Teaching "Guidance" in your PE classroom

How many PE teachers have learned how to teach visual, verbal, manual and mechanical guidance since the GCSE and A-level PE courses changed in 2016? Guidance, a pretty simple topic, has been taught on all GCSE and A-level PE courses since that time, having previously been an A-level-exclusive topic. 

Personally, I’ve been teaching about guidance for A-level PE since 1999. That is a bit scary to write down, as it’s bloody ages ago and I’m feeling old. My belief is –and it really is just a belief– that guidance remains a slightly misunderstood topic across our sector, so one of my aims of this post is to create a future standard. It’s one of those lessons where, perhaps, we feel “Yep, that’s accessible… I get it… I can explain it…”, etc. but I wonder how many of us have deeply thought about guidance, its context, importance and associated learning.

Here’s the provocative section before we take a deep dive into the guidance types later:

So, there’s our provocation out of the way. Remember that everything above is written to get you thinking, not to cause you to teach that specific definition. 

The four guidance types

As you will likely know, there are four types of guidance:

1. Visual
2. Verbal
3. Manual
4. Mechanical

For each one, I want to really emphasise how to explain it to your students, how to bring it to life and, crucially, how to expect your students to write about it. Let’s start with visual guidance.

Visual guidance

Visual guidance occurs when a sports educator uses visual stimulation to introduce new information to sports learners. It takes many, many forms including all of the following:

• demonstrations;
• video guidance;
• photographic imagery;
• drawings;
• tactics boards;
• wall displays;
• posters;
• hand signals.

For PE teachers, visual guidance can be seen as our bread and butter. We demonstrate things all the time, we place posters next to the gym machines, we provide loops of video on presentation screens, etc.

Visual guidance involves light energy (photons) smashing into the retina of a learner’s eye. That’s it really, but it’s nice to take things further. 

Visual guidance is essential for novice (cognitive stage) learners. Before beginners have a sense of the feel of a skill, a visual picture is needed in order for the beginner to try and replicate it. This is where visual guidance comes in. When a beginner sees a model, they attempt to recreate that model, often with errors and often in a non-fluent manner. Literally, they are trying to reestablish the model. Later in this process, they will require extrinsic feedback before the correct feeling of the skill can be stored and reused. 

Therefore, at least one way to think about visual guidance is that it is the medium required in order to create the memory of a movement. 

But visual guidance is many more things. Visual guidance comes in a wide variety of methods and also can be considered a very motivating method for first learning what a skill looks like. Consider what it is like for a student in your PE group to see you demonstrate a skill such as a seat drop, a forward roll, a golf drive or the arm action of the front crawl technique at the side of the pool and then try to reproduce it. All of us will feel motivated by such an experience assuming that the challenge level and complexity is at the right level (Thorndyke’s law of readiness) for us.

Consider too how important visual guidance is in alternative teaching methodologies such as reciprocal teaching. Perhaps you are teaching a lesson on basketball shooting with the aim of developing communication and, for each group of three students, say, there is a coaching card that helps them coach one another. This type of visual guidance not only helps to improve the performing student but also the communication methods used by the student-coach. 

Visual guidance is almost always combined with other methods. For example:

...when combined with verbal guidance: When a gymnastics coach “cues” one or two coaching points during their demonstration of a forward roll such as the arm position and weight transfer.

...when combined with manual guidance: When a swimming coach manually moves a performer’s legs through the breaststroke leg kick whilst all other group members stand on the poolside and look downwards at the leg action. Caution! Do this quickly: They get cold on the poolside.

....when combined with mechanical guidance: When a table tennis coach uses a vibrantly yellow gate for the player to practise serving through.

Verbal guidance

It’s all about the coaching points, right? Well, yeah, it is. Coaching points are certainly verbal guidance but there are tons of other types too. I want to focus on some that I feel I use a lot of the time in my own coaching (I’m doing very little practical PE teaching anymore 🙁):

• questions;
• follow-up questions during Q&A sessions;
• epistemic feedback;
• description of the set-up of a practice;
• description of a challenge, for example, during a cognitive learning session;
• a final instruction prior to kick/tip-off, push-back or centre pass.

All of these examples are verbal guidance when they are initially provided. 

You already have read how coaching points combined with a demonstration (or other guidance method) is known as cueing. But verbal guidance is much more than this. Verbal guidance is provocative and useful. Now, I don’t want to go too deep on levels of processing or dual coding, as I want to keep this article as light as possible but it’s fair to say that the combination of linguistic and visual stimuli is a powerful learning tool. Therefore, as coaches, as teachers, what we say and don’t say and how we say it, really matter. 

