Experiential Learning
Play Practice Play, the methodology we explore through the Grassroots class, is built on Experiential Learning.
What is that?
Short version: people learn from doing a thing and then making sense of what happened. Not from being told about the thing and then doing it.
If you've read The Balance Bike Theory, you've already met experiential learning. You just didn't have a name for it. Nobody sits a three-year-old down and explains the physics of counter-steering. You take the pedals off, you let them fall over a few times, and their body works it out. Then one day you put the pedals back on and they ride away.
That's the whole idea. The falling over isn't a failure of the method. The falling over IS the method.
The four stages
Strip the academic language off it and the cycle is four steps.
You do the thing.
You notice what happened.
You work out the rule.
You try the rule again.
That's it. In the textbooks this is Kolb's cycle and the stages have longer names — concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, active experimentation. You do not need those words on a Tuesday night in the rain. But you do need to know that it's a cycle, and that it only works if all four happen.
Skip step 1 and there's nothing to reflect on. Skip step 2 and it was just exercise. Skip step 3 and it doesn't transfer to next week. Skip step 4 and you never find out if they got it.
Four stages. Break one, break the whole thing.
Now look at Play-Practice-Play again
Here's the part that took me a while to see.
Play-Practice-Play isn't a session format that happens to be popular. It's the experiential learning cycle laid out on grass, in order.
First Play = they do the thing. Small-sided, 2v2 or 3v3 or 4v4, players arrive and play. You facilitate. You don't explain the topic. And this is the bit coaches find hardest — you WANT them to meet the problem before you name it. If tonight is about SUPPORT, you want to watch them lose the ball because nobody supported. That failure is not wasted time. It's the raw material for everything that follows.
Practice = they notice, and they work out the rule. This is where the middle two stages live, and it's why Practice is the phase that needs you most. Your questions do the noticing. Your key word does the rule. Activities of appropriate challenge, game-like, with repetition — but the coaching inside them is inquiry, not instruction.
Second Play = they try it. Full format, no interruption, you go quiet and you watch. This is not a reward at the end of practice. It's the assessment. It's the only honest evidence you'll get about whether anything you did in the middle worked.
Same four stages. Same order. Every session.
And then the cycle turns again next week, because what you see in the Second Play is the concrete experience that tells you what the next session is about.
The four ways coaches break it
Almost every session that doesn't land has broken the cycle at one of the four stages. Here's what each break looks like.
Break 1 — You explain first.
The twelve-minute chalk talk before anyone touches a ball. Everyone huddled up, you're describing what SUPPORT means, they're cold and looking at the goal.
You've just told them the answer to a problem they haven't met yet. There's no concrete experience for it to attach to, so it attaches to nothing. It's an abstraction about an abstraction.
Let them fail at it first. Then the word means something.
Break 2 — You answer your own question.
"Jose, did you support there because you saw your teammate was about to lose it?"
He says yes. Of course he says yes. You just handed him the answer and asked him to agree with it.
Stage 2 is the player noticing what happened — not you telling him what happened. The moment you supply the observation, he stops observing. This is why hot and cold feedback has rules, and why the hardest one is sitting with his answer without correcting it.
Break 3 — You never name it.
Good session. Great energy. Players solved problems, made decisions, went home happy.
And on Saturday, none of it shows up.
That's a stage 3 failure. They had the experience and they noticed things, but nobody turned it into a portable rule. A rule needs a handle, and the handle is a word. SUPPORT. BREAK. SCAN. That's the entire reason a common language exists — not so you sound organised, but so the thing they worked out on Tuesday can be carried to Saturday in one syllable.
No word, no transfer.
Break 4 — You coach through the Second Play.
You've done everything right, and then the last game starts and you can't help yourself, and you spend twenty minutes shouting SUPPORT at them.
Now you'll never know. You've contaminated your own experiment. Did they support because they understood it, or because a large adult yelled it at them?
The silence in the Second Play isn't you being lazy or hands-off. It's the only way to get a clean reading.
If you want to reach for the freeze here — read the toolbox first, and then reach for something quieter.
So what is the coach actually for?
If the players are having the experience and drawing the conclusions, what's left for you?
Protecting the cycle.
You design the First Play so the problem shows up. You pick the constraint that makes it show up more often — the rule you add is the game you get. You ask the questions that make them notice. You give them the word that makes it portable. And then you shut up and find out whether it worked.
That's a harder job than explaining things. It's also the one that actually changes players.
You are not the source of the learning. You're the conditions for it.
Task
Take your next session plan. Beside each part of it, write which stage it serves — do, notice, rule, or try.
If one of the four has nothing beside it, that's your session's weak point, and it's almost always the same one. Most of us are short on 'notice.'
Then run it, and afterwards write down one thing a player said that surprised you. If nothing surprised you, you were probably talking.
So. Play, Practice, Play. Not because it's the format on the course. Because it's how people have always learned anything — and somebody was smart enough to put it in the right order and give it a name.
@leedunnesoccer