Your Brain is not a Computer! - Ecological Dynamics in Education - A Conversation with Prof. Keith Davids

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

In fact, what they did there was confuse education and training. Training an organism to just repeat an action in this way and nothing more, rather than educating a person to fulfill their potential, to adapt to what's in front of them.

Hi everybody. Thanks for joining me for another episode of the podcast brought to you in partnership with Notosh. My conversation this week is with Professor Keith Davids, who is the Professor of Motor Learning at the Centre for Sport and Exercise Science at Sheffield Hallam University. This was a fascinating opportunity for me to learn more about the growing area of ecological dynamics and the constraints-led approach to skill acquisition and learning. In collaboration with academics around the world, as well as some elite sports coaches, Keith has pioneered the development of the constraints-led approach within sports and exercise science. But there are really important implications for the way that learning happens in all educational situations, as we start to think about the idea of constraints and how we work with them to support productive learning and development in a way that goes beyond a narrow cognitive perspective. Thank you, Keith. A long-awaited conversation. I'm really, really happy to be able to chat to you today. So thank you firstly for joining.

Our pleasure. Pleasure. Absolute pleasure. And you sent me an example of one of the podcasts and, you know, I was really interested in listening to it and to be part of this is fantastic.

So thank you. Thank you. No, I really appreciate that. But, but also it was just amazing for me to discover your work and your colleagues. And because you kind of have those moments where you, in your reflections and your reading, your hubris, you're like, oh wow, I've just come up with a really interesting new idea. And then you discover that people like Keith Davids have been at this for the last 3 decades, you know, and it was just honestly, it was a really eye-opening moment for me when I discovered your work and the constraints-led approach. And, and I think while we'll start off talking about sports science and skills acquisition and motor learning where your kind of main work is, I think there are real major implications for the way that we think about education more generally from this kind of ecological dynamics constraints that approach. So there are some, I've already used a few words there that people may not be familiar with. And I think, so I'd love to, we can take it a bit slow to go through some of those key concepts. Just to help people learn, and we'll, we'll try and use lots of examples as we go. But I'd love to start, if you perhaps, if you could kind of set that scene a little bit from your work in sports and exercise and movement science. So thinking about how do people learn skills? How do they, you know, coordinate their actions in environments? And how has that perhaps changed as you've developed your work around ecological dynamics? How have you changed your view of that kind of learning process?

Yeah, it's a, that's a really pertinent question or series of questions. And it's important and it's caused me to reflect. I think, I mean, for me, it all started from a very selfish perspective. I loved playing sport as a kid. I grew up in a city in East London and it was urban environment, quite dense. There was obviously parks there. And back in the 1960s, you know, that was your form of entertainment. As a child, you know, someone would buy a cheap plastic ball, and then bring it to the park, and then that would maybe puncture in a few weeks, and then we get another one, etc. And, you know, we'd play football, and we'd play cricket and tennis, you know, those sorts of things. So it was really about being active and engaging in these sports, and actually developing a sense of self, i.e., performing skills, seeing that, you know, you're becoming better at something and being motivated by that and thinking, Well, I'd like to become even better. So it was quite selfish. I gained an interest in this area of motor learning, as it's called, how people learn movement skills, how we perform movements, how we coordinate our actions. And I wanted to become better at it. So it all started from that. Tim Logan.

Yeah, fascinating. And I mean, already you can see that this is much bigger than just skill acquisition around sports and exercise, because that kind of mastery process of just wanting to learn skill and coordinate in a particular environment doesn't have to necessarily be a physical environment. It could also be a conceptual environment as you learn about maths or you learn. So again, just to reiterate, I think there are major implications for the way we, we learn other domain and disciplines as well, not just sports. But I do think that's a really important place to start because there is this, it's a useful embodied perspective because everybody has tried to learn to ride a bike or learn to play football or learn swimming, or, you know, there's a very kind of intuitive understanding of what it feels like to not be very coordinated when you're learning a skill or learning a new sport or whatever. And I think again, that's a good place to start to, to help people think about it. And so you've taken a lot of your more recent work then from ecological psychology and dynamical systems theory. So that some of those kinds of concepts will come up, but the big One, I suppose, firstly, if we can talk about, is the idea of constraints. So as you're thinking about the learning process in any of those examples we've already given, firstly, what does it mean by that idea of constraints? And for me, the word often in, you know, in everyday language can be quite negative, right? It's like, it's a negative term that means it's holding me back. But actually, I think the way you're using it just as a setup is much broader than that, but they are both positive, in inverted commas, and negative affording, which we'll get onto. But so firstly, yeah, could you explain a bit about what that means in terms of constraints?

Yeah, maybe we could step back, if you don't mind, we could step back from that to start with. You know, for someone who's interested in how they perform movements, coordinate their actions, learn movements, especially if you're going into a professional capacity that's related to education, training, teaching, coaching, or even if you're parenting and suddenly young children—

Absolutely.

See them develop over time, etc. It's important to gain an understanding of the processes involved. I did that, as I said, from a quite a selfish viewpoint. And at that time, the dominant paradigm, this is before the ecological dynamics approach and the concept of constraints, which we'll come on to. The most influential paradigm for viewing learning more generally, but clearly motor learning as well, which is what I was specifically interested in, was the cognitive science paradigm. So basically, essentially, the focus on the brain or the mind, something called the mind, and how people use the mind in order to regulate their interactions with the environment. And obviously that means controlling and movements and things like that. So the first called a call for me interested in becoming better as a footballer or a cricketer or whatever. It was called motor control and learning. And that came from the Second World War, actually, Tim. So if you don't mind, we go back there first and then that will help make sense of—

Absolutely. I think, and yeah, I mean, if I could just reflect, there's a similar division even in just, you know, traditional versus progressive ideas within mainstream education, K-12, you know, school-based education. So I'd say I'm already hearing connections with this kind of more cognitive approach versus this more ecological approach that will resonate with some of the teachers listening as well. So yeah, absolutely, go ahead.

