Strivers
It was clear that the students who were striving could do the activities became unengaged as the session was too easy. So students started to misbehave and was hard to get their attention and back focused on the task. Therefore, a lot of time was spent on trying to stop the students who were striving from distracting the other students meaning, little time spent on coaching and trying to improve the children at the tasks that were being taught in the lessons.
Strugglers
As well as strivers there were strugglers in the sessions as well. From finding the task too hard this meant that they also became unengaged as the task was too hard for them. This meant that they were not getting any success. Therefore this meant that the students started to mess around and not focused on the task and play with their friends.
From doing research it became clear that we needed to plan further our activities and adaptations of the sessions. When looking at the Coaching Planning and Reflective Framework (Muir et al., 2011) it was clear evidence that we needed to improve our practice structure and planning to create adaptations so that the task could be altered for both the strugglers and the strivers. This meant that we could keep pupil engagement high as they will be able to receive the correct challenge point for their ability (Lee et al., 2004). It is vital that the children have the right challenge point because if it too easy they will be bored therefore loose engagement. If it is too hard they will lose confidence and will not want to try anymore as they are not receiving any success (Bandura, 1977)
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The following week the session plan was much more detailed and had clear adaptations for every activity so that we were able to alter the tasks if required. However some of the tasks we found harder to make them easier as they were basic tasks meaning that we could not always adapt so we had to spend more time with the strugglers to help them complete the task. Therefore we could have spent more time on planning or alter activities so that both strugglers and strivers we able to complete the tasks.
From conducting further research we decided look at functional task difficulty. This looks at the skill level of the participants and the conditions, allowing us coaches to set the right challenge point for our participants. The next week all challenge points were appropriate and we decided to give more information optimising the students amount of learning (Gray, 2018). This worked as the challenge point was suitable and adaptable for all levels ensuring that all participants were involved in the session.
We also included activities for a little boy in our class who has severe disabilities and wanted to join in so by creating little activities for him to do he enjoyed it and he was clapping and said thank you at the the end of the session which made all 3 of us coaches really happy.
References
Bandura, A., (1977). Self-efficacy: toward a unifying theory of behavioral change. Psychological review, 84(2), p.191.
Guadagnoli, M.A. and Lee, T.D., (2004). Challenge point: a framework for conceptualizing the effects of various practice conditions in motor learning. Journal of motor behavior, 36(2), pp.212-224.
Muir, B., Morgan, G., Abraham, A. and Morley, D., (2011). Developmentally appropriate approaches to coaching children. In Coaching children in sport (pp. 39-59). Routledge.
Gray, R., (2018). The Perception & Action Podcast. [Blog] Available at: <https://perceptionaction.com/105-2/> [Accessed 8 April 2020].
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