As a teacher of Physical Education, being able to teach a game effectively is an obvious part of the job. The big question that dominates my professional thought processes is “What is effective teaching of a game?”. Do we want a student to replicate and mimic successful sports actions/movements and consider that effective? (I will use the word ‘Game’ and ‘Sport’ interchangeably at times). Or does good teaching allows the student to appreciate and adhere to that game even after the PE lesson is over? Contemporary education practices suggest that a deeper level of learning that goes further than just reproduction of actions is necessary. Personal understanding of the role of physical education in our lives tells me that skills learnt in PE classes need to embrace a part of the human psyche that allows a life-long contribution to that individual. It cannot be a once-off series of lessons in predetermined action movements that we require to meet our system’s short term objective.
Reinventing The Game (RtG) is about creating that environment of ‘reinvention’ for the students as they explore the Playability of games while they embark on the understanding journey to learning games.
In RtG, I explore ideas of Technical Concepts and Tactical Concepts. I look at games as a complex system and the solutions to solving problems in games (ie. learning in games) requiring complex system adaptation. Excellent work has been done in this areas by many and I find that pulling it all together is the work of us teachers. I once attended an international conference and sat in 3 concurrent sessions on learning. One was from a neuroscience perspective, the other from a cognitive learning specialist and the last from a pedagogy point of view. All 3 could have achieved more comprehensive pragmatic outcomes if they had come together to leverage on each other’s specialties when looking at the common point of how students learn. One of the big problem I see clearly (at least to me) is the lack of connection in research to the everyday on-goings of a classroom. Without doubt, the work done at the academia level does concerns the teacher and is vital information to lesson development in PE but I feel the need to also have good bottom-up initiatives from teachers on the ground to put together leanings from controlled environment research with their real day-to-day experience in a seemingly uncontrollable environment.
Precision in Physical Education (PE) – What is its role?
As usual recently, my thoughts get built up mainly due to professional life impacting experiences that gets me reflecting on our profession. What came up to a bit of an extent recently is the existence of the perception that spending time on understanding theories, sciences, underpinnings, etc. may be considered as being not align to the reality of school business on the ground. Recent encounters very well meaning leaders in the profession suggest that the younger the age group, the more we need to just get about being efficient in daily school life and perhaps not worry too much regards ‘pedagogy’ and such. I can almost understand this view, as I believe there is much misconceptions on the ‘scientific’ treatment of our subject, which seems to merely need good instructing. Understanding in areas like pedagogy, theories, models all take literal instead of the broader conceptual meanings. Example, pedagogy is strategy, theory is wishful thinking, models are blank frameworks, etc. My personal belief is that the younger the age group of learners, the more worthwhile to understand better the physiological processes at work within the learner and the behaviour exhibited in response to task and environment.
Also recently, the strangle hold of fitness testing looms large in my professional life. It is something that once was a mainstay in the country I come from but now a subset of the bigger physical literacy push. Or is it not? You may still find older teachers and school curriculum still clinging to it. It doesn’t help that evaluation process across subjects prefer clear quantitative data to compare teacher performances. Following the fitness theme here, I happen to visit a National uniform-group fitness testing centre where we observed their latest technology in helping test recruits using X-Box technology. This means that precise movements are needed in push-ups and sit-ups to trigger the automatic count. (There was a time where the age group I deal with are supposed to be ready for their enlistment in the uniform-groups via their fitness lessons in schools)
To a large extent, precision also plays a big part of how the fraternity exhibits in delivering PE. From the obvious direct link (of the X-box technology example above) in school’s fitness testing to how we want students to learn skills.
Taking the fitness testing precision example above where we consider expecting a fully extended elbows in a push-up for the push phase for testing, how much does that last bit of range of motion for the elbows and shoulders in a prone push-up position contribute to this proxy indicator of upper body elastic strength. Furthermore, how much does it contribute to the expected functional ability of the learner, and even the older uniform-group personnel, in their day-to-day existence. Insisting on precision takes a fair bit of time in the preparation phase, usually a teacher-centred process which leads to possibly external regulation for most learners (limited intrinsic motivation). This is not easy to talk about on as they are those in the fraternity who take this very seriously and equates it to effective teaching, especially the more experienced teachers.