Yeah, as you sort of said, you know, a lot of these sort of important theoretical discussions and debates actually come from quite simple practical issues and questions. And at the time of the Second World War, it was essentially a case of the sides in the conflict being involved in an arms race. And so engineers technologists at the time were producing military technology at a really rapid rate, improving the design of planes, tanks, radar, ships, submarines, all these sorts of weapons of mass destruction, or maybe not, you know, as massive as they are now.

Yes.

But essentially, there was a problem that emerged because technicians who were operating the systems didn't fully understand it because they were advancing at such a rate. And so that clearly became an issue. Can we select people with talents and abilities or personalities, even in the case of studying a radar operation device, you know, mindless for ages, but fully focused and, you know, attentive. Should we be selecting them or training? So it became this issue. And this issue actually, when I looked into it later on, existed in USA. Physical education in the USA, it was put on quite an experimental scientific footing by the original pioneers. In universities training physical education teachers. And they were, they were interested in developing assessment tests. I was quite staggered by that because they were going straight to the assessment evaluation of performance. So in other words, can we develop a universal test of someone's skills and abilities that could predict whether they can become a football star or a tennis star or something like that, rather than thinking How best can we coach or teach? How best can we help an individual learn to become a good mover with potential for becoming a good swimmer or a track athlete or whatever? So they went straight to the evaluation, and that continued into the Second World War. So in order to develop their understanding of selection or training in terms of operating technology, what the American and the UK government did was they seconded academics to university campuses and they gave them the problem of solving this issue. And that continued after the Second World War. And you can trace it back to the year 1955. The Hickson Symposium was said to be the first event that recorded the birth of cognitive psychology. Basically psychologists who'd been exposed to interactions with engineers. And at the time, the computer was developing, you know, Alan Turing and, and so what happened was the psychologist used the computer as a model for how the brain may operate, where you feed information into computers. So information comes in through the sensory systems into the brain, there's some sort of transformation of that information and decisions made. And then there's output and action is made. So you can see how the human-computer interface led to this symposium. And so at the dominant model of how humans control movements, perform the movements and learn. Yeah, was pretty much from that cognitive science, mechanistic, technological perspective.

Interesting. You mean to tell me that's not exactly how the brain does learn, like a computer?

Well, I mean, it's interesting that psychologists have had a propensity, reading about it in detail, they've had a propensity to look to the latest technology.

Exactly. As the metaphor, right?

Yeah, yeah. At the time it was the computer, but it would have been quite rudimentary compared to how they are now.

No, absolutely. I mean, I'm being facetious, but it is the reason I say that is because it is still a very dominant perception amongst educators that that is how the brain processes. You know, that is this input-output information processing machine that essentially we're learning with and we are educating. We've got a room full of 28, 29 of these little machines and we're feeding information into them and they're processing in different ways. And while people might kind of reject that crudely, it does seep in into the way that people do think about education still quite broadly, I would say.

Yes, they still do. And it reinforces the way we think about educators and trainers, teachers, etc., think about those processes, which I'm sure we'll come on to.

Yeah, sure.

But essentially, a lot of terminology like processing, I need to process that. Programming, practicing a movement again and again, so that you program it so it becomes automatic. That type of sort of thinking became universally accepted. Yeah, right.

I don't have the bandwidth for that is another phrase you hear all the time. That's a good one.

Yeah, there's loads of those sort of things. They're very mechanistic. And you can trace it back to that time period there. But interesting, just before we move on to the ecological approach, you know, the military-industrial complex actually has influenced education practices much more than we acknowledge, although it's hidden in plain sight, really. I mean, you've got the design of teaching and education practices that are based on the principles of scientific management proposed by Frederick Taylor, who helped in the sort of designing the first production line, and the idea of using time and motion analysis so that treating people like they were cogs in this production machine, a collective, you know, producing small, simple movements the role in producing a car, for example.

Sure. There's, I mean, there's also the kind of the IQ test and the development of the IQ test in the military. And, you know, Francis Galton's ideas and eugenics, the early eugenics ideas. I mean, anthropometry, right? Measuring humans. It was very much an early phase that was then kind of tested and developed within the military. And then it obviously came back into more widespread use to measure people's IQ and You know, all of that stuff.

You're right. You know, in terms of being able to take simple measurements, recording data and labeling and categorizing people, um, in order to make sense of, you know, the, the massive population and select and identify people, you know, things like phrenology, the measurement of the brain, of the size of the skull, etc., to be able to decide whether somebody had criminal tendencies or not.

And let's not forget, it's had major racial implications for incredible atrocities against people of color around the world and unbelievable violence, right, perpetrated in the name of the idea of measuring humans.

That's right, yeah. And so you could see the sort of, um, the idea of selection, identification, labeling from very young, yeah, all for purposes of military conflict or for using selection for positions, etc. And You know, for me, the disappointing thing about all that was the lack of focus on development of an individual changing over time, of how people are different and unique. Rather, it's focused on categorizing and labeling individuals and capturing them for the purposes of production for the greater good, for society. But there are different ways of doing this as we'll come on to.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So, I mean, it's all very easy to kind of criticize what we don't like, but then we start getting into, well, okay, if that's not the appropriate metaphor to use for the brain, and that's not a generative and productive way to think about learning and development with young people or elite sports teams or whatever, what is a better way to think about that? And that brings us therefore onto this idea of ecological dynamics, which is kind of the pioneering work that you've been doing.

