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For Dance team we would put on a kids clinic every year. We would teach them new dance skills and a routine that they got to perform at half time of a football game with us. It was so much fun but sometimes challenging to verbally describe to the kids what move we wanted them to do next. This was because verbal cues work better when a person is already familiar with a Generalized Motor Pattern. These kids were learning new coordination patterns so demonstration was an effective method to teach them. We taught them how to kick in a kick line which requires relative timing features, when to kick one foot and how fast to bring it back down to kick up the other one. With features like this having one Dance team member demonstrate helps the kids have a model of what the coordination pattern is supposed to look like. Then we would pick one kiddo to demonstrate the move we just demonstrated and provide feedback to them because they were giving an unskilled demonstration. Having one of the participants demonstrate the skill helped make it seem more achievable for the other kids. They also got to see how the kid demonstrating the skill tried to correct it based on our feedback, which also helped them feel like if they made an error they would be able to fix it too. It was always really fun trying to teach and help younger kids with something I grew up loving to do. Below is a picture from a Kids Clinic we did during basketball season. We stayed on the sides so the kids could show their parents what they learned but still reference us for a demonstration of the routine

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Would you like to use a fresh perks card?

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Would you like to use a fresh perks card?

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Since my sophomore year of high school I’ve worked as a cashier at a local grocery store. Now it may seem that this isn’t a physical job. For the most part that is correct, except for scanning and entering items is a very foreign motor skill at first. When I first started out I was in the cognitive phase and the store had me train on the computer. This was helpful because it allowed me to fully understand what to do and what makes a good cashier before actually working with customers. Then I went to a training register, which allowed me to apply strategies and figure out which ones work and which ones don’t. There were some days I was very good and other days I think I entered in two items per minute. After a while I entered the Associative stage of learning, at this point I was on a real register dealing with customers. The store put an experienced cashier with me in case something went really wrong or if I had questions. This helped because it allowed me to figure out the most effective strategies for me to use to be a good cashier. My performance was more consistent but I still found myself making errors if a loud noise distracted me or if the customer tried to carryout a long conversation. I started to be able to pick up my own errors but still often needed help to fix them. Now, after 4 years of cashiering I think it’s safe to say I’m often in the autonomous stage of learning to cashier. I don’t have to think about what I’m doing as much and can carry on a conversation with the customer. I can catch and fix almost all of my errors. Even now I think I drift between associative and autonomous because if something changes I can still get thrown off sometimes. Cashiering is so natural that trying to train someone how to cashier can be challenging. I don't have any picture of me cashiering but this is similar to the set up in my store.

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In middle school I started playing volleyball, it’s fair to say I wasn’t very good at it yet. I was a novice, along with most of my other teammates. My coach knew this and used practice variability accordingly. They started us off in block practice; we practiced one skill many times in a row, and then moved onto the next skill. This worked well when we were novices, as blocked practice is most beneficial for novices, but as we became more skilled this practice style was no longer beneficial. My coach then tried to introduce some variability to our practice and switched to a serial practice schedule. A serial practice schedule involves a series of tasks, for example we would do a bump, set, spike rotation, and repeat that multiple times. This serial style was more conducive to retention and transfer to a game setting. In a game it’s highly unlikely that I would need to do 25 bumps in a row, I need to be able to switch which GMPs quickly. The serial practice style gave more of this quick switching between skills and mimicked a game more. This also allows for comparing and contrasting the GMPs, which help strengthen the understanding of each skill, this is following the elaboration theory on why positive effects of contextual interference, introduced with serial practice, occur. I didn't have a picture of me playing volleyball but here is a player performing a bump, in block practice they would only practice a bump for a set number of trials. In serial practice she would follow this bump with a set, and then a spike and then repeat the series

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Looking back I remember competitions for dance team being so much fun. But if I really think I remember how many teams there were and how little practice space there was. We had one classroom for our whole team; this didn’t leave us a lot of space to practice actually doing the routines. One strategy I used was mental imagery to practice the routine. I would imagine myself doing the dance without actually moving my body. I would also listen to the music to imagine myself hitting all of the music cues. The neuromuscular theory attempts to explain why mental practice can be helpful. According to the neuromuscular theory when a person imagines a movement occurring EMG activity was measured in the muscle. While it wasn’t enough to form movement in the muscle it was enough to prime the muscle to move to complete the skill later. From personal experience I agree with this hypothesis because when I would mentally practice I would feel the muscle tighten that I was imagining moving. I know several of my teammates used mental practice before competitions too. It seemed to work because we did pretty well at competitions and never had anyone forget the routine. This is a picture after my team won second at a competition, I remembering practicing the routines in my head before performing which helped me feel confident when it was time to perform.

