Running is something that I had taken part in before, mainly on cross country runs at school; an activity I would always finish last on. I also ran two half marathons in 2019; I always think it’s best to try things twice to make sure it’s not a fluke the first time – it wasn’t a fluke, running is the worst. After my second half marathon, I decided enough was enough – I will never run again. It’s a boring experience. I’m slow and therefore not that good at it. The universe had other plans. During the first lockdowns of the covid-19 pandemic, along with so many others, I decided to start running as my mandated hour of physical activity to break the monotony of our individually collective experience.

On these runs I used the Nike run club app to primarily log my running, but after using the app for a little while, I found the guided runs section. This is essentially an over-enthusiastic running coach, shouting in my ear the entire time to run further and run faster, I thought to myself. I vowed to give it a try, despite my pre-conception. Little did I know that this would be the most profound experience I could ever hope to have running around my local area, with just me, some earphones, and my thoughts to keep me going.

It was an odd experience to have, the guided run had no idea what I was looking at, where I was going, what I was feeling; yet Coach Bennett (Nike running, global head coach) spoke to me as an individual and through some simple techniques, got me to think about running in an entirely new way. Coach Bennett was in an entirely different country, came from entirely different experiences to my own, I hadn’t even seen his face before, yet was still able to get me running happier and running smarter. One of the first guided runs I completed was a run where Bennett just asked me questions all the way round my twenty-minute route.  These questions were not all about running, most of them were about how I was feeling, what had I done before starting this run, how difficult it was to start the run – yet through these questions I had to think more about running. Coach Bennett has lots of catchphrases, as you would expect from any enthusiastic coach, but one that stuck with me was ‘this is about running, but it isn’t about running’, highlighting the holistic nature of performance.

This amazing experience led me to think about how I could use this in my own practice as an adult education teacher. It struck me, that my experience of and thoughts on running before finding the Nike run club, were a lot like how an adult learner might view education and learning; they dread the thought of it, haven’t previously been very good at it, do it because they must. So, after trying it, decide it isn’t for them. Learner motivation is a complex issue in the further education sector, and one where there is a vast cannon of literature. Maybe the solution to learner motivation could be found in coaching practices.

In the same way that a good coach knows that for the athlete to perform at higher levels, their wider needs need to be catered for; a good teacher knows that for a learner to make progression in their learning, their wider needs need to be catered for. This idea isn’t new to us, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is a key theory used in both pedagogy, andragogy, and coaching theory (Maslow, 1943). However, within coaching and sport, there is a recognition that instead of just meeting the essentials, there needs to be quality to the wider needs. But it’s not just performance sport that has developed this trend, you may have noticed gym memberships offering nutrition plans and advice, sportswear companies promoting wellbeing advice, fitness influencers promoting work/life balance. These industries recognise that for someone to succeed they need a wider hollisic set of support mechanisms. It’s not that in further education we don’t do these things, it’s that other industries are doing better, and it’s time to catch up.

We could also extend this analogy beyond the development of a holistic approach to consider the practice of teaching and learning. If you go to a gym, you will see many people, lifting, pushing, pulling and throwing things many times over and over. In the gym this is called a rep, meaning repetition. In education, Cognitive Load Theory has demonstrated the need for information to be repeated several times, in different modalities, before it is committed to long term memory (Sweller, 1988). Gym goers will divide their gym sessions into sets of activities, made up of these reps. They recognise that to build muscle, lots of different activities are needed that work the same muscle group but in different ways. They will then record their progress toward a pre-planned training plan and reflect on how it felt. This connection to feelings is important for an athlete, as this lets them know that they have not only made progress but how far they can push themselves next time. Then they will come back tomorrow and do it all again, progressively making the exercise harder as their strength increases.

From this we can develop a different way of thinking about learning, shifting our mindset as teachers to become coaches, turning our learners into athletes. With our athletes partaking in workouts instead of lessons, building training plans rather than schemes of work that focus on how the athlete will make progress not just what they will learn. Every workout has sets, every set has reps – repeated episodes of learning. We often give learners a piece of information once and expect them to remember it. Imagine telling an Olympic athlete to do a sport once and then expect them win a gold medal – it probably wouldn’t work too well.

Would you try this out with me? Turn your classroom into a gym and create a training plan for your learners based on repetitions and sets of different learning activities. Let us know how it goes, and what you learn from doing it.

References

Maslow, A. H., 1943. A theory of Human Motivation. Psychological review , 50(4), pp. 370-396.

Sweller, J., 1988. Cognitive load during problem solving: effects on learning. Cognitive Science, Issue 12, pp. 257-285.