How about sport/game skills or abilities? How much does insisting on exact range of motion, including replicating accurately examples of proven coordination from higher level performance specific to others, contribute to overall learning from an understanding point of view for the learner? This includes using internal cues (that are mainly diagnostic for the teacher) as teaching cues that directs body and limbs for the execution of different technical and conceptual skills/abilities, e.g. basketball free-throw, volleyball dig, javelin throw, set pieces in team games, etc. Without doubt, such teaching approaches have resulted in successful learning and performances before but how confident are we on the efficiency of it? To what extent does motivation comes in when we start with precision? Using Self-Determination Theory (SDT) terminologies, what is the impact on Autonomy, Relatedness and Competence?
So, you can insist on precision focus in outcome and precision focus in processes, with everything else in between, depending on context of the teaching and learning situation. What role does precision play? Look at the figure below that is usual for me in creating to attempt to seek understanding. This brings to mind also the different learning stages models like Fitts & Postner’s (cognitive, associative and autonomous) and Bernstein (freezing degrees of freedom, freeing degrees of freedom and then selecting most efficient degrees of freedom) for me. The former comes very much from a general motor programme approach and the later from a perception and action behaviour that is very much about the learner, environment and the task. To many on the ground, such distinctions in teacher understanding are worthless and I can understand that view when we consider PE as an activity/event play time. Lately I have been wondering if my own efforts in wanting to know more could be a waste when the organic development of the subject over decades still seems to move towards movement for the sake of moving and little consideration for learning.
This is where I can say that influences from Ecological Dynamics contributes to an opinion. Concepts on emerging behaviour, direct perception, embodied cognition etc. may lay fairly clear but perhaps not complete ideas on the above topic. For this reflection, I will limit direct reference to them all as it does create some jadedness from many who work on experience and gut-feel and who may be too overwhelm by the daily reality of education to find space and time to explore a different view. One main reason why precision is favoured in most teaching and learning situation is the very intuitive and well-rooted believe that we can front load our body with new exact information, in anticipation of its appropriate replication when needed. This approach does not emphasise the impact of the inputs from outside the learner (e.g. the intent of task itself and the environment that the learner works in), other than teacher instructions. Precision also is very clear as an evaluative standard outcome that can easily be comparable. In other, words this is a linear expectation of how we learn. A generic, chronological order that is guided by the decomposition of a task mechanically (not functionally).
Are there times when we feel that a linear approach is needed in a class of up to 40 students? YES, said rather exasperatedly! Should this define the way we teach PE in the present climate of wanting innovative learners and the impact of understanding better how learners operate in each unique context of learning? NO, said rather apprehensively! Apprehensive because it is a very controversial thought at times, even though much progress is made in research and policy guide, in the last one to two decades at least. Constraints to fully embracing this, in my ever changing views, includes teacher acculturation (teaching the way we were taught/coach in Sports or from past practises that have proven to be very comfortable for teachers, despite up to date information availability on contemporary learning sciences, and treating PE as sports instructing classes) and on the ground support for PE to be more activity driven. The latter to fit the various needs of schools to spent time on academic classroom time “recovery” and meet popular expectations of health benefits via clocking miles, creating multiple play opportunities, etc. Also an important reality, the need for precision KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) like obesity direction, sports participation and fitness levels. I say this as part of the system I am critiquing against and also reflecting deeply how much must I shift to fit into something that is “working well”. This after 3 decades of teaching!
It has been many months of not visiting my personal blogging habit as a way to delve more comprehensively into a job that can very easily take on an event or activity management role. There has been more than enough lamenting here on our seemingly ‘babysitter’ job for ‘fresh air’ in between the more important business of academic, examinable subjects. In a recent sharing by our highest education trained in-charge person in the nation, much of the discussion revolved around taking care of the learners in the best possible way without a focus on wanting them all to be alike in objectives and achievements. In a perfect world, implementation should follow that line, but I left the discussion with much wonderment on how much of that we are able to follow.
In my bigger teaching environment, much effort is also put into the character and citizenship development of the leaners and this role is expected of all teachers, including the academic teachers with clear examinable performance indicators. We are driven by current and past central tendency data, meaning a lot of our planning and decision making is based on what the majority of learners are exhibiting vis-à-vis where we expect them to be, which is referenced from past cohorts being compared to overall nation expectations. You can imagine the dilemma when in such an environment, the same expectations overflow into subjects like Physical Education (PE). As much as we have settled handling this mismatch in evaluating subjects like PE and other life-skill related ones, it still creeps up every now and then on the ground in an awkward way.