Yeah, your introduction made me think quite humbly to make sure that I acknowledge the giants whose shoulders I'm standing on, as it were, you know, and obviously, one of the giants would be James Gibson from ecological psychology. So ecological dynamics, for those who are not familiar with it, essentially refers to an integration of principles, concepts, tools, and ideas in ecological psychology, which is quite different to cognitive psychology in the way it views human behavior and the relationship with the environment. And the idea that humans might be dynamical movement systems. A dynamical system originated from mathematics by the French mathematician Henri Poincaré back in 1905. And so ecological dynamics refers to an integration of ecological psychology and dynamical movement systems. So the idea is, is that human individuals or a collective of individuals can be conceptualized as a dynamical system. A dynamical system is one that's changing constantly over time. So, and you can also look at dynamical systems at different scales of analysis, zooming out and zooming in. So you can look at the level of muscle cells molecular level of analysis, genetics, or you look at the socio-cultural historical level of analysis, right, the influences that shape human behavior. Ecological psychology is very interesting because it refers to the idea that we're constantly in interaction with our environment. So you can't study human behavior at the level of the actual individual human system, or, or indeed a part of it, which is above the neck. Exactly right. As well, you know, the cognitive thing only. The idea is, is that the interaction of an individual complete with their unique history, development, genetic constraints, etc., or things that shape them— ecological psychology refers to the fact that we're surrounded by information, and that we use this information in order to regulate our interactions. So you take the individual out of the environment, the context, try to study them in a lab, for example, and you've taken, you know, a massive component of that system that's formed away from it. So you're not going to understand behavior as effectively.

And then we put them back in the real world and expect them to behave in exactly the same way they did in the lab, right?

That's right.

But I think that's really important because that's where it goes from being, from sounding quite conceptual and abstract and sophisticated in ecological terms, constraints, you know, all of the things you've mentioned. To being something fundamentally very intuitive, right? Because we live that every single day in every single moment that we know at a very deep cellular level somehow that we as humans are constantly interacting with our environment and with the thing that we're doing at that time. So you're that, you're this moving dynamical, you know, flux of all of these things happening between, and this is where we get onto constraints. The individual, the environment, and the task, as I say, the thing that you're doing. Um, and so, I mean, maybe that's a good place to go next then, going back to the question I asked slightly prematurely, but was about constraints. Yes. And I think that idea is a useful one to help people to look at their environment that they kind of understand intuitively because they're in it, they're working in it, living in it. But I think it's useful as a way to articulate what's going on there, to think about these interactions of this idea of constraints.

Yeah, exactly. And it's quite a— it's a simple idea, but it can be challenging to maintain. You can grasp it, but actually maintain it in your— the way that you seek to understand human behavior, that's quite challenging. So essentially, at the moment in psychology, we have theories that are related to each individual. So they could be, you know, traits of personality, for example, the role of genes. Cognitive psychology focuses on individual acquisition of motor programs or whatever it is that you develop in the mind, the brain, in order to regulate your actions with the environment. Or you have environmentalist theories as well. Separately, an ecological theory focuses at that point of interaction the person-environment interaction. That's the appropriate scale of analysis, not the person only, not the environment only, but that person-environment interaction. And it's essentially— the idea is, is that the person influences the environment, and of course the environment shapes, influences the person's behavior as well. And if you're studying humans as dynamical systems, that means that that person is changing at lots of different scales, for example, development from infancy through to later adulthood. And there are all sorts of things that could shape a person's changing at different timescales. So constraints. Now, this is the key concepts in it. And Carl Newell, the British psychologist who works at the University of Georgia, made an absolutely fascinating contribution to how children develop their movement patterns. But the idea of constraints was quickly picked up as much broader than just to do with children developing. Constraints as a concept has quite a pedigree in physics, biology, and chemistry, and it refers to the fact that anything that you see, any phenomenon being a system integrating and becoming a part of larger systems. So everywhere you look, you've got systems. So you might see a single termite or single B, as a system in itself with many, many components all interacting to produce its behavior. But then you have a system of these systems where you'd have a colony of termites, you know, a flock of seagulls and birds. And if anybody's seen a murmuration of starlings, the birds coordinate their actions in such a way they'll understand what we mean when we talk about systems operating. And humans are the same. For example, movement systems. They've got these many, many muscles, limbs, joints, segments, bones, etc., different components of the body, the parts of the nervous system, different integrated system. But then they form part of collective systems like societies, communities, groups, teams in sport, classes in education, etc. And so you've got this sort of systems orientation. And these systems are capable of self-organization. That is, for example, when we coordinate our actions as a human, we may see somebody— I mean, this is how children learn a lot of the time. They'll watch an adult walk, and then they try to do it. But of course, their early attempts at self-organizing and locomotion action or sitting up action, etc., doesn't work unless their system, their physical anatomical morphological system has the capacity to complete that type of coordination. So there's a lot of this sort of propensity to self-organize, but it's best to look at that as self-organization under constraints. So think of constraints as, as you pointed out eloquently at the beginning, constraint is a neutral term. It's not like the term that we use in everyday language. It's not to be seen as something that restricts bounds the entity, the phenomenon that you're studying. Think of it as guiding, shaping, influencing the behavior or performance of a particular system. So it's a source of information.

Yeah, absolutely. And the information point I think is brilliant. I would love to come back to that, but maybe it's useful to just at this point, give a few examples of what we're talking about. Cause so Karl Newell's triangle of constraints where he talks about the structural and functional individual, and then the the environment, and the task. So everything is a kind of dynamical interchange between those three things. So for example, within sports, as that's your domain, what— could you give a couple, maybe a couple of examples of how a coach might work with the constraints?

