Self efficacy

[Lasse Karlsson]

I don’t know why you need all this complicated teaching tripe.

All you need is slow rod so that you can feel it and tune in, one swipe and it self unloads and decelerates. After that you wait for the boing and go home for tea and medals. I’m fairly sure that it must be possible to cast without any human intervention whatsoever

Regards

Vince

[Paul Arden]

Hi Mark,

1 I totally agree. It’s also quite blinkered teaching. It’s looking at components/faults and fixing or tinkering them one by one, which maybe how you fix a car, but we have a piece of plasticine in front of us. Furthermore that approach will almost certainly result in a very rigid, self-conscious caster.

That’s the problem with 6-Steps, 5Es. While it’s extremely useful for instructor understanding, I don’t think of it as how to approach a lesson. Far better is to study movement and use the 3Ps. Base, pattern, force application. I’ve heard very often that Style is what the body does and Substance is what the rod does. However it’s the body that moves the rod and we are teaching body movement. We need to look at the big overall picture first, and look for what’s good and not only what is “bad”.

I think it can be best summed up as we “study movement”.

2. Totally. A really good example is an instructor training to make consistent loops at 40’, when they haven’t even learned to do it at 15’. If task no1 was teach how to cast narrow loops with 6 or 10’ of flyline and not false cast at 40’, I suspect the general population would receive an easier first lesson.

3. Yep I don’t know how you check for that (apart from discussion). Assuming they have been fly fishing before, I put out targets and just ask them to have a play (usually while I’m doing something else). A minute later I’ll know exactly where we are.

5. Sure I read about that (thanks!). Explaining that this is part of the process helps prepare for it. Solving it is a whole other issue. One way I do it is to jump to another cast that has similar elements to the sticking point. Eg Switch/Jump Roll Cast for delayed rotation in Distance. Accuracy for tracking. Or even just changing planes to were the movement is not ingrained. Sometimes it can even mean leaving it for a few weeks and developing something else.

That’s a statement worth unpicking

Yes it’s an interesting one. Basically how you can give the same presentation, or cue even, and get widely different results. I don’t think I would use this, certainly not in general, but just imagine the words “stop harder”. Say that to ten different casters and they are not all going to be doing the same thing afterwards

Cheers, Paul

[Stoatstail50]

For some reason I decided to look back on some of the threads here in the teaching section. I can’t remember the detail of what I may have said in previous posts so it was comforting to discover that they were largely consistent. That is they are all promoting the idea that instructors, new or old, benefit from studying both “what to teach” and “how people learn”.

There are lists in those threads of the things that I personally believe influence the way people learn, self efficacy among them. Those things underpin any lesson I deliver, they help determine the drills I use and when I use them, they inform what I say and when I say it.I don’t do that because it makes positive outcomes a guarantee but because it increases the probability of one.

Human beings are largely the same physiologically speaking, there is a generalised pattern to which we all basically fit. There are a vast variety of variations in this pattern which is what makes us individually distinguishable one from the other.

Cognitive behaviour is kinda like that too as I understand it, Thrre are generalised patterns of behaviour with a degree of individual variation within them.

These things have been studied intensely for a very long time and most of the key areas of research are easy to understand and freely available on the internet and listed in previous threads on here.

Well known behavioural generalities can be exploited by instructors to design lessons which make desirable outcomes more probable. Because of individual variability it will not, however, make it certain.

Whether instructors choose to exploit this kind of information is entirely up to them of course.

[Stoatstail50]

. And this is teaching the same thing in the way that we teach to everyone!

If we teach the same thing in the way we teach to everyone, the probability that we will get a positive outcome is low. This is “stopped clock” being right once a day stuff.

If, however, we take generally predictable behaviours as a base and tailor these in our lesson to fit the individual then we increase the probability of a positive outcome.

To do that we have to accept that some behaviour is predictable. Do you still maintain that it’s not Paul ?

[Paul Arden]

To do that we have to accept that some behaviour is predictable. Do you still maintain that it’s not Paul ?

It’s both. The fact that we don’t know when a road block will appear or when a student will suddenly accelerate and master three things at once, means that while we can make general assumptions and set expectations, we also have to accept that random chaos can appear at any moment.

I actually think that’s where we matter most by the way. How we deal with the wheels falling off. Do we wait for the road to clear, try to drive around, over or through, or find a new route entirely? That’s when we need to become resourceful and it’s not always the same solution. In fact it’s a clear case of the need to experiment.

Now this relates back entirely to the subject matter. Because to truly solve a problem we need to find a way to embrace the challenge. Tendency to tail… what a good example that is. Difficult to pinpoint the cause, especially if there are several, incredibly difficult to fix. And often, the more you try to remove it, the more frequent it becomes. Sometimes we can solve it with a cue, but more often we need to rebuild the stroke over many months. Or build another stroke that contrasts. Or teach them to utilise and control tails. Or all three.

Maybe it’s me or maybe it’s human, but I’m hard-wired to look for patterns. Breaking the code doesn’t seem to apply to anything I do when I look deeply enough. In fact I don’t think it’s simple at all. Especially anything related to behaviour. If it was then the world wouldn’t be in the mess it’s in today.

Back later!

Cheers, Paul

[Stoatstail50]

. we also have to accept that random chaos can appear at any moment.