Listed below are series of seemingly random encounters/questions/observations/etc. I encountered lately that spurred me to get out of this reflective hibernation for my own professional sanity. Learning comes from everywhere and my own personal slower methodology always comes from what’s happening around me. I at times regret not developing a more academic approach to finding out from literature (or proactively learning from external context) firsts and thus anticipating important areas of learning, direction, alignment, etc.
As I list out my laundry list of selected reflective prompts recently, I will attempt to connect it to why it also impacts for me at the bigger picture of making sense of my personal journey (which perhaps is heading very close to an end-point) in the teaching profession (I have reached a stage where I have called a break to trying to always want do things better, not always successfully, but rather focus more on the what and why of my day-time job. Probably a self-protecting mechanism of a teacher on a plateau of ‘what else is there in PE’).
At what point do we intervene at classroom level if we want students to be involved in an explicit (something we can see) or implicit learning process. Do we as teachers rely heavily on assumed implicit learning taking place and therefore not too concern on timely interventions? In fact, are we even also implicit in our own thoughts of learners’ implicit learning, basically not being concern or need to see learning taking place but go through the motion of completing a class/activity without the consideration of timely interventions. In such situations, we may tend to only create a learning narrative when the need to reflect on a lesson happens, giving a false illusion of explicit planning.
What class lever is a pull-up/chin-up when looking at the workings of a specific muscle group. How to apply micro rules to macro actions or vice-versa. This reminds me of the whole non-linear/emergent ecological approach to approaching any skill acquisition (or functional working understanding) of a movement process, simple or complex. We tend to rely on heavily on traditional decomposition of a movement and working from a bottom-up approach of putting simple movements back together like a jigsaw into a whole complex movement. This has worked fairly well when trying to understand processes but may not reflect actual mechanisms at work. This and the podcast example (see below) reflects the same dilemma we have as teachers brought up very heavily on understanding motor schemas as our teaching framework, i.e. we create targeted needed component experiences and leave it to the learner to bring it up when needed it its whole expected perfect movement solution form. This lever example reminds me of how we are so comfortable with linear understanding of processes that assumes the whole is equal to its parts.
Podcast episode discussing immediate history of a particular action being important to action, i.e. hysteresis, that works within the ecological dynamics school of thought also. How is this compared to traditional ‘computational’ cognition? In the same podcast series, another interesting discussion was the role of a traditional football activity, the rondo, in high level training, coming from perspective of ecological skill acquisition. This was followed by another discussion on another podcast, the role of two-touch football in a drill and game. For the very analytical expert, the need to look at a specific part of a process and break it down is very tempting. While we all seem to understand the need for a holistic perspective, we may inevitable also take it for granted and very easily fall into picking apart components of a process.
Teaching Games for Understanding is a multi-step process. Follow the steps and good to go? Where should we start at and do we follow it in a particular direction? Non-linear pedagogy is what? There seems to a frustration and jadedness to the response to teaching approaches being sprouted by different groups, with education systems/groups emphasising different perspectives with ‘nuts and bolts’ examples that gets in the way of understanding underpinning theories. Does this boil down to individual teachers and what their beliefs and philosophies are in teaching? A teacher who believes in the need to continuously understand underpinning physiological processes within the body-person-environment interaction will leverage on example scenarios of teaching approaches. The contrary will be those that rely on such examples to feed their repertoire of readymade strategies for different scenarios.
Quote from my colleague (paraphrased), “I know PE is important, I saw them having so much fun just now…remind me of my own schooling days.” Does this undermine what we really do or should we rejoice that others see our students demonstrating joy? Do we need to be teachers, if mere instructions can carry out the same joyful expectation?
Difficult looks from around when trying to discuss thoughts on pedagogy and PE – can we just get on without all these? Age-old observation. The need for immediate and clear implementation structures and frameworks as more preferred and palatable. Structures can take on a life of its own, with the what and why of the structure forgotten?
Can a PE teacher teach a much younger age-group if they have always been teaching older learners? Let’s assume we don’t consider personal preference and only consider professional competencies needed to teach extreme ends of an age-group spectrum. Are we equip to do handle all? If we are activity driven, does that get in the way of our worry of crossing age-groups for teaching. Will a conceptually driven teaching mindset help?
Let’s not put Tchoukball (or insert any game that you think deserves an inclusion in this question context) in our curriculum as it is a very easy game and won’t require the usual length we spent on popular favourites from the Invasion family of games. Does this reflects an activity specific approach to teaching, as opposed to perhaps a curriculum that is concept driven (e.g. creating learners who are confident in movement) it its suggested teaching approach.