Yeah, so constraints are everywhere. So they're available to be used, and any educator, parent, teacher, coach, trainer, anyone involved in the development, the learning of an individual, probably has used constraints. And maybe not understanding it properly. But, you know, this sort of understanding will help them to develop their methodologies. Yeah. And help them to exploit the self-organization tendencies that exist within people. So essentially, you've got to look at what are the factors or unique characteristics of each person that they bring to a particular task, which James Gibson called effectivities. Just essentially means the dispositions, the tendencies, capacities that they use to negotiate a task, etc. And that could be anthropometrical, as you mentioned at the beginning, biomechanical, physical, anatomical. Have they actually got the physical apparatus to perform a task, etc.? But there's also the psychological dimension, the emotional side. Do they want to engage? Absolutely. Ask, you know, how badly do they? So you've got all the multiple dimensions of human behaviors that they bring to a task. So in other words, The organismic constraints refers to what you bring to the table. The task itself refers to the rules, the conditions, the characteristics of the tasks. So for example, can you use two hands, one hand, single digits? Is it performed indoors? Is it performed outdoors? Is it performed on the side of a mountain, you know, climbing, etc.? And what are the important features of a particular task? So that would be the equipment, that might be used, the regulations, the surfaces that you're engaged with. The environment refers to the physical environment. So, we talked about weather, ambient temperature. That's an easy one to think about. Obviously, negotiating the environment with respect to the force of gravity, remaining upright. So, when— it's really important when you're on the side of a mountain and you're climbing, you're making a decision about making a transition,, move in order to grip a surface. You've got the force of gravity to think about there. When you're performing in, in a swimming pool, for example, it's an aquatic environment and you've got to transition through the medium of water, not just air. And then you've also got not just physical constraints of the environment to think about, you've got the socio-cultural historical constraints of the environment. And going back to what we were talking about earlier in terms of the military-industrial complex and how they have long-lasting legacy in the way that we learn and teach and educate, you know, then they're quite important because they are long-lasting traditions, what we call sticky traditions that are there simply sometimes, well, we've always done it this way. Absolutely. And so different countries have got different approaches. So you can see where those environmental constraints would impact. So just to sum it all, bring it all together, those constraints are continually interacting. And that would lead to 2 important variables, most important variables for learning: individualization of learning. In other words, because people bring different things to the learning process, it has to be a very individualized approach to learning that is most effective. And if you are taking a group approach, etc., you've got to be able to design pedagogical strategies that allow individuality in achieving a particular task goal, intended task goal. But then you've also got the context as well. So learning opportunities need to be contextualized as well. In other words, the information that's present in a performance environment needs to be present in a learning environment as well.

Yeah. I mean, it's fascinating. There's so many implications there. But I think just to take that point about individualized, there's an interesting way as a teacher in a class, you might respond to that because you may respond to that by affecting the broadly called task constraints, right? You might change the task or offer different types of tasks, or there might, it might be something about the environment that you adapt to allow more space for individuals to bring themselves into it. I find it a really interesting way of thinking about it because there are so many, as you know, and again, this comes back to this point about this intuitive understanding of it. And I've heard you say the same thing about sports coaches who kind of suddenly have this language to to use to describe the things they've always done. But I think a lot of educators listening to this might be saying, well, yeah, of course, like, this is how I am in a class. This is how I work with young people. You're constantly moving and shaping the environment and the task and responding to the individual emotionally. And it's almost by necessity, you have to do that in a very dynamic human environment like a school. You might say that.

Absolutely.

But I think it's just a really interesting way to frame it so that you really take seriously, rather than privileging one aspect of those constraints, like the certain type of information and knowledge that we privilege by propositional knowledge in a written form, in a standardized exam, as you said, we privilege certain constraints that we work with, but we ignore others, but they don't go away, right? They're still there in the environment and this dynamical interaction. And I think that's what it helps for me is, is to take really seriously all of the stuff that's in the room in inverted commas with you. You can ignore them, but they don't go away, right? Yes.

I mean, what, what Ecological Dynamics did for me was to basically do away with the legacy, the baggage, if you like, of the military-industrial complex, which is essentially focused on simplifying tasks and teaching techniques. By that I mean, this is the way that you must do this, you know, from, for military purposes, for industrial purposes. That's the historical legacy, to manage people in order to make production of behaviors or reproduction of behaviors, compliance with postures, that being the end goal of education. In fact, what they did there was confuse, deliberately or not, education and training. Training an organism to just repeat an action in this way and nothing more, rather than educating a person to fulfill their potential, to adapt to what's in front of them. And it's a very sticky legacy, as I said before. And, you know, in certain sports, they're more inclined to be that traditional, focused on a reproduction of a technique and compliance to a, you know, some sort of textbook pattern of an action than in others. And in so many sports, coaches, teachers, athletes are looking at ways of disrupting a performance environment for their opponents, to not giving them the sort of the comfort zone of thinking, oh, I know how this person is going to play, I know what shot they'll play. And I'll tell you, certain sports have really embraced these ideas in a massive way. When you see formats of cricket, for example, and I apologize for the listeners who are not too familiar with cricket, but cricket batting has changed radically over the past 5 or 6 years, and all sorts of strokes are suddenly appearing, and it's just wonderful to watch, really. The purists don't like it as much because it's not this perfect ideal, uh, reproduction or repetition of a particular technical pattern that's historically in all the coaching textbooks, you know. But it is a very functional and effective way of doing things. So, you know, I had an interesting conversation at a symposium we held recently recently, somebody made the point then that, is there such a thing as mistakes now? Good question. What it does, what ecological dynamics has done is question the relationship between movement variability and the performance outcome. Ecological dynamics says, as long as the outcome of an action is consistent, in other words, if I've got a ball in my hand, and I aim to throw it and hit a target 5 meters away, but it does reach the target, In other words, I achieved my intention. Yeah, how I do that depends on the laws of the game as well, the actual equipment that you use, the position, the initial starting position, etc. I could, you know, maybe use my left hand, my right hand, two hands, etc., to get to the target. So there's lots of different ways.

