The Environmental Difference In Learning Experiences

THE ENVIRONMENTAL DIFFERENCE IN LEARNING EXPERIENCES

I have always been a big believer in learning by doing. To become good at anything, you do the thing you want to become good at. My training to become a Sitting Volleyball Statistician at the Paralympics 2012 taught me that the environment in which the “doing” takes place can affect the learning experience vastly.

LEARNING A NEW SKILL

My role as the “observer” is to verbally call out every ball touch on one side of the sitting volleyball court, for the inputter to key the calls into the software and the scriber to write it down on paper. For every ball touch, you need to say, “Action, Player, Outcome”*. Being the observer is incredibly difficult to do and a typical experience is described below:

LEARNING ENVIRONMENT 1

I first practiced calling live in a friendly match**. As described above, it was incredibly difficult. After 5 sets of practice, I felt I only improved a little. I think one of the problems was limited feedback opportunities. You know you made a mistake but you don’t really know why you made a mistake or even how to rectify it. The next point comes and you just have to plow through.

LEARNING ENVIRONMENT 2

I managed to get a match video of that friendly match. I practiced at home and after 5 sets, I exponentially improved. The fact I was able to pause (to reflect and to think up new strategies), rewind (to practice the quicker rallies where I made mistakes until I got it right) and fastforward (e.g. time-outs and between sets to maximize the calling practice) was invaluable. The best thing was being able to go back and repeat those longer and quicker rallies until I got it right. It surprised me that it may have taken 10 attempts to fully get it right!

THE IMPORTANCE OF THE LEARNING ENVIRONMENT

I still believe in learning by doing. However, a caveat to that is you need to be able to afford plenty of feedback opportunity and increase the intensity of the practice when you can.

* I noticed a slight difference at the UK School Games and DataVolley where the calling structure is, “Team, Player, Action, Outcome” rather than “Action, Player, Outcome”

** I would have loved to post up photos of me at the friendly match but unfortunately Paralympic rules don’t allow me to.