Differentiated Instructions vs Differentiated Teaching – is it a versus argument? Should differentiated teaching be considered a teaching tool or a basic tenet of teaching? If it is the former, than it is just another tool. If it is the latter, why is it that propriety differentiated instructions methodologies (e.g. by Tomlision) seems so revolutionary?
The trigger points above demonstrate key discussions in this teacher’s recent professional journey that may or may not strike certain chords that resonates with others on a personal journey to make sense of the profession. Seemingly unrelated incidents and thoughts that may be written off by many as just the varied nature of what we do but maybe taken a bit too seriously by this teacher as something that needs to be made sense of.
The Graph below in Fig 1 was one way for me to make sense of the above points possible common manifestation in the profession (curious if they also resonate with others). I assumed that the curriculum flavour that we create also reflects the teaching perspectives that we have.
The below took a very long time to manifest. It is a combination of work stress, doubts about alignment of what I want with what it should it be like to be a Physical Education (PE) teacher, fatigue, etc. Amidst all these, my last impetus to just sharing my thoughts below (jumbled up thoughts!) came after a discussion with a fellow teacher in the all-consuming discussion of what PE is and what it should look like. This type of discussions doesn’t come easily and requires a lot of passion in the area to maintain that conversation when it does take place. I say it not in the way of an arrogant gift to look into an area but more a self-suffering willingness to explore a lot of what is already seemingly status quo. Status quo not because it is perfect but because of the tremendous job requirements of a teacher in a school setting competing with the demands of the content area. Question that keep coming up in discussions like those above; “What is PE?”, “Why does a cognitive focus PE lesson seems flat and incompetent?”, “Why does a technique driven PE lesson seem soulless?”, “Why does a values driven lesson seem too artificial?”, “Why are our expected outcomes not coming out?”, “How is a detailed lesson plan (the type we were trained with) learner focussed when it is the teacher’s plan?”, etc. So on and on the thoughts swirl.
In approaching a teaching scenario, the above diagram, Fig 1, seems to suggest a possible start with Learner Outcome consideration before moving on to decide our intervention strategy, Teacher Input. Or is it vice versa? What process does Fig 1 best fits; 1) The teacher’s thinking process when approaching a learning design? 2) Or is it better to consider the opposite flow? And finally, 3) Should it be a cyclical process?
With this little exercise on trying to get the steps right, it seems to support that we are very structured people and we seek clear, chronological processes to make sense of our teaching. We add to this challenge by also wanting to be very specific with our teaching outcomes, e.g. values, affective, skills, etc. In considering this linear question, a middle section is suggested that adds a layer to the usual input/output observation. Let me label the middle step mention in the diagram above as the middle link.I put forward the possibility that much of what we want from learners doesn’t start or end at their total action flow intention to implementation cycle but rather a part of it (somewhere in the middle?).This makes it very challenging when we approach a lesson design with that expected outcome when that outcome is actually a part of something else, perhaps the extremes of Fig1, rather than including also the middle link also. Isthe journey and destination synonymous? Are our teaching models, strategies, approaches, etc. considering all parts?
Recently, I came upon a question asked on social media regards what is skill, or to be skilful and what does it mean for Physical Education (PE). There is a lot of evaluation and judgement put into a word like skill and whatever follows after that as a breakdown of the skill in question. We seem to know what eventually we want to see coming out of learners (a usual possible interpretation of what a skill is), we work towards it as best as we can and most of time, we get variations of what we expect. To some extent, it is the same for popular concepts of thinking (e.g. Making thinking visible – as opposed to it not being emphasised in our task), affective (e.g. We want students demonstrating resilience – as oppose to them having the lack of it if we are not successful in your efforts), cognition (e.g. We want students to use their mind in the task we give them – as oppose to them not using it), etc. Are all this attempts to put the horse before the cart too explicitly? Without doubt, as experts, we can predict much movement outcomes when it comes to skills, values, etc.
At this point, I will say that learners cannot demonstrate Skills and Values in Physical Education (PE), being a bit extreme to try bringing across a point. At least, not for the type of skills and values that represent a process that we hope is life-long and ingrained deeply in the person and consequent actions of the learner. If it is teaching to mean demonstrating a particular physical/action-outcome based on teacher’s expectations, it is possible. Teachers may see skills and values as merely selected demonstrated outcomes hopefully representing a deeper learning and learners seeing it as something disruptive getting in the way of their intentions and expectations. Could it be that we are all focusing too much on the extremes of Fig 1, rather than including middle link?
