Cue Words for Learning Styles

Just a short post as I am wrapping up my summer vacation today. A few months ago, I read The Sports Coach as Educator; Re-conceptualising Sport Coaching and discovered in it, a wonderful nugget of info that I instantly started to use in my coaching.

As we all know, every athlete learns in their own way–a personalized mix of visual, auditory and kinesthetic learning. In Chapter 4 of the Sports Coach as Educator, Paul Potrac and Tania Cassidy advocate guiding athletes to learning by using the following cue words that focus their attention:

• For visual learners, coaches can use words such as: ‘see,’ ‘watch,’ ‘look,’ ‘picture this,’ and ‘focus’
• For auditory learners, coaches can use words such as: ‘hear,’ ‘listen to the beat’ and ‘identify the rythym’
• For kinesthetic learners, coaches can use words such as: ‘feel,’ ‘move,’ ‘demonstrate,’ and ‘practice’

While in most sport practice settings, the set-up of learning stations for each learning style or combo of is mostly impractical, adaptation of learning cue words described above could be a way to accomondate different learning styles on your teams.