Yeah, sure.

And in the past, it's been restricted for whatever reason. Yeah, for people to explore that.

Yeah, I would reflect there in just, again, a similarity with the kind of cognitive psychology legacy in education as well, particularly in certain countries where it's seen a resurgence of things like deliberate practice, a lot of the dialogue around expertise and novice learners and expert learners and how they learn differently and how, and retrieval practice and these very almost rote learning approaches to just lots of repetition of practice to get automaticity. And I know that's a term that you struggle with. So yeah, I definitely see it a lot in education as well because it seemed to be, that's how we break down tasks into these component parts so they can practice these component parts over practice. Again, another term that's come around, over-practicing. To get this automaticity so that you reduce cognitive load when it comes to, you know, doing something more complex with this knowledge, for example, in the performance environment of the exam. So there's a lot of that kind of conversation. And I, one of the things, again, I really appreciate about the ecological psychology kind of approach is that it's another way of looking at the whole thing that's happening so that the only game in town is not the cognitivist approach. And there is this really important counter perspective that we need to look deeply at because it's, I think, way more realistic, if I could use that term. I mean, it binds to reality in the way that I kind of understand reality much more clearly. And it isn't, as you say, just neck up, you know, but maybe you could say a little bit about the kind of the expertise piece and the, why are we so obsessed with that idea of just over-practicing and getting that automaticity?

Yeah, well, I mean, it goes, it goes back to sort of mechanistic approach. Now, if you think about it, if you go back and you're using a computer metaphor for the way the brain works, the brain is a computer from a cognitive science perspective. Well, you can't really have variability in programs that the computer uses. So if you talk about programming a movement, what that means really is that you're repeating and rehearsing a movement. So you're getting rid of any movement variability, because variability is seen as error or noise in the system, which you've got to eradicate. A computer program cannot have variability in it, in the sense of that, you know, becoming unreliable, and people talk about bugs in the system, etc. But humans aren't computers. And the human brain is, if you like, a biological organism, part of a biological organism. It's not this technological mechanism that is, you know, idealized as producing like perfect or automatized outcomes, etc. That's not the aim of behavior, and it's not the aim of practice. The thing is, is that we do, you know, if you want to call them mistakes, or we might make, if you like, imperfect approaches, imperfect ways of doing something time and again. But the point is, is that that provides us with feedback, which allows us to adapt and refine the way that we do things. So these refinements and adaptations are not really about correcting the system to make it more automatic. It's about enhancing the functionality. And by functionality, I mean the way that you interact with the environment, that you achieve your intentions, the outcomes that you wanted to achieve, that you want to achieve, or you need to achieve in a particular environment. So putting your foot on a step and then progressing. If all of a sudden you feel that the step wobbles a bit, adapting to that is a refinement and adaptation. You know, it might mean that your foot adapts a position that's not ideal, if you like, and was programmed into the system, but it achieves the goal of, you know, putting your foot on a step, etc. What this means essentially, Tim, from the perspective of education and learning, is that you can create a landscape of learning environments, like a continuum. And at one end, you have a very stable learning environment with not much information, not much in terms of problem solving or decision making. And at the other end, you've got a very unstable or variable environment, which represents lots of pathways to achieving a goal, lots of information that's present there, etc. In many performance environments, move towards the more unstable and the uncertain end of that continuum. If as a coach or teacher, educator, trainer, your individuals are operating at the stable end, that is not necessarily a bad thing. It's most important that the educator, the person in charge, the parent even, with a child learning to cycle, for example, ride a bicycle, why are the conditions of practice either task constraints Why are they down at that stable, highly stable, structured end? And why are you giving verbal information that might be needed at the beginning, confidence levels, etc.? But they shouldn't be there all the time because that could be hindering learning. It's about understanding where each individual needs to be on that continuum at a particular time. And that instability or uncertainty relates to the information that's present. In that learning environment, the information that we have to deal with as learners, the problems to solve, the decisions to make, the choices in regulating our actions. Moving up and down that continuum is most important. Personally, I think that teachers, educators, particularly those who prefer very traditional ways of managing learning environments— let's go back to that military-industrial complex, etc.— they like to be in charge of things. And that's why a lot of the learning designs are at that highly stable end of the continuum. Yeah, perhaps longer than they need to be.

And, but that's the key point, isn't it? Because it's so interesting because the way we talk about preparing our young people for the complex world and, you know, where we say we're preparing them for this unstable, highly unpredictable information is flowing at huge, incredibly dynamic and, you know, fast rate. We're preparing them for that environment. But we're doing it by keeping them in a very stable, very controlled— information is quite static. There's less, as you say, less information in a way in that environment, or less changing information. We're trying to prepare them in that kind of environment for this other thing. And it's a really delicate art, I would say. That is for me what coaching and teaching is about, is about how, when to push them along that continuum a little bit. And again, as you say, individually they'll be at different paces and different rates with that and understanding your learners to help them to do that. But the way that you do that is by manipulating, as we've said, the task constraints, the environmental constraints where you can, you know, like you said, taking them outside where the weather is more unpredictable for in a training, if you're doing PE, you know, rather than in a highly controlled gym kind of environment.

I mean, a simple example of that would be across the world globally, there's great alarm at the moment. For example, New Zealand, in the UK. It's the same Norway, it's the same. Outdoor swimming is becoming very popular.

Yeah.

So-called wild swimming, etc. But drownings, fatalities are increasing at a very high rate. And it's particularly younger males who are drowning. And actually a lot of the time, evidence shows that these people who drown, unfortunately, they are recorded as being good swimmers.

Yeah, sure.

