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"Learning is what we do when we don't know what to do" - Guy Claxton
Ministry of Football believes in letting players set their own limits on what they want to achieve and how good they can become. We recognise that it may take many mistakes before a player achieves success, and we encourage all players to experiment with different solutions in order to find answers that they are comfortable with.
Many other coaching programmes teach players text-book packaged techniques, and restrict the players to using only these solutions to problems they face in games. On these programmes, coaches provide constant information to their players on what to do next (Push up! Pass! Shoot! etc). In doing this, they produce players who are dependant on the coach, and whose level of development cannot surpass that of the coach who is instructing them.
Ministry of Football does not believe in restricting players to a set of particular answers. We do not scream instructions at the players (they can’t hear us anyway because of the music!). And we do not tell players off for making mistakes, for taking risks, or for trying new things. We want to help to produce players who are better than we are, players who take the game beyond its current limits, we want to be amazed by what our players can do.
"Practising in the narrow sense of repitition makes skills more reliable, but not necessarily more efficient and more adaptable. Once we are able consistently to 'get it right', it may be worth trying out different ways of getting it wrong, to see what happens. There are two reasons why this is a good idea.
First, such a precautionary move may anticipate problems that could occur during the 'real-life' execution of the skill. and develop ways of meeting them. Having secured the ability to build a tower of blocks, young children learn more by seeing how insecure they can make it before it topples over. When they are in 'practising mode' the collapse of the tower signals failure, and may cause distress. When they are in 'playing mode' a similar event may be construed as interesting and informative, and even greeted with glee rather than frustration.
The second function of play has to do with the way know-how is stored in the mind. Children have an innate tendancy to seek greater flexibility and coherence within what they have already learned. After they have achieved adequate mastery they will go on through play to explore and even undo what they have just learnt, searching for anything that links this new ability with other pockets of expertise within the brainscape. Children spontaneously indulge in a kind of 'learning beyond success', in which the mind rewrites what it has learnt, segmenting out and rendering explicit concepts and skills that are common to different domains of expertise.
One might say that in general, this is the difference between proficiency and virtuosity: The expert has achieved a level of mastery that permits playfulness - the ability to respond, or even to 'break the rules', while staying within the domain. A Picasso or a Pele are able to do things with brush or ball that the journeyman artist or footballer can neither concieve ot nor carry off."
- from Wise Up: Learning to Live the Learning Life by Guy Claxton. Click here for more on Guy Claxton.
We believe that children will learn to play football by playing football. Our sessions do not include queues, or boring drills, or lengthy demonstrations or lectures. We maximise the amount of time the children spend playing by creating an intense atmosphere and using activities that contain elements of game-related decision-making.
"A great pianist doesn’t run around the piano or do push-ups with the tops of his fingers. To be great, he plays the piano."
– Jose Mourinho
Click here to read about our research into Active Learning time on the MoF programme.
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