So, my attempt now is to figure out what are we doing well and not so well when we start our intervention planning by looking at a predetermined exactness of the outcome we want and working backwards. What I do observe as being totally not considered many a times is the middle bit, what happens within the learner because of our interventions. I believe we usually make an assumption that whatever the leaner is expected to present is exactly what happens within the learner. For example, I want a learner to demonstrate good use of cognition in a physical task, therefore what needs to happen within the learner is good cognition. This totally doesn’t explain whatever physiological/biological processes that needs to take place within the person in sync with its interaction of the world. We can get away without considering this middle bit most times and the learner will just adapt and overcome in our task to present a similarity to what we are seeking, maybe using a learning process that is easily overlooked by us or different from what we expect.
Let’s take an example of learners participating in a modified tag rugby game as a demonstration of speed and agility for the teacher in a physical health and fitness session when the learners are actually just enjoying a game that have passing, interception and scoring! Both learner and teacher are satisfied with outcome but for different reasons. The learner goes through an incidental internal learning process created unknowingly by the teacher. This is an easy to accept circumstance because both expectations are in the physical realm and looks similar. What if we are endeavouring to teach fair play, or some affective component, and go through a lot of effort to present scenarios for learning as such. Both learner and teacher may think they reach their outcomes, only with the learners reaching one that is totally out of synch with the teacher, making the affective expectation significantly misdiagnose. In both examples, we took a cross-sectional definition of a process outcome to represent that outcome.
The simple examples cited seems to point to the age-old issue of needing to know what you are teaching and assessing for confirmation. My interest here is what if we indeed have a missing ignored middle link and will never know what we are doing is really facilitating directly where we think we are heading towards. I will say that our usual expectations are broad enough that we can get away without acknowledging this middle link.
Let’s come back to the examples of wanting a skilful player, a thinking player or a player who shows specific affective characteristics. We design elaborate lessons starting with these aims, hoping to see what we want to see. We go through with the lessons and usually find it hard to decide if we had achieved what we need to. There was a recent request for a study by a university that came to me, where researches will attempt look at classes (2 Sessions) and interview learners, in the hope of identifying values being taught. We are keen to know if we have taught the life-skills that we expect of Physical Education and Sports. I also have other colleagues in the fraternity looking very seriously at how values can be brought across by coaches in their sessions, including making it as part of coaching accreditation processes through observations and therefore a compulsory part of professional development.
My take is that it is tough. I come from the specific perspective that as long as we are not sure of or ignore the middle link, what we get are just cross-sectional outcomes without realisation of needed developmental processes accompanying skills, values, etc. In other words, the actual internal processes within a learner to achieve thinking, affective characteristics, values, skills, etc. may not be aligned to what we want as final outcomes.
So, what are possible alternative approaches to all these? One simplistic possibility is to really ask ourselves when we observe desired behaviours from learners or from role models, where we think it came from. The only answer not allowed is that it came from our direct instructions to display such behaviour.
For example, we see a young player assisting an opponent after a fall in a game. Is this behaviour an outcome of us telling players during training to do it, because of showing them a similar scenario clip on social media during a teachable moment, as a result of values friendly policy and structure in schools or is it due to a much longer, deeper involvement of a culture of respect for others, probably demonstrated and led by significant adults?
Using the same thinking flow, when we see a player demonstrate incredibly creative passing in a seemingly hopeless situation, is it because they went through drills on it, went through cognitive sessions where such similar (hardly possible to have exact ones) scenarios were played out or as a result of having experienced a rich enough learning environment that allowed such creativity to emerge, perhaps one where player is allowed to search solution space based on their abilities? The last two options can be very similar and I believe we have been using them implicitly without realising the impact of solution space exploration and putting more belief in our teacher effort in showing what is right or wrong.
Concepts like skills and values are just given fleeting definitions and the intervention strategies developed as a result are just too elaborately hinged on these simplistic definitions. We might be seeing skills and values as rather narrow cross-sectional exhibition of actions based on our own chosen context. Learners listen to our interpretations and that probably is the end of that process. However, learners do have intentions and motivation to do the business at hand, e.g. playing a game and accomplishing a task within it, i.e. scoring, intercepting, getting into appropriate positions, passing and everything else necessary to achieve their need and wanting to be involve. Affectively, learners do have their own value compasses developed through upbringing and daily living experience. The player with a shouting coach/teacher or a strict block practise regime training/PE session will not develop the behaviours we seek as expected. If anything, such behaviour might be observed despite our adult intervention.
