ABSTRACT
In this chapter I present a practical example of Positive Pedagogy for coaching by recounting my own experiences of coaching croquet to older athletes in a croquet workshop. In this example I wanted to encourage the athletes to learn to use intrinsic feedback as a way of discovering the best stance and grip for playing a wide range of strokes. The example draws on my experience of coaching a group of twenty athletes in their sixties and seventies at a regional croquet workshop delivered at a New Zealand croquet club to focus on the most basic aspect of croquet, which is hitting a ball cleanly. While the tactical nuances of croquet, and golf croquet, are typically developed over a series of episodes of experience, reflection and experimentation, by far the most critical and rarely mastered aspect of the game is the simple ability to strike a ball cleanly and with moderate power (McCullough and Mulliner, 1987). Tactical training in croquet has long been delivered through lectures and lessons learned through errors during match play but, more recently, approaches using Game Sense have been used to provide game-like experiences to facilitate both technical and tactical learning (Clarke, 2016). Technical coaching in croquet is almost exclusively delivered through a demonstrate-andreplicate pedagogy where the individual aspects of coaching tend to be correctional with a focus on what is done incorrectly and fixing mistakes. The Positive Pedagogy approach generates dialogue within the player, between players, and between the player and coach. This encourages curiosity about players’ own technique with the focus clearly placed on what is done well and, perhaps most critically, building on the existing skills and knowledge of the player. The literature in GBA confirms the capacity of this pedagogy to generate positive
outcomes such as positive affective experience (see Harvey et al., 2009), improving relationships (Chen and Light, 2006) and developing tactical knowledge (Bohler, 2009). Positive Pedagogy is an extension of the pedagogical features of Game Sense (Light, 2013a) and TGfU (Teaching Games for Understanding, Bunker and
Thorpe, 1982), developed to include individual sports, that appears to work with children and young people as suggested by the limited literature on it (see Light and Kentel, 2015; Light, 2014a). However, there is little literature on its application to older athletes. As I illustrate here, it is also an ideal pedagogy for teaching older athletes as a
group that has been largely ignored in the GBA literature and has received limited attention in the broader literature on sport coaching.