Nope, personally, I definitely don’t accept that.

In fact I don’t think it’s simple at all.

Well I agree that, it’s quite complicated.

[Paul Arden]

Well Mark, you might not accept that but I recall a discussion you started about the wheels falling off in one of your lessons. It happens – I’ve had it numerous times – and we have to be adaptable when it happens. Everyone has the potential be a really outstanding flycaster IMO and they are not all going to get there the same way.

Mel divided flycasting students into two categories: poets and engineers. In swimming, one of the leading coaches divides students into 6 categories and he certainly has a global outreach!
http://swimsmooth.cz/en/swim-types

With the multiple-lessons coaching I’ve been doing over the past years, I find it very difficult to categorise anyone. I just think everyone is unique.

Christ - most sleep! Tomorrow…

Cheers, Paul

[Stoatstail50]

Everyone has the potential be a really outstanding flycaster IMO…

Totally agree.

….and they are not all going to get there the same way.

Disagree. They are all going to get there following a totally predictable developmental route. They won’t all go at the same speed, some of them will stop, some will stall at different points but they will all learn in pretty much the same way.

As a consequence of that I do not accept that any lesson will descend into random chaos…if it happens it’s because I’ve fkd up. Lessons are almost entirely controlled by the instructor, content, goals, drills, words everything…chaos is acceptable only if that is what the lesson was designed to deliver.

Even knowing this I’ve had several where the wheels fell off. My first lesson after qualification was a train wreck. What happened after that was I tried to find out why. I spoke to as many pro sports instructors as I could find to try to work out what the problem was.

As a consequence of that first lesson I have never since delivered a lesson that is based around explicit fault correction. That’s because someone gave me a book on PR and Marketing which majored on priming and framing. It was so obvious that fault correction had a negative psychological effect.

My mum was a physiotherapist for cerebral palsied children, teaching people how to move was a central part of her profession. I explained what I was seeing when I was teaching and she recognised freezing immediately. She pointed me at Luria, Bernstein and the Vygotski Group.

I looked as far back as I could and the first mention I can find, in this iteration of sexyloops, of the circles drill to deal with joint mobilisation is in 2013. As I recall I nicked it from a tennis coach a few years before that.

Back then only a tiny number of SL posters were looking beyond the authorised casting texts. Will Shaw and I were both fans of behavioural economists and cognitive behaviour studies and swooped book recommendations. Will recommended the Hodges and Williams on skill acquisition mentioned in this thread.

The loop published an article in 2012 by Dayle Mazzarella which confirmed many of the things contained in the books we had been reading. It finished with a few book recommendations including Practice Perfect by Doug Lemov.

If anyone is interested in preventing random chaos from appearing in a lesson I strongly suggest they read about how people actually learn to move. Cognitive behaviour is quite predictable, it makes no sense to me not to use it to improve lesson delivery.

[Paul Arden]

Hi Mark,

The reason I don’t think they get there in the same way is because students have different light bulb moments in their casting progression. They can occur anywhere. I’ve seen Spey casting improve the entire flycasting performance, the 170, various drills. What is a light bulb for one person is not a lightbulb for another. That’s unpredictable.

We have numerous light bulb moments, I call them epiphanies, in our development. But we don’t share the same ones, not in the same order and if they are the same they can have different intensities.

So many times it’s happened that I was trying to teach something within a cast, that suddenly magically gets solved 6 months later, in an entirely different cast. It’s very interesting. Connect enough dots and you create a picture.

Cheers, Paul

[Stoatstail50]

I think there is a distinction to be made between general principles of motor learning and the different things that you are going to teach, the different stages you decide to teach it, the different levels of casting skills and abilities and the different objectives of individual learners. These last things are going to make every personal journey “different”.

Nevertheless, however different the content, it will be dependent on a learning process which is remarkably similar between individuals.

For example this thread describes an underpinning principle which is going to influence an entire lesson, that is the promotion of self efficacy. The simplest example of this at work, something that we both use, is the avoidance of negative framing. Whilst reactions to this may vary by degree they are almost universally predictable, that is, it stimulates defensive cognitive behaviour. To be clear, negative framing doesn’t stop someone from learning, it just makes it less likely. Similarly, positive framing doesn’t guarantee someone will learn, it just makes it more likely.

Here’s a few more which are fundamentally true for everyone.

Motor skills, in this and many other disciplines, are learned with vision as the dominant sensory input. Therefore, using drills that develop visual skills makes it more likely people will learn.

Motor skills are learned when an individual can connect what they see with what they do and verify performance against objective for themselves. Objectives should therefore be set so that a caster can independently verify whether they achieved them or not, it makes it more likely they will learn.

Given any set of conditions and a clear objective, learners self optimise. Meaning that, if you have set the objectives properly, you can give them time to work it out for themselves. Independent problem solving is more likely to stick than one dependent on instructor feedback.

If you over explain your learner will suffer cognitive overload. Limit the information content, it reduces the likelihood that the activity will be learned.

If you deliver multiple instructions at once or too close to each other your learner will become confused.

These are all general statements based on common predictable cognitive behaviours, I can think of many more. None of them guarantee a successful outcome but all of them in combination make success more likely. It plainly doesn’t mean that the journey each individual takes is the same.