The Constraints Led Approach
Or how to build balance bikes for first responder training
Just like with the balance bike, we can apply the EcoD principles to training first responders using the Constraints-Led Approach (CLA).
CLA is about designing practice environments where critical skills emerge by shaping the environment and task. Instead of giving rigid instructions or using decomposed tasks (like the exercise bike in the last post), you create situations where the necessary skills arise through interacting with the environment. This makes learning more adaptive, dynamic, and ultimately more like the real thing (it’s also more fun).
The Constraints-Led Approach in Practice
The CLA synthesizes EcoD theory into a practical learning design. The trainer designs activities that focus the learners on key aspects of the skill that is being developed. The limitations that are placed on the activity are called constraints. They take away (constrain) options. The activity then allows the learner to explore the environment and discover opportunities for action (affordances).
Here are the core CLA components according to Renshaw, Davids, Newcombe, and Roberts (I highly recommend picking up their book if you are interested in this topic):
1. Intention: Every practice starts with intention. What’s the goal? Setting this intention keeps learning focused and informs the learners about what they’re trying to achieve. Having a clear intention is what activates the learner’s powerful self-organizational machinery. We want to take maximum advantage of this machinery.
2. Constrain to Afford: With countless variables involved in any skill, simply saying “go arrest that suspect” or “go play soccer” won’t work. Constraints simplify the task into something manageable, focusing the learner on core opportunities for action (affordances). As learners progress, constraints relax. It’s the trainer’s job to guide this exploration, helping learners to discover what to do, when, and why.
There are three types of constraints that affect behavior:
Personal Constraints: These include the learner's physical and mental characteristics. These can change over time, like increasing strength with weight training. Making people do something when they are already tired is a personal constraint.
Environmental Constraints: This could mean changing the playing surface, altering lighting, or adjusting cultural expectations in training. Doing scenario based training in different buildings is an example of varying environmental constraints.
Task Constraints: Trainers usually have the most flexibility here—altering rules, goals, equipment, or the structure of a task to highlight the affordances relevant to the skill. Using an balance bike instead of a real bike is an equipment-based task constraint. Adding a time limit is also a task-based constraint.
3. Representative Learning Design: Practice (usually) should resemble the actual performance environment. It doesn’t have to be an exact match, but it should be close enough that skills are likely to transfer. Key elements of representative design include:
Task Degeneracy: There are multiple ways to achieve a goal.
Decision Making: The learner should make choices rather than being forced into a single solution.
Perception-Action Linkages: Practice should couple what learners perceive with how they act and the effects of their actions—these cannot be separated if you want transfer to occur.
Specifying Information: These are the cues (information) that you want the learner to pick-up to drive their decisions. They distinguish (specify) between options.
4. Repetition Without Repetition: In CLA, we avoid drilling the same movement repeatedly. Instead, learners pursue the same goals through varied means, adapting movements based on context. They repeat the outcome without much concern for the specific movements that were used. Coaches can alter constraints to introduce variability or guide the learner toward better solutions.
Examples
This link is to Greg Souders teaching Jiu Jitsu: Souders sets the intention, introduces a constrained game that focuses them on some aspect of the larger sport, and lets students figure out solutions without over-instructing. He is not teaching them how to do a specific technique and then correcting them.
The video below is an example of us using CLA to teach active shooter response in an undergraduate experiential class. The intention of this activity is for the students to learn how to apply the Security, Incident Command, and Medical (SIM) process that ALERRT teaches in active shooter training. The video shows the students after they have already practiced doing this by themselves. For those of you who don’t know, solo officers can’t do much other than choose a good place to stand in the room for Security, call out on the radio for Incident Command, and maybe give injured people instructions about how to control bleeding for Medical. Because there is not a lot to see, I decided to post this video which focuses on two-person SIM because there is more going on. The video starts after the first officer has made his initial radio call.
The situation is constrained in a lot of ways. Students start already in the room with the bad guy down. Only the bad guy is in the room (the aren’t any civilians or other unknowns). A second officer is coming down the hallway so they are also practicing linkups. We are only working the SIM process, nothing before or after.
The activity is representative in that it looks somewhat like what would happen in the real thing. There is more than one way for them to succeed, they have to make decisions about what to do, there are linkages between what they are doing and what happens, and there is specifying information that is like what they would see in the real thing.
You see a little repetition without repetition in the video. The student goes from the second arriving officer to the officer already in the room on her second repetition. We also have them repeat the task several times until they start to get it down. Additionally, we change the position of the bad guy or use a different room to add variation.
A couple of things to point out here. First notice that there is a lot of sloppiness. That is very common when you first start working in a particular area. Second, notice that I am letting them struggle through the situation. It’s very tempting to give them the answers, but the struggle provides better learning. Third, there are several ways to improve on the feedback in the situation. In general, its best when the situation provides it’s own feedback. Instead of me talking to the students about providing effective cover, it would have been better if the bad guy had simply come back to life. Then the students would immediately see the problem in a way they are not likely to forget. This creates tighter perception-action linkages.
Once the students are doing well at this task, we would change it. An obvious next place to go would be to add an injured person in the room so that the students had to address that problem as well. We could also add uninjured people in the room. I am sure you can think of lots of other variations too. It all depends on what problems you want the students to work on solving. You can also start working on connecting this to other parts of the response by going forward or backward from the situation. You could backup to the officer being in the hall and having just shot the bad guy so that now they have to work their way into the room. You could start working on getting the bad guy out of the building if you wanted to go forward. The CLA is really only limited by your creativity.
Breaking Away from Exercise Bike Training
The days of exercise bike training—where isolated actions are drilled without context—should be behind us. Many of us know this in our guts (and the research supports that feeling). We should be moving toward a future where every training session is designed with representative challenges that mirror the complexities of real life. The Constraints-Led Approach gives us a framework to get there, creating professionals who don’t just know what to do, but also know how, when, and why. That’s the kind of skill development that has the best chance to saves lives and ensure officers are ready for reality.