A gymnastics coaches’ professional development program: exploring a needs-focused social learning space
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Background: Learning is a social, situational process. Effective coaches consistently apply situationally appropriate coaching knowledge to improve athletes’ developmental outcomes. Learning experiences should be cognizant of coaches’ learning needs and capacity to apply knowledge to facilitate athletes’ holistic development. This involves meaningful learning experiences tailored to coaches’ contextual learning needs. The use of social learning theory in supporting coach learning and development has been recommended in providing meaningful learning environments closer to coaches’ realities.Purpose: This study explored the impact of a professional development program designed to create a social learning space (SLS) for competitive youth artistic gymnastics coaches and evaluate the value created therein. Specifically, the purpose of this study was to explore the extent to which coaches generated a SLS and the value the coaches created through their participation in the program.Methods: Six coaches joined a weekly gathering over five weeks. Data comprised transcribed video records of the gatherings, a focus group with the coaches, a semi-structured interview with the facilitator of the gatherings, and the researcher’s notes. Thematic analysis was employed to inductively analyze the creation of the SLS and deductively analyze the value created using the value creation framework (the VCF).Findings: The findings revealed that facilitating a learning opportunity based on SLS elements can result in coaches creating a SLS. Through building productive relationships to learn to make a difference in their practices, the coaches created value. Specifically, the coaches broadened their perspectives on athlete development, deepened their understanding of gymnasts’ developmental needs, and began to transform some of their current coaching practices.Conclusion: This study demonstrates the promotion of a professional development program focusing on coaches’ learning needs using the elements of SLS and the tenets of the constructivist view of learning. The SLS structure of this study has implications for the development and implementation of professional development programs for coaches. Future studies on designing professional development opportunities for coaches should expand on the different uses of the SLS approach as a more pervasive structure of social learning, drawing on complementary principles with theories and adopting a longitudinal perspective.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".