The thing is that most people learn to swim in an air-conditioned pool, temperature-controlled, water temperature-controlled, full lighting. Outdoor swimming is— the conditions change. There are currents, there's wind directions, variability in water temperature. You've got to think about getting into the aquatic space, the lake or the river. You've got to think about getting out of it as well. You've got to perceive a lot of information. And that's the difference. There's a huge difference between swimming indoors and outdoors. The task constraints are so different, and the way that people learn to navigate those environments, they're two completely different tasks. So just because you might be good at swimming in an indoor pool at fast and going up and down in a nice straight rectangular shape, that's not the same as negotiating a rocky shoreline where you might lose visibility of you know, the landscape, etc. There's a huge number of variables that can change, etc. So that's, that's what I mean. So to go back to your point there, one thing we could talk about later on is what should practice look like across that continuum?

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I, I do, I really do think that's a lot of the debate. It's not framed in those terms, but within my world of education, about how do we adapt our teaching approaches and how do we adapt curriculum, a lot of it is exactly about that question of how do we create environments where we support learners at the stage that they're at to navigate complexity and navigate uncertainty, be adaptable, but doing it in a way that is controlled to the right degree for the right time and age and etc. And it's a phenomenally difficult question, I think.

Yeah, exactly. And, you know, some people may be interpreting this saying, so are you saying then you just throw people in the— well, exactly, and then they sink or swim. It's absolutely not. I think the crucial point you made before is the skill of the teacher, the coach, the educator is in managing the constraints. So when at the beginning I said two of the major things that educators, parents need to think about is individualization of learning. Just because one child or one learner is operating or performing or coordinating their actions in a certain way doesn't mean the other one is there at the same time. So just modeling and copying is not the point of it. Individualization of learning— in other words, it goes back to what I said before— what does this individual bring to the learning? Exactly. That can help them function. And then contextualizing learning environments, you know. And as you said, the skill of it is pretty much not rushing to the more complex end quickly. It's not that at all. It's about really well-organized, well-managed learning. So putting the learner at the center, their needs at the center of the learning process. So for this reason, I've talked about maybe teachers and coaches should call themselves learning designers, change the name, because what that does is puts the emphasis back on learning. Yeah, what are the needs of this learner, and what is the learning process that needs to be designed then to Exactly.

Absolutely. Because that idea of design, I think, acknowledges that you are working with, just as you might think about an architect or a product designer, they are working with certain different materials and constraints and affordances. And that's a word that comes into design. And that's a word that you also use. I'm not sure. I don't know how necessary it is for us to dive deeply into affordances now. I don't know. How much more it adds than constraints at this point. But I think there's a, that idea of your role being designing the environment. And that doesn't mean just once when you are just designing a lesson plan or you're, or you're, you might be designing a learning environment from an architectural sense. It's constantly designing and redesigning in the moment, right? Of facilitating because your, that is your role is to work with the individual, the task and the environmental constraints and move and shape them in whatever way you can as a facilitator educator to allow the learning to then, or the coordination to emerge. And that kind of, that idea of, yeah, the way that things fit together and allow that to emerge into the learning and development that you talked about, I think is that, I mean, that is the role of an educator, right?

Well, and that's right. And there's a wonderful insight by the American Motor Development theorist, Karen Adolph. She talks about learning in development. She says we shouldn't be talking about learning and development as separate processes, which I grew up with in movement sciences. So if you were a developmentalist, you're interested in how children develop, develop their movements. If you're interested in motor learning, then you're interested in how people learn skills. Karen Adolph talks about learning in development, and by that she means that We as individuals are changing over a certain timescale. So we're aging, we're maturing, we're developing, and there are particular sensitive periods. So for example, adolescence is a massive period of rapid growth, and the system gets perturbed a lot emotionally, hormonally, physically, anatomically, etc. And learning in development is a very important way of expressing what you said there, which is essentially that a teacher or a coach or a parent needs to understand that just because a child might perform well in a particular context, learning situation that's designed at time A, a few weeks later, a few days later even, they perform quite not as well or even better. You know, it can change. We need to keep this idea of learning in development in mind, that the individual is changing, not the same every day. And having this view of a human as a sort of automatized— is almost like robotic. Yeah, that's a problem, really. So it's about understanding that individuals change over time. And so as part of that, Carl Newell showed us how to understand variability. Essentially, what he talked about was if you compare movement variability or someone's performance variability at too fine-grained a level, you're going to get a lot of periods of improvements, regressions. So yeah, it's going to look dirty, noisy, and full of variability. But if you look at— if you zoom out and look at that over a longer timescale, you'll see the learning transition or not, depending on how effective the individual's learning. So, you know, variability is actually— and this goes back to the point I was making before about, you know, what is an error, what is a mistake.

Exactly. Yeah.

Adaptation or refinement enhancing your functionality over the longer timescale.

Yeah.

Should that be seen as an error? Um, or should it be the system adaptation?

Yeah, but it's also really interesting from the perspective of almost the slide into behaviorism because it's one way of thinking about this is like, oh, we've now, we figured out a better way to manipulate the environment. So we, we understand constraints, Brilliant. Okay. So like individual task and environment constraints that allows me as an educator to manipulate the environment to such an extent that I get exactly what I want out of these people in front of me, because I know I can predict that this is how they're going to respond to these environmental and task constraint changes. And clearly that's a ridiculous idea because they are individuals, they're bringing different things into the, and so there's this. Another phrase you've used is in talking about affordances is the idea of invitations to action rather than opportunities for action. And I think that invitation piece is really important because you've got to allow the individuals to have agency within that space, right?

