“Wipe clean” and whole-part-whole — bringing the two concepts together?

In his recent ECB podcast, Pete Sturgess talked about learning design in session planning and mentioned the “wipe clean activity”, a (short) distraction between the introduction of a new skill or technique and further consolidation.

A new one, on me, but perhaps it could be combined with whole-part-whole.

Within the educational theory of spaced or distributed learning, it is postulated that newly acquired knowledge can be promoted from short-term memory (something that might just have been learnt) to long-term memory (more likely to be retained) by interspersing periods of short, intense learning with activities to distract from the initial theme before quickly revisiting that main theme again.

What might that look like for coaching session design?

Perhaps by dropping a short, sharp fielding practice into the session as a distraction.

So “whole-part-whole” (game to identify a skill to be developed; a more traditional skills practice; game to test the newly coached skill in context) becomes “whole-part-distraction-whole”.