Structures and Ecology: Linear facilitation processes vis-à-vis non-linear developmental processes.
Is it possible to have a linearly focussed structure together with a realisation of non-linear development of the learner? I don’t think I like so much all these descriptors with the word linear (or non-linear) pegged to it. Linearity or the lack thereof suggest a unidimensional process, with temporal (chronological) urgency or not. This type of versus discussions puts many off almost immediately, especially those in teaching where everything is based on neat time-based structures. Structures by definition are pretty fixed and always starting from clear beginnings, going through fixed processes and inevitably always ending with a common accepted end. This is great, this is how we have survived for so long. The challenge now is to fill up the flexible spaces in between the structures with realities of how learners learn. The structure may have a strong temporal focus but the gaps in between can accept multi-dimensional (multi layered) processes that are unique to individuals but follow universal laws of existence between the agency (the learner), the environment (including people, society, etc.) and the task. I will include one more important element; living expectations.
The below was a struggle to write. Definitely, the longest I have taken to write an article for my blog. As I teach less towards year-end, administrative work pile up, thoughts become preoccupied with non-direct teaching matters. It was clear that reflective mood is directly proportional to how much on-the-ground teaching and observation is happening, at least for me. It reached a point where I wondered what really I have accomplished in decades of teaching Physical Education (PE) or if I even have been teaching at all. Very good friends put things into perspective for me and all of it is basically “if you cant beat them, join them” type of advice. For the millionth time, I wish I were in an industry/field with much clearer outcomes, half wishing in jest. Writing for me is like the canaries to miners of the past. Once it dies, there is a chance I have lost the balance in teaching.
A paper I read recently, (Moy, Renshaw, & Pavey, Impact of the constraints-led approach on students’ motor performance, 2020), looked into gathering more empirical evidence to show the benefits of an Ecological Dynamic (ED) based Constraint Led Approach (CLA) informed by principles of Non-Linear Pedagogy (NP). Putting the different bodies of thought, ED, CLA and NLP, in the same sentence took me some time to reread and even then I am not sure I got the true (or accepted) relationship right personally, in the direction of what the well-known authors in the areas try to do. I feel forced. Is fidelity to processes and approaches, such as those described above, taking away focus from the learner?
The main researchers in these areas (CLA, NP, etc.) are all mainly within the same circle, leveraging on each other to produce much papers and textbooks that is valuable for our understanding. Their work is probably not complete in its theories or practical application and do require much effort by any reader, if there is interest in exploring it for teaching. My own interest in Ecological Dynamics approaches when looking at how we interact with the world in our needed actions daily definitely takes up quite a bit of the time I have that is dedicated to professional development outside of the business of being a teacher leader on a day-to-day basis. It is not easy.
One of my areas of responsibilities is to discuss where PE has taken us over the year with individual teachers in my department. A colleague mentioned Games Concept Approach (a Singaporean understanding of Teaching Games for Understanding, TGFU) and NP in the same thought when describing at possible ways of looking at PE. In the discussion that follows, I felt there was an overwhelming desire to bring PE to a level that is beyond the comfort, practical level of that teacher. The same feeling I sometimes have when trying to make sense of how to move forward in the field of PE. Many a times, I question the need to do that when expectations seems to tell us to be status quo in treating PE mainly as activity sessions. This expectation can come from internal to the school and external stakeholders, including PE teachers ourselves. During this terrible COVID period, I am very sure there are many of us out there feeling very helpless as the main component of social interaction in traditional PE is taken away, relegating movement away from the context we are used to our whole teaching lives.
Which led me to reflect on what exactly do we want from our learners when they leave the schooling system, other than hoping for a neat linear extrapolation of what we expect of them while in school. Majority of them will not carry on with facilitated, deliberate learning of skills like sports and explicit physical fitness type activities. It ends the moment they leave the schooling system, hopefully their last education touch points have some element of PE, probably around the age of eighteen. After that, some do take on a routine of being involved in sports and/or physical fitness activities but mainly as social vehicles that just happens to overlap with their need for recreational movements for health and fitness. Their participation in these areas will develop and that happens mainly from trial and error. There is no more deliberate fancy acronyms labelled processes being administered by professionals. Some may indeed take classes led by instructors whose main modus operandi will be technique replication approaches as the quickest way to get outcomes from motivated individuals, usually very successfully.
