The pedagogical exchange encompasses all actions a coach undertakes with the aim of helping the player acquire the necessary competencies to play football. This includes activities conducted before, during, and after training:
The design of training contexts, verbal intervention, and the coach’s non-verbal communication. All of these, combined, can become a training approach that helps the player develop the technical, decision-making, psychological, and conditional capacities necessary to play according to the agreed game model. The pedagogical exchange is one of the three pathways in our training program.
The ForeFront Football training program.
The pedagogical exchange, as its name suggests, is not unidirectional: the player also proposes actions according to their needs, empowering them, making them a participant and co-responsible for their learning. As a counter-cultural approach, it must be viewed as a process where the player gradually integrates into this proposal, always knowing their starting point and deepening their understanding according to their interest, capacity, or developmental age.
Understanding training in this way yields a highly valuable outcome: the coach gains insight into the player’s needs and their natural motor actions, as the coach’s modus operandi involves observation and dialogue. This makes the training process more significant and transferable as the weeks progress.
This is only possible if the coach operates within a Level 3 or 4 design and intervention style.
You can learn about the specific characteristics of each level in the interactive resource of our training program, which you will find below by clicking on the level titles.
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The higher the level, the more degrees of freedom the player will have in the proposed Preferential Simulating Situation (SSP), which has implications for their creativity and the emergence of action possibilities. Both levels should not be discordant within the same SSP: For example, designing an SSP using Level 4, which offers maximum player autonomy, and guiding it through model corrections, corresponding to Level 1, will cause a distortion between the motor behavior the player performs due to the constraints used and the message received from the coach to achieve the task’s objective. This incongruence can be exacerbated by interactions made by the coach before the SSP, if they were focused on exploration and the search for the most appropriate actions to perform the SSP, rather than a closed proposal of pre-configured actions by the coach.
Furthermore, higher levels align with what pedagogy and neuroscience applied to learning advocate: long-term processes where the player is the protagonist, whereas Levels 1 and 2 aim to achieve short-term performance by leveraging the respect and consideration players have for the coach and their imposed game model, but which is rarely sustainable in the long term.
Therefore, to excel in coaching, we believe it is necessary for the coach to question at what level of design and intervention style they believe their game proposal should be practiced, and what role the player plays in this process—whether passive and executing, or proactive and propositional. At lower levels, reproducing tasks found in books, the internet, or from colleagues makes some sense, as there is a technical-centric view, but at player-centered levels like 3 and 4, the task is contextual to the players and is only one part of the whole, the SSP.
The emergence of player actions is due to multiple factors.
As can be seen in the image above, task design is one of the factors affecting the emergence of player action, framed within environmental “information sources,” or even “sports equipment” or “playing field.”
With pedagogical exchange at higher levels, the aim is to include other factors in the player optimization process, especially those shown in the image as being produced by internal constraints.
