CLA or NLP? How are they related?

Question:

Which is the bigger "umbrella"? NLP or CLA? How are they related?

My personal thoughts and response:

Both CLA and NLP are underpinned by the same theories. Both emphasises the importance of ensuring that the learner is always situated within the environment, where both the information and movement are always coupled, and never separated. NLP aims to establish a set of pedagogical principles to account for the nonlinearity in learning through 3 pedagogical channels i.e. practice, instruction and feedback. The design principles in NLP are: Constraints manipulation, Task simplification, Representativeness, Functional variability & Attentional focus. NLP presents information and ideas on how practices can be organised and structured, as well as how best to deliver and provide instructional information during PE lessons or coaching sessions. In other words, NLP covers all 4 teaching processes in our STP i.e. lesson preparation, lesson enactment, positive classroom culture and assessment & feedback.

On the other hand, CLA provides a methodology for teachers and coaches to identify, select and manipulate key constraints in an individualized approach, capturing the concept of self-organisation, affordances and interactive nature of the emergence of goal-directed behaviours. In a CLA, the 4 environment design principles are: Session intention, Constrain to afford, Representative learning design & Repetition without repetition. As one would have noticed by now, the principles are largely pertaining to lesson preparation, and some aspects of lesson enactment. What is critically missing is the part on assessment and feedback. In a CLA, one would not know what to say, or what not to say when they wish to intervene to support the students’ learning further. But with these principles in mind, teachers and coaches will be able to design more effective learning tasks that will bring about highly adaptable and flexible movers.

Where constraints manipulation is concerned, CLA foregrounds the importance of constraining to invite and encourage a range of affordances (opportunities for action), aligned to the session intention. There are times where we may want to keep the movement problem very open, allowing for a wide range of affordances. There will also be times where we want to narrow down the landscape of affordances so that the exploration process is a little more targeted. It is not a simple matter of putting in constraints to make the task easier or more difficult, but rather, it is about excluding certain movement solutions (by determining the exploration boundaries) and at the same time, encouraging and inviting certain types of movement solutions to solve a given movement problem at hand. In short, a CLA is a methodology which can be used (but not the only one) in a NLP to design learning environments that are individually relevant for each learner in a PE and sport programme.

Personally, I will say that CLA is at the heart of NLP. But even then, it is still possible to remain largely linear in your overall pedagogy if you are not aware of how your existing instructions and feedback can be more nonlinear (that’s what I was doing until more recently). Similarly, jumping on the NLP bandwagon without paying attention on the environment design principles as advocated by a CLA may result in teachers designing learning tasks which incorporates random variability which may not exactly help with the exploration process. I have seen NLP lessons where the teachers throw in a huge number of varied equipment to get the learners to explore throwing and catching skills, ranging from balls, projectiles, flying disc, etc. If not carefully considered, learners may be lost in that exploration process, not sure what to explore, how to explore, resulting in a learning process that may not be as optimal as it could be.

To conclude, I am not sure if there is anyone out there who went through the same journey as me. My journey with CLA went back to 7 years ago before I eventually got more interested with NLP only more recently. I started reading up on NLP only about 4 years back when I joined NIE. So for me personally, if anyone wants to be effective in enacting the NLP principles, there is a need to really learn both. NLP alone may not be fully sufficient. Likewise, understanding CLA alone will also be incomplete. I see NLP and CLA complementing each other, alone it will always feel incomplete. Thus, while NLP covers a larger aspect of teaching and learning, I won’t exactly describe NLP as the bigger umbrella as there are certain things in CLA which is not exactly featured in NLP explicitly. And most certainly, you can do NLP with zero knowledge of CLA as well. In actual fact, there are other alternatives out there. You can read up on other approaches for example Differential Learning. There is also a book on the Ecological Dynamics approach. But if given a choice between NLP and CLA, my personal take is to learn to do CLA well first, and NLP can come in later to further refine your existing practices. With that, I’ll share with you some data to illustrate the degree of nonlinearity of my lessons at NIE back in 2021 so that you can see how varied the degree of linear and nonlinearity back then in my lessons when teaching floorball and hockey at NIE.