Let’s take the example of epistemic feedback. Imagine you have been coaching netball and you have taught a group the correct technique for shooting as either a GA or GS. A form of verbal guidance could be the following statement:

What happens if your opposing defender is taller than you, has long arms and excellent balance? How would you need to adjust your shooting technique? Show me in your next set of 10 shots.

Those of you who teach A-level PE will recognise this as a Gestalt principle. I’m throwing in a challenge or provocation by means of a question. But this question can stimulate the shooters to think about shooting off their back foot or shooting with greater height (at a greater angle) or even shooting with a fade-away action. Furthermore, once the shooters learn to shoot a greater angle, say, they will understand why this is necessary. Therefore, their tendency to reproduce this behaviour is greater. Moreover, the coach can now reinforce not just the action or the success of the action but the attempt to do something differently even if the outcome is not successful. 

I also want to return to the idea of cueing through verbal guidance in combination with other guidance types. Combining guidance types with verbal guidance helps to improve the memory trace of an action. It also helps to broaden a schema (Scmidt’s theory). Therefore, cueing is a critical behaviour for a coach or PE teacher exactly because it aids in the storing of a movement pattern (encoding) as well as the quality of its retrieval (decoding) including, when coached well, the tendency for learners to produce novel and sometimes creative movement responses. 

So, here’s the message: 

If in doubt, combine your other guidance methods with a coaching shout (not literally shouting: use of voice).

Manual guidance

Time for a bit of silliness: I always sing a song by the band Reef when I think of manual guidance. Do you remember it?

I used to dress a bit like that lead-singer fella back in the day. I’m pretty sure that the first time that I ever went into an Ikea store in about the year 2000, I was dressed exactly like that.

So, manual guidance is about laying hands on, right? Yup, it is! Manual guidance is about the physical manipulation of a performer through the sensory medium of touch. I don’t want to go down the negative route but, of course, permissions and reasonableness need to be considered here. 

The main reason for using manual guidance, almost certainly combined with at least verbal, is to create an intrinsic feel of the correct skill in a learner’s memory before they are capable of producing the correct action from external stimuli only. Manual guidance can cause a learner to overcome learning plateaus by establishing the correct feeling of a skill. 

The idea is that after the guidance has been removed, the performer can replicate it without the guidance and, you know what, often they can. But manual guidance has a major, major weakness: it is often very temporary as a success strategy and reversion does happen quite commonly. I could go into Thorndike’s law further here and write about the law of exercise specifically but I will leave that for another day. 

Needless to say, manual guidance has its role in coaching. For example, I have found it really useful when working with learners completing any form of inversion in either trampolining or gymnastics. For a while, I got really good at handholds and was able to use highly specific ones to guide somersaults of all kinds. Likewise, I have used manual guidance a lot in racket sports to establish correct grips and hand positions. To me, they feel like ways to break through a “stuck period”, to “unstuck” somebody. 

Mechanical guidance

Mechanical guidance methods are the use of aids to improve the transfer of information between an educator and a learner. I have already mentioned trampoline harnesses but almost any other piece of equipment could be considered a form of mechanical guidance. I try to categorise mechanical guidance methodologies:

• used to create the correct intrinsic feel of a skill;
• used to emphasise the correct action in one part of a movement;
• used to expose a learner to the correct feel before their musculoskeletal system is physically mature enough (Thorndyke’s law of readiness);
• used to prevent danger the first time a challenging activity is trialled.

These groups do overlap. In fact, all four could overlap in any particular example. I suppose the most fundamental consideration is the intrinsic, kinaesthetic feel for a skill. The reality is that, at some point, this needs to be established if any skill is going to be advanced. Mechanical guidance has a significant role to play in this requirement, as it has the possibility of introducing the kinaesthetic sense earlier than would happen naturally. 

I like simple examples of mechanical guidance and I will return to my own teaching of gymnastics in secondary schools up and down the UK (I’ve taught gymnastics in six different schools through the years). I became a really big fan of using a bath sheet (big ol’ towel) to help students invert. A bath sheet can wrap around a gymnast's waist (typically) and allow a gymnastics teacher to encourage a good-quality rotation and cause a somersault. It’s an interesting example because it seems like a manual guidance method but, of course, there are no hands on the performer and an aid has been used. Furthermore, the towel gives greater distance between the performer and the coach and allows leverage to take effect and aid the movement. 

Conclusions

So, my friends, there you have my thoughts. I’m not sure if they are useful or not but I enjoyed writing them down. It’s odd to consider how infrequently us PE and sport teachers discuss these topics as a sector. We need to do it more. 

Please remember that the opening, the provocation section, was literally for that purpose only. I’m just sharing how I think about things and not instructing you to do likewise. 

Finally, I strongly recommend that the guidance lesson is taught outside the classroom. In fact, I may put a second post together to show you how I would do this personally.

Thanks for reading.

James