Internal Processes and Cognitive Approaches to Coach Learning and Development

Sport coaching has often been considered a cognitive activity, aligning to a dominant psychological discourse within a process-product paradigm (Lyle & Cushion, 2017). It is a logical extension of this line of thought to turn to cognitively informed perspectives to help us understand how coaches learn, and in turn how to develop coaches and their coaching. This chapter aims to explain internal processes of learning and development, with examples from sport coaching and coach development situations. It foregrounds what is involved with respect to learning from this perspective, then considers who the coach learner is, and finally explores how cognitive approaches can help us in supporting coaches’ learning and development. While acknowledging limitations to the available evidence from sport coaching, understanding internal processes such as perception, attention, memory, and the integration of different types of knowledge into changing mental models can offer much-needed focus for coach development and coach developers, for the benefit of sport coaching as a profession and a discipline.

http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003160939-12