About
The Constraint Collective is “The home of skills and expertise for understanding constraints-led approaches in education, science, exercise and coaching.”
Our mission is to provide “a home for those interested in learning more about constraint-led approaches in education, science, exercise and coaching.”
We are noticing increased interest in the ideas of Ecological Dynamics and the Constraints Led Approach to coaching and we are continually fielding many requests from a wide range of people who had come across the key ideas and wanted to know more. Lots of the time, these inquiries are from practicing teachers, coaches, coach educators, sport scientists, S& C specialists and talent developers who are interested in applying the ideas in their work, but want to know more. Often these inquires come with the offer ‘to buy us a coffee’ to provide proximity to share ideas. Practically, simply finding the time to meet individuals has become almost impossible, especially in the current health situation. It also meant that only individuals in our locality could benefit from these conversations. We hope that the website can help us to maintain and broaden our engagement with more people.
Another reason we developed the website was that, while we were obviously pleased to see the ideas of the Constraints-Led Approach being taken up by practitioners, we also noticed that sometimes the key concepts were not being applied correctly with a tendency to misinterpret them. For example, we saw some practitioners taking concepts such as self-organisation to mean that there is no need to ‘coach’ and, therefore, simply ‘let the game be the teacher’. Other typical misapprehensions include seeing constraints as negative influences that limit skill development by over- or under-constraining practice tasks or that the concept of representative learning design means that coaching practice must always take place in full competition environments. We were also aware that many practitioners liked the main ideas but felt that they needed support because they felt that the ideas were too complex and difficult to understand. Our goal, by setting up the website, was to improve the communication of key concepts of the CLA, presenting them in a wide variety of ways that are meaningful to many practitioners working in different contexts.
We aim to build a community to share a range of online and off-line resources, provide opportunities to collaborate, discuss ideas and provide forums to advance CLA practice. We will provide contemporary commentaries with CLA links to current topics of interest in the news. We will help coaches connect and share ideas, providing examples of CLA practice in their own work. We will invite coaches to co-create knowledge and understanding of how to apply CLA. We will talk to researchers and get them to explain how practitioners can incorporate the key findings into their work. We will also be offering opportunities for you to take part in educational programmes as well as connecting with us to build your skill set or those who work with and for you. Over time, we will publish our own books, manuals and encourage others to become part of the project. We welcome connection from individuals, teams or organisations. We can tailor our work with you based on a flexible and adaptable approach to learning and development.
“As a group it is no exaggeration to say that we are connected to almost every significant player in this field across the world. Our connections cover academic institutions and sporting bodies and the science community across Europe, North and South America, Africa, Asia and Oceania. Our work is having increasing influence at all levels, ranging from junior sport, talent development programmes in professional sport to elite practice in national sporting programmes. We advise coaches across the world in individual and team sport. We publish with partners across the world and supervise Post Graduate Students, often in partnership with state and national sporting organisations across the world too.”
— Ian Renshaw
The Constraints Collective team is made up of Ian Renshaw, Keith Davids, Will Roberts and Danny Newcombe. The team have over 100 years of collective experience of teaching, researching, coaching and working with colleagues in bringing to life the ideas of ED and CLA. We have an extensive network of friends and colleagues who are working in this space and at times we will post invited contributions from our ‘associates’ working in the area.