For our final placement block, we were asked to teach year 4 samba dancing. Before the first session, I was worried as I’d never coached dance before. For the first session we planned to put on a video of a dance routine and pause it after every one or two moves for the children to practice the moves, if they didn’t understand a move we would demonstrate.
My main concern was that some of the participants may not want to join in, however when we put the video on, everyone watched it and copied the moves like we asked them to. This surprised me so I looked at some theories surrounding why they enjoyed the session so much.
First, I looked at self-determination theory (Deci & Ryan, 2000). This states that participants need autonomy, competence and relatedness to be determined to complete a task. They had autonomy because we weren’t giving them instructions; they simply had to watch the video and then they chose to copy the moves they saw. The competence came because of the video we chose. Most of the participants were beginners, so we chose a simple video for them to copy, this meant they could all complete the moves and gain the feeling of competence. Relatedness was obtained through the whole group attempting the dance together, so no one had to be embarrassed.
I also looked into achievement goal theory (Dweck, 1986). This states that if participants are able to do something, they feel competent and enjoy the experience and therefore are motivated to do it again. This relates to our session as the participants were able to do the parts of the video they were shown. This led to them feeling competent and therefore enjoying the experience of dancing, because of this they were then motivated to try the next move we showed them. This continued through the whole routine and the class seemed to really enjoy the session.
References:
Dweck, C. S. (1986) ‘Motivational processes affecting learning’, American Psychologist. (Psychological Science and Education), 41(10), pp. 1040–1048.
Ryan, R. M. and Deci, E. L. (2000) ‘Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being’, The American Psychologist, (1). Available at: http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/login.aspx?direct=true&db=edsbig&AN=edsbig.A63492306&site=eds-live&scope=site (Accessed: 10 December 2019).
Nathan Westwell - Coaching Blog 