Yeah, really, really good point. Yeah. I mean, it's probably worth dwelling on the concept of affordances. So affordances for listeners who are unfamiliar with the term. Was invented. It's a word he acknowledged it. James Gibson, ecological psychologist, the founding father of ecological psychology, said, I made that word up, affordances. And an affordance for him is an opportunity for action or a behavior in an environment. You know, I talked before early on about ecological psychology, the scale of analysis is person-environment interaction, and affordances frame those interactions. For example, take a gap in— you're walking on a trail and a gap between two boulders. That might be an affordance to just leap across for one individual, but for another individual, that opportunity for action doesn't work because they haven't got the capacities to navigate that gap. For a young child, it might be too great a distance. For an older adult, They may have not have the muscle strength to be able to locomote across that, etc. This is where the individuality comes in, in terms of detecting these opportunities and using them. Recently, Gibson's fantastic concept of affordances as an opportunity for action that surrounds us in the environment was upgraded, in my view, by Rob Wirttargen, the Dutch psychologist, ecological psychologist. Virtagan and his colleagues talked about affordances being seen as invitations that solicit your actions, solicit your behaviors. So that for me is wonderful because as a teacher, parent, or coach, you can design a landscape of affordances. But your point is crucial. Some people think with an invitation is if I gave you an invitation to dinner tonight, Tim, let's meet for dinner tonight. You can accept it and fly all the way from where you're located in France to Sheffield, where I'm located, or you can turn it down and say, thanks very much, lovely idea, we'll do it soon, but we can't at the moment. People can reject or accept affordances based on their capacities. They can make decisions about how they're feeling, their motivations, their emotions, physical capacity. So when, you know, in terms of accepting or rejecting an affordance, to perform an action in sport, very different when your status is fatigued, right at the end of performance, versus right at the beginning when you're fresh. So these affordances solicit you, but then you interact with them as well. But the person— think of what the learner brings to a learning context. And that, as you say, that will change over time, different timescales, the here and now, and over the timescales of, you know, months and weeks, et cetera.

Yeah, no, I do think it's a useful concept. I'm still not totally clear on how, whether it's the same as constraints or different, but it's, I've heard John Verveke talk about affordances as like a floor is walkable, right? It's like that quality of I can walk on it. Whereas, for example, if suddenly the floor's covered in ice, it's less walkable, right? It's the affordance landscape has changed because I can't walk in the same way that I would have done before. But, but to your point, I might not accept that invitation to walk on the floor. I might want to lie down on the floor. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It also affords me to lie down on the floor, even though that's not what you would normally do.

Yeah. Interestingly, when you read Gibson's original text on affordances, he calls an affordance a constraint. That surprised me when I saw that written down, but he didn't use it in dynamical systems terms, the way that constraints are used as a dynamical system. You know, he essentially saw an affordance as, if you like, a source of information, an opportunity furnished by the environment. By the way, he did say that affordances are for good or ill. Sure. In other words, they're for good or bad. So what's an affordance for one person walking on a really slippery pavement? It's like, oh, I really don't want to do that. I'm going to take a stick and I'm going to wear my best shoes with my best grips. Might be an opportunity inviting gliding actions by another person with the confidence, the skills, the capacities to glide on it, maybe the right equipment, etc. So it does show you that individualization is that what you bring to a particular context means that you can use certain affordances, opportunities, or invitations for actions that other people can or cannot use.

Yeah, sure. And in a way, that's a responsibility of the learning designer, right? Of the designer of that environment. Because I think, I think it's really important going back to what we were saying earlier about the kind of standardized environment and just pushing everybody through particular, you know, you want to create a landscape of affordances which allows people, as you said earlier, to bring their individuality into it, into it, to interact with it in a way that allows them to be afforded the things that they want in that environment, right? So like to your point about, you know, it's, you know, a kind of really obvious example would be mobility and access to, as you were saying, bouldering or whatever. Clearly, some wheelchair user, that's going to be impossible. And therefore, how do you create a landscape of affordances where there is a level of challenge that is appropriate to a wheelchair user to develop certain skills, as well as the person who's really adept at jumping across boulders. And that's, that's a real challenge, right?

I mean, that's a real challenge. And it's wonderful that there are a lot of people taking up that challenge. And societies are becoming much more inclusive in terms of diversifying people's opportunities to accept affordances available in the landscape. So if you've got stairs and steps and ways of navigating the environment, you've also got pathways that other people can navigate with, you know.

Yeah, fascinating. And the other thing where you talk about teams is the idea of shared affordances, which takes it then to another level, which I'm really interested in that because obviously learning coaching in most environments, I mean, in some environments it's one-to-one, but in most environments it's many-to-one or many-to-many, right? And you've got this collaborative aspect happening. And so that idea of like, for example, team sports. And understanding the idea of shared affordances. So you can somehow, this kind of a coordination that might emerge between a team or between a group who's working on a task in a class that allows them to respond together to the affordances in some way that they've kind of, they're more coordinated somehow. So I don't know what, could you say a bit about shared affordances?

Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, James Gibson again was, was onto that. This is where his ideas are so visionary. So he talked about one of the most important affordances that individuals have are for social interactions with other people in society. So from a cognitive psychology perspective, the way that those sort of collective behaviors go on in a group, community, team, at work, at play, etc., is through developing a mental model. Somehow we all tap into the same mental model. We develop that, you know, imagine that like a computer program. Which we all share online, but we're not connected that way. We're separate biological organisms. And no amount of instruction and, you know, teaching people, this is how you view the mental model, you pass the ball to this person, to this, you know, this, it's quite limited in what that was about. Gibson cut all of that out of it by talking about shared affordances. So what we become good at, with good teaching, good coaching, education and parenting is to see the opportunities or the invitations that others provide for us or for others. So if I'm playing on a playing field and I see a teammate of mine run down the side and I can see the affordance, there's a, like an opportunity to penetrate through a gap using that shared affordance that we have or affordance for that individual. I can place the ball into that space for that person to run onto and score or create another opportunity. So shared affordances, designing learning environments for us to share affordances as a team so we can see opportunities that the collective system can exploit in the landscape. And remember, affordances are appearing, disappearing. So this is the skill of playing team games, for example, is that these are, you know, like immediate And they're not there for very long unless you play in a poor position, but you can see affordances for others as well. And that's how we can work as a group in order to develop as a, as a community, as a group, as a team.