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Getting feedback is an important component in being on a dance team. We get feedback all the time, concurrent to our performance during practice, terminal to our competition performance from the judges, and we even give feedback to ourselves after watching videos. The concurrent feedback happens during practice, our coach will yell at us to fix something as we’re performing the routine. This has been proven to not be very effective and from personal experience it’s hard to remember what was yelled during a run through. The feedback given concurrently is also short and nondescript.  It’s difficult to accurately apply it to fix the error we made. The feedback we get after competitions about our performance is extremely important because that’s what gives us a place and possibly a trophy. We take this data, which is often more descriptive than the previously described concurrent feedback, and we dissect what the judge is talking about. We can go to that place in the routine and practice what they said we messed up on, and evaluate what is the best solution for the critique. We also have terminal feedback from ourselves about ourselves because before competitions we would record our routine and watch it back. We would make notes on what we need to improve and also let other teammates know if they need to fix anything. The terminal feedback was more helpful because it didn’t interfere with the task. Concurrent feedback runs the risk of becoming integrated in the task and possibly becoming dependent on it to perform the task. For our dance team the terminal feedback was the most important so we never relied on the concurrent feedback too much. Below is a picture of my team after a competition happy before we have to read the feedback from the judges.

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When you have to know three different routines perfectly, at the same time

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When you have to know three different routines perfectly, at the same time

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Being on dance team involved remembering a lot of dance routines. Learning them could be extremely overwhelming but our coach used some of the strategies we learned about in lecture to help us. Dance routines could really be considered serial skills, so a big part of serial skills is often verbal cues. Dance is typically done to music, so our coach would point out key spots in the music where the dance move at that particular moment went with whatever word was being said in the song. This helped because if you got off track and then heard that cue it could help us get back on track in the routine. She also emphasized location cues for our body positions. Dance teams get judged on consistency so it was important that all of our arm movements matched. Emphasis on location cues actually helps remember the movement better.  Our practices were also structured so that we learned new stuff at the beginning and end of practice and practiced what we had learned in previous practices in the middle. This is playing into the primary-recency effect in which things presented in the beginning and end of a practice are remembered best. The picture below is us all hitting a T it's important that the judges see this 'picture' in the routine and that we all remember to hit the T at the correct moment in the music.

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Three cheers for.... wait...what comes next?

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Three cheers for.... wait...what comes next?

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During my senior year of High school my two friends and I were all named co-captains of our Varsity Dance Team. One of the responsibilities we had was to teach the school song to all of the new team members. To us that seemed easy and a no brainer because we had only done school song 200+ times before so we ignored our coach’s advice to go over it together before we tried to teach it. We got to the practice when we were supposed to teach it, we demonstrated it once just fine and then it came time to teach it. All three of us blanked when we started to describe the moves. We stared at each other while also avoiding the “I told you so” look from our coach. We “choked” trying to teach the school song.  Our Coach told us to go over it that night and try to teach it tomorrow. We got together after practice to try to go through the moves together and the only way we could figure it out was to watch one of us do it while we wrote down the moves. Because we had done school song so many times the school song was stored in our procedural memory. School song had become automatic to us. To us trying to teach it forced us to really try and think about the moves, which uses declarative memory. Declarative memory can easily be verbalized and shared while procedural memory is difficult to articulate because it’s about how to do action and it’s often unconscious and automatic. We were trying to articulate something that was stored in procedural memory because we had done it so many times and couldn’t do it because we didn’t have the declarative memory of school song. The picture is of us three captains and how we felt when we choked in front of the team of new people we were supposed to be in charge of.

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I have been dancing since I was about 3 years old, and up until my freshman year of high school I had only ever done turns to the right. So when I walked into my first Dance team practice of freshman year and the coach asked us to do left turns after we had finished our right turns I thought she was crazy. I didn’t want to disappoint my new coach on the first day, so I gave them a try. I could actually do them, it took one or two tries but I actually wasn’t as bad as I thought I was going to be. This is due to bilateral transfer. Two theories, motor control factors and interhemispheric transfer of motor commands can explain bilateral transfer. The motor control factor theory claims that the generalized motor pattern is the same for both limbs and muscle selection is just a parameter of the GMP. So by working on my Turning GMP for so many years it was relatively strong, so I could use it to attempt to turn on my left. The interhemispheric transfer of motor commands theory claims that when the signal to turn went to the muscles required for a right turn, a sub threshold signal went to the muscles required to turn on the left. So when I went to turn on my left the muscles were familiar with the signal. The picture below shows my team and I mid-turn, priming our muscles and strengthening our GMP to turn on our other leg.