhance the learning environment.

You will need to consider how to adapt your environment to create safe uncertainty, representative practice, and optimal levels of challenge and support that replicate the pressure and conditions of the performance environment. It will also be valuable to dscover how you can plan your skills training to match the ongoing practice and competition goals of your participants, ensuring that their needs are met.