I have had lots of time in recent months to think about pedagogical practice in sport analytics. A number of my posts in Clyde Street (link) have sought to address the changing world of sport analytics. The catalyst for my thinking has been Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel’s speaker deck, Let them eat cake (first)! (link).
I found her backward design ideas compelling and they encouraged me to think about how we prepare analysts for the world of work. Not all students will find a place in the competitive world of sport analytics, but like Sam Gregory (link), I think working in a club isn’t the only job. I do think we must stop recruiting students with promises of employment in high performance sport. We can share alternative employment options but these require our students to be highly skilled and knowledgeable. It requires us as teachers to be reflective too and demonstrate the soft (power) skills essential to practice as an analyst (link).
My thoughts, through backward design, have led me to think about how we share with students. I have Gergely Csibra and Gyorgy Gergely’s (2009) optimism about how we might share through natural pedagogy and how we might acquire new information and use it later when necessary.
In their 2009 paper (link), Gergely and Gyorgy propose “human communication is specifically adapted to allow the transmission of generic knowledge between individuals. Such a communication system, which we call ‘natural pedagogy’, enables fast and efficient social learning of cognitively opaque cultural knowledge that would be hard to acquire relying on purely observational learning mechanisms alone”.
We need conversations about how we might promote this natural pedagogy through attentional and communicative gaze and how we do with the presence of learners (link). I do think backward design facilitates this through opening up conversations and enables us to contemplate epistemic vigilence (link). (My emphases.)
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