PE is sometime broken up to cognitive, affective and the physical in its delivery plans. This linear decomposition strategy is a structure also allows us to understand better, different aspects of the movement process. This strategy looks promising on paper but may not necessary meet the embeddedness of the affective and cognitive in actions for successful learning impact. For example, fair play and respect mentions may mean little if it appears as descriptors before opportunities that allows such competencies to be exhibited. Even if scenarios are planned deliberately, an artificially designed opportunity may not deliver such affective components in the same way as real opportunities, which by definition is mostly difficult to schedule or plan.
Hayball and Jones, (Hayball & Jones, 2016), wrote on how Sports and PE impacted life-skills delivered to a group of females. They interviewed 16 – 18 year old females who withdraw from school sports. The participants refer to PE also in their comments on how it influenced their perception of certain life-skills like conflict resolution, positive attitude, awareness of consequences of action, mental toughness, self-esteem, confidence, stress management, having realistic expectations, planning, adaptation, leadership, and social competence.
It is satisfying to see efforts in such areas of research but I feel that more needs to be done to really figure how best to offer Sports and PE in a way that have lasting impact other than using simple input–output processes. It is reassuring to hear the participants in the study reflecting on certain experiences being a catalyst for certain positive/negative life-long behaviour but it is unlikely that a single (or even multiple similar type) past reflection that is so specific is the root cause. It probably points to types of authentic experiences over a period of time being the real influence. The process of influencing (through teaching for the teacher and learning for the learner) is probably not just definitions or recollections of such behaviours. Is living it.
Without doubt, is the incredible contribution of movement life skills to personal affective development in specific identified areas like those mentioned in the study above. An example of an input-output process: I want learners to know about conflict resolution and therefore I indicate verbally that a specific affective competency is targeted at in a series of sessions that may allow students to resolve conflict as part of design. Teachable moments in overdrive. Unfortunately, some of us may have experience explicit teaching of values that fails because of not being authentic to the needs of learners, e.g. it needs to be experienced, maybe through their learning relationship with the teacher and context. In a way, the teacher needs to exude the values and character competencies in the lesson design as part of the task environment and not as direct instructions for learners to focus on standalone values and character competencies. I believe that in observing a teacher-learner situation, you can almost be guaranteed of very effective values education taking place by the mannerisms and behaviour of the teacher rather than the task design that artificially incorporate non-representative experiences of values in action and learners’ responses to it. There is room for both type of approaches, there is value in behaviour definitions and recollections.
What could be an enhancement to the usual input-output process can be a learning approach being more organic to our base objective of delivering movement outcomes in its broader existence as part of life. For example, this can be letting movement lessons bring out naturally the need to resolve conflicts, in decision making to inter-personal interactions, without deliberate creation of conflict scenarios. Words like conflict resolution, mental toughness, etc. are different in its impact and meaning to different contexts. I might go as far as to say that such character building opportunities needs to be from bottom-up, rather than top-down. That is, having a broad base, original intent experiences leading to identified aspects of movement development and the cognitive and affective influence that comes together. This is oppose to starting off with specific character traits or cognitive wants and trying to fit into a learning experience. The mind is the body and the body is the mind.
In the same vein, how effective is putting a physical outcome before experiencing the affordances of a task in a specific environment, e.g. creating receiving opportunities by moving to space. This may mean very little until the learner experience not having space to receive a pass and is committed to a task outcome that requires needing to receive the ball in an advantageous position. This can happen with a lesson design that acknowledges the role of carefully thought out constraints that are aligned to the multi layered developmental processes of the learner that does not always flow neatly in temporal and spatial sequences. Movement definitions help but they are just proxies to a deeper process. All these might seem very long-winded for a straightforward passing activity that seemingly can be more directly delivered. Either way, we might still observe good learning except that one relies on facilitated learning and the other by learner’s own adaptive abilities that leverages probably more on learner’s own motivation to want to know more. In which scenario are we value-adding better as teachers?
Cited, referred to articles:
Hayball, F., & Jones, M. (2016). Life after sport? Examining life skill transfer following withdrawal from sport and compulsory physical education. Sport & Exercise Psychology Review, 12(1).
