12-11-2011, 11:51 PM
This fascinating discussion continues. "Fixed" modes of thinking certainly won't get either naturally talented or naturally hard working players very far at all. Life's much more complex than that.
In education there are two (very) broad schools of thought about a child's learning: Piaget's view emphasises stages of intellectual development and relates these to age and physical and mental change; Bourdieu's view stresses that the child acts as a significant self-motivating actor in its own development in response to external stimuli.
The former leads to the idea that curricula should be carefully staged - e.g. Piaget-like thinkers often stress that, as chess is an essentially adult conceptual game, children aren't really likely to make significant headway in it until around about 12, when, they often assert, the ability to conceptualise only really begins to kick in. Bourdieu-like thinkers may not dissent from such Piaget-like thinking as a general prescription for learning (and the development of curricula ... and chess-training schemes) but stress that many (possibly very many) individual children have it in themselves to develop either much faster (or slower) than the mainstream.
Teachers (chess coaches) should be aware of such different schools of thought and ideally capable of cutting such intellectual Gordian knots faced with real pupils and the learning challenges they actually present. There is no definitive answer to what is "perfect" teaching (coaching). A good teacher (coach) simply gets on with it, develops pragmatic prescriptions, applies them flexibly and as intelligently as possible, given pupil responses ... and hopefully gets results.
Hope helpful ... I'm off to play some chess shortly ... I'm still learning!
In education there are two (very) broad schools of thought about a child's learning: Piaget's view emphasises stages of intellectual development and relates these to age and physical and mental change; Bourdieu's view stresses that the child acts as a significant self-motivating actor in its own development in response to external stimuli.
The former leads to the idea that curricula should be carefully staged - e.g. Piaget-like thinkers often stress that, as chess is an essentially adult conceptual game, children aren't really likely to make significant headway in it until around about 12, when, they often assert, the ability to conceptualise only really begins to kick in. Bourdieu-like thinkers may not dissent from such Piaget-like thinking as a general prescription for learning (and the development of curricula ... and chess-training schemes) but stress that many (possibly very many) individual children have it in themselves to develop either much faster (or slower) than the mainstream.
Teachers (chess coaches) should be aware of such different schools of thought and ideally capable of cutting such intellectual Gordian knots faced with real pupils and the learning challenges they actually present. There is no definitive answer to what is "perfect" teaching (coaching). A good teacher (coach) simply gets on with it, develops pragmatic prescriptions, applies them flexibly and as intelligently as possible, given pupil responses ... and hopefully gets results.
Hope helpful ... I'm off to play some chess shortly ... I'm still learning!