It's fascinating because it's, it's that responsiveness and that kind of collective responsiveness, but it's also interesting how persistent the mental models framing is, right? It keeps sticking around. It's like, if only we could all learn the same mental models for And this is not just sports, right? This is some deep stuff about how we live and morality and all these things. It's like, it's a dangerous kind of impulse towards standardization. It's like, if only we all learned the same mental models, then it would all be all right. But it's like, there's a kind of an imperialist urge there of like, well, it has to be my mental model that I'm suggesting that I want you to learn, not yours.

Yeah. And some think of the cultural issues involved, the historical issues, you know, mental model is very much, you know, like a very static phenomenon that is passed on from generation to generation, uninfluenced by other cultures, new ways of thinking, etc. So it just doesn't work. Whereas affordances, which are changing in the landscape all the time, influenced by different cultures historically, etc., you know, and even our ability to use them, you know, our ability to perceive them, how that changes. So it's a fascinating topic, you're right.

It really is. And just one final thing, I don't know if you're aware of Michele Gelfand's work on tight and loose cultures. That really connects with that idea because it goes back to your stable and unstable environment kind of continuum. It's that she talks about cultures being, it's kind of a tight-loose continuum, right? Where you've got much more control and limiting constraints, let's say, you know, much less information or flexibility or variability in the environment in a tight culture versus the loose culture, which is much more open, there's much more kind of possibilities, invitations for action in all sorts of ways. It's an interestingly similar framing, but at the level of society, social norms, culture, etc., which really connects.

Yeah, just related to that, one point I should make is one of the things that we've discussed from an ecological dynamics perspective is changing the tone. So changing the use of wording. At one level, words don't mean as much. At another level, they mean a lot. But the traditional emphasis on skill acquisition— I've used it in this podcast simply because I wanted to make sure that people understood what I was talking about. Skill acquisition, the idea is that you acquire a program or an entity stored somewhere in the brain or in the mind that you draw upon in order to control your action as you perform a behavior. We've argued that really we should be focused on skill adaptation. So you can see where skill acquisition, where errors and mistakes come into it, because in acquiring that program, you might make a coding error or exactly, yeah, yeah, perform the wrong movement. And that doesn't fit. That movement doesn't comply with the classical template that I, as a teacher or coach, I'm trying to instill into you. Skill adaptation, on the other hand, it does really imply that functionality, that adapting to the environment and refining movements over time. And that kind of fits with what you talked about there broadly, but we can bring it back down to the individual experiences in a learning environment. We talked about maybe if you focused on skill adaptation, adapting your movements and actions to a dynamic changing environment over different time scales, that could be a good thing. If you really are very keen on hanging on to the term acquisition, what you could think about is acquiring a more functional relationship with the environment over time. So at the beginning, when you learn something, your relationship with the environment is not as functional as you want it to be. You're refining it, you're adapting it. And what you might acquire— again, it's at that performer-environment level of analysis— you're acquiring a more functional relationship.

So sorry to do it, but like, I can't resist. That then brings up the idea of fittedness, right? You are fitting your environment. And that kind of, that, those ideas of presence, noticing the environment, being aware of your environmental, the niche you're in and fitting. And that's how Darwin meant it originally. Not, not about survival of the fittest, strongest, et cetera. It's like, how fitted to your environment are you? And so I think again, it's just, it's such a, quite a profound and important insight, I think. That we're not just trying to create this standardized product that's going to be resilient in all possible environments. It's about how do you adapt, as you said, or acquire relational fittedness over time in order to learn and grow. I mean, I think it's really important.

Yeah. Again, one last point. I can't stop. To go back to a fundamental issue that people might be thinking about. So how do I practice then? How should we conceptualize practice? Well, in the past, people have always said, you know, the most important thing for practice is repetition. It's just repetition, repeating, rehearsing a technique. Instead, as Nikolai Bernstein, the Russian physiologist from back in the 1930s, he made this point, is rote learning has been discredited. He mentioned that back then in his talk about stickiness. Yeah, really, we should be thinking about repetition without repetition. So what should we repeat? We should repeat the solving of a movement problem, not repeat the technical movement pattern that we're somehow ingraining in their mind.

Yeah, but not necessarily a movement problem in the full complex unstable environment of the game situation.

Yeah, information.

Yeah, you can still manipulate the constraints in and allow them to be a bit more stable when they need it to be a bit more stable, right? Absolutely.

So regulating a problem So you go two-choice decision-making to increasing the number of choices, for example, you know, so essentially changing the affordances in the landscape. That's what teachers and coaches can do. You can narrow it down or you can open it up. There are more invitations that face them. Exactly. That's a really good point.

Brilliant. Thank you, Keith. I mean, this is fabulous. Exactly what I was hoping to really— I mean, it's been quite heavy at points. I think, but I think it's such important stuff, and I'm so appreciate the work you've been doing, as you said, for a long time now. And I think there's so much we can learn from all of the incredible stuff. As you said, standing on the shoulders of giants, but you know, you've made a huge contribution there as well. So I so appreciate it. Thank you so much.

Yeah. Oh, thank you. No worries, Tim Logan. And I must say that one of the things that absolutely delights me is to see the impact that our research has made. So it's gone way beyond outside the sports domain and into, for example, education of maths and science concepts, military training, police enforcement training, working with neurodiversified populations. And to see that is just wonderful for me. Honestly, it's fabulous.

Love it. Oh, amazing. Thank you so much.

Okay, pleasure, Tim Logan.

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