Moy, B., Renshaw, I., & Pavey, T. (2020). Impact of the constraints-led approach on students’ motor performance. Journal of Physical Education and Sport, 20(6), 3345 – 3353. doi:DOI:10.7752/jpes.2020.06453
Recently, few perennial issues were discussed, mentioned, lamented, etc. concerning Physical Education (PE) and the way we deal with it, in my learning space. The mention of such points may get you going as a teacher or result in a large sigh of exasperation that there are always folks trying to intellectualise the field of PE when it should be dead simple. Let me try elaborate a bit more on some of these recurring themes for me.
Pedagogy, framework, strategies, theories, underpinnings, models, etc. These are words that practitioners may not have the effort and time bandwidth to differentiate or understand their academic vs literal use. Is it a problem?
For most parts, we can get away without worrying too much about the labels that guides our intervention. Learners will get through our lessons, picking up skills and knowledge, schools have their Physical Education (PE) curriculum delivered and we get our pay cheques. It matters when we acknowledge that the movement is a life-skill and the recipients of our services are differentiated with many needs. We need to be master-chefs in providing that differentiation. Otherwise, we are just plain cooks providing back of envelope recipes for everyone. It doesn’t help sometimes when professional development attempts also use the terms loosely or with not much emphasise on the need to take note of their needed depth of understanding to use their suggested intervention approach well. Perhaps they do but it is us that want a quick fix that zoom immediately to the easy to use part. Below are my own rule of thumb that helps me with the various labels and teaching myths/facts – not the best guide and acknowledging working towards more clarity;
Pedagogy (sometimes also called an Approach) – Comes with an underpinning theory that needs to be made sense of first. Can come with multi-stage schematics. Will be worried if it needs following linear steps suggestions, as human behaviour is not so straightforward. We present our thoughts to each other linearly but sometimes need to explore the possibility that it is not in practise, e.g. a learner may not want to kick a ball in a particular way because he was taught as such but rather use the learned experience when the context ask for it.
Pedagogy requires a broad understanding. May leverage on a specific context, e.g. the teaching of concepts in an invasion game, to deliver pedagogy ideas better. At times, the vehicle of delivery, e.g. the teaching of concepts in an invasion game, may inevitably take on the main theme.
Deeper exploration of pedagogies may be difficult because of information access abilities due to cost or just effort and time needed. A philosophical stance help in the comprehension of a pedagogy, e.g. learners learn best in experience and thus understand what they are doing as necessary to achieve what is needed. Pedagogy is often misrepresented as strategies and vice versa, losing important insights.
Framework – Usually depicted visually by more complex tables and schematics, it helps in understanding better a characteristic (e.g. behaviour) process. It is not meant to be direct intervention guide but perhaps as a checklist to guide our interpretation of what is needed in the intervention. Can be used as a broad guide in wanting to be clearer on a more complex idea, e.g. a theory, an approach, etc. For example, my Reinventing the Game framework helps me make intervention sense of all that I come across in skill learning and acquisition sciences.
Theories (or Underpinning Theories) – Not literal theories (just guesses) but evidence based research that informs. May be uncomfortable for practitioners to delve into due to academic language use, connection to other complex theories, seemingly unrelated, etc. Further exploration of theories may be difficult because of information access abilities due to cost or just effort and time needed.
Models – Used often in discussions to describe an approach or pedagogy. It is usually a whole package that comes with theories, perhaps philosophy, implementation examples, easy to understand schematics, etc. Unfortunately, whole models are usually relegated to being aligned to quick and easy examples of implementation as the essence of the model, e.g. Constraints Led Approach is about putting in constraints in lesson design and therefore it is important to get examples of effective constraints for specific skills, forgetting the role of environment and learner.
Strategies – Direct translatable step-by-step actions for specific context. It becomes a problem when relied on for every context encountered as a professional development effort. Usually presented in relation to specific game/sport/skill. Very popular for us teachers who need quick, efficient help in teaching skills that we are not familiar with. May inevitably take a life of its own as a Pedagogy, Approach, Theory, etc.
Model fidelity. Something we drift towards without realising sometimes. Focusing on a teaching model, usually with the suffix pedagogy, approach or model. This focusing is in the hope that lesson designs for a teacher have some consistent theme. Usually a well-meaning attempt to jump on the progressive bandwagon of wanting to look deeper into how to teach more effectively.
Research. A lot of the incredible work done by researchers requires much academic conditions for it be delivered as original or publishable work. It is unlikely any of them claim to be cure-all solutions to universal problems. However, enthusiastic discourses often results in versus arguