Minerals 1

An article by Stephen Pritchard    No Comments

In Learning Nutrition parlance, “Minerals” as a nutrient equates to the idea of shifting control of and responsibility for learning to the learners themselves.

I’ve started to do this more in my junior badminton club sessions.  The age range for these sessions is 7-17 years.

I’ve begun to provide the whole group with a range of practices for the same skill early in the session.  These are demonstrated, and numbered in order of increasing difficulty.  Players are then charged with choosing which practices to work through.

Initially this led to players being more focused and being happy to work independently for longer periods of time than before.  It enabled me to sit back and interject where I felt I was needed.  However, I noticed that all players – irrespective of ability – chose to start at practice 1, perhaps in a quest for early success, before progressing from there.  As this is a new concept to them (and me), at least in this setting, I guess they are probably not yet adept enough at self-assessment of their ability.  It was pleasing to see though, after a period of time, that groups had progressed at different rates and had ultimately got to a reasonable level of challenge appropriate for them.