when we learn something often has a relationship with something else we've learned or we're going to learn right we kind of learn things in a sequence in an order and some things are kind of similar some things are kind of different well the transfer of skills theory suggests the relationship between these and i've pre-populated a bit and i really want to focus here because i want to talk about the concept of positive transfer this is what we want in our coaching and teaching environments why because it suggests that if done correctly the learning of a skill can aid or we might say facilitate improve the learning of another so think about your sports coaches think about your pt just think about maybe some coaching you do yourself if you can sort of coach one thing and has a positive influence on the learning of something else that's great right i'll come back to this point about proactive and retroactive due course so the question i want to ask is then how do we cause this to happen so how do we cause positive transfer to happen how do we make the learning of one skill help the learning of other skills so here's a couple of things first of all we want to practice in game related environment okay and what i mean by that is if you are a hockey player you really want as much of that hockey experience exposure and coaching to be very close to what you're going to do in kind of match situations doesn't need to be a match but that's important the coach also needs to point out similarities between skills so if a hockey coach is teaching under hitting skill for example they might point out how it's similar but maybe also different to something like the slapping technique what about for example the coach might teach similar skills together actually drawing what the overlap is into their core coaching practice so for example if we're a badminton coach and we're teaching an overhead clear we might also quite close to that link to a smash which has a lot of similarities not least the footwork so that's an interesting one we also want to make sure that previous skills previous skills are and we use a specific subject term here over learned and what i mean by that is that if we are sort of following white loosely called a mastery model positive transfer is more likely because what's been done before is learned properly so let's put that in a mastery model of learning we move on from things when we truly truly grasp them now interesting we don't do this very much in sport we tend to find this kind of model much more common in music let's say learning to play the piano say we also don't tend to do in schools interestingly either which i'll come back to perhaps on another occasion we also want to use positive reinforcement so if we see an athlete who is transferring their capacity to let's say a positive reform reinforcement for transfer so if we are working for the first time with the tennis player who's playing badminton and we see that their kind of tennis serve is transferring effectively into that badminton smash we can highlight that we also want to make sure that we teach fundamentals first okay so we don't want to be rushing young athletes to really high level macro learning until they've really got got got that finally we also want to use progressive practices so we don't do something that's very difficult to begin with we do it gradually we in we introduce it now this might be useful to you when you come to your sort of coursework considerations but progressive practice now i'm going to put one more point into here and then i want to come back to this proactive retroactive point we can also as a coach point out similar information processing now similar information processing skills now i'll give you an example of this i often go to like um uh wrecking sports this kind of lesson but i know for example in tennis the ideal point at which to hit the ball is trajectory on a ground stroke is as the ball begins to fall again after the balance it rises then it begins to fall again and it's then we hit it whereas it's something like table tennis we are actually what we're able to do there is we're actually to strike the ball at the peak of its bounce that's the whole idea of table tennis right so if we stress that we want the student the learner to process that information and focus specifically on that point in whichever sport happens to be in the two that could be a really convenient thing now i said about proactive and retroactive what do we mean by this so let's assume we've got positive transfer we've taught it well we've linked the skills together we've put it out similarities etc etc all the core skills were overland well what this could mean is if it's proactive that good learning could help a skill we learn tomorrow in the future if it's retroactive that new learning from today will actually aid a skill that we've previously learned in the past and we can apply it back to that skill that's what we mean by proactive and retroactive more of which in a second now negative transfer is exactly the opposite learning of one skill inhibits or worsens the learning of another so we want to negative transfer so the question therefore is how how do we prevent negative transfer and this is what i want you to be thinking about the coach could draw attention to differences okay so if two skills are very similar and could be confused the coach needs to state what the differences are we need to make sure that there's thorough learning before we move athletes on okay before progress now that is no different to me talking to you about that mastery model from earlier on they must learn it sorry before they move on therefore let me shove in here mastery model exactly the same point i made a few moments ago we also want our teachers to teach in clear steps now this is so important to the on our coaches of course as well this is so important to the coaching process teaching clear steps that show the progression that's where those progressive practices come in really usefully not too much at once so gradual steps not too much at once otherwise that sort of excessive information can lead to poor transfer of poor technique we also want to avoid confusion okay so we might avoid teaching or coaching confusing or very very similar skills close together and we also want to take part in what we call near transfer now this is exactly what i referred to before as practice like the competition practice like the game that is near transfer now to finish this tutorial off we've looked at positive and negative oh by the way sorry i should have stressed there of course negative can either be proactive or retroactive so for example if i learn a skill today which actually limits my capacity to learn something tomorrow properly that's a proactive negative transfer if i learn something today that worsens the skill i learned yesterday in the past that's a retroactive transfer now what i want to finish off with as i said a moment ago is i just want to detail three additional types of transfer two of which we've looked at already we've got the concept of bilateral transfer now bilateral transfer is a very very simple concept it's when we transfer a skill from one uh from one side of the body to the other so for example i've played a lot of football in my life for example of the body of the body let me start again here that's meant to say two when i wrote f to the other so i'm a right-footed football player and it can be that i can transfer the skills i've got on my right foot and try to attempt those to be successful on my left foot and of course footballers do this all the time with greater or less success but you'll notice very clearly a performer who is two-footed or for example it's quite rare but a tennis player who can strike with both right and left arm that's really unusual i've seen occasionally a top level tennis player will switch their hand uh you see a little bit in snooker with players sometimes playing left and right-handed when they tend to play the other way around um i can play for i play a lot of table tennis i can play table tennis left-handed for example i haven't really practiced it but i can do it because i can transfer that skill from the other side and i also want to reiterate the points about proactive and retroactive transfer and let me let's just be absolutely clear about what these mean proactive transfer is when learning influences it influences learning of a new skill in the future learning of a new skill in the future let's say tomorrow so if i do something today that supports my learning of something new tomorrow that's a proactive transfer whereas in exactly the same way by the way it could be a facilitating or inhibiting but in the same way just to reiterate that point our retroactive transfer this is exactly the opposite of that right it influences for good or bad it influences learning of a skill that has been learned in the past and of course it can be positive or negative right that has been learned in the past oh you must get sick of watching me right so there we go learned in the past that's what we mean by retroactive so we've got five types of transfer all of which can overlap so for example you could have a positive bilateral retroactive transfer you know that is something that could exist these are not mutually exclusive of course i hope that's helpful oh sorry before we finish can i just stress the the sort of big marks here offer how you would prevent negative transfer and how you would cause positive transfer that's quite likely to be where the bigger marks for this particular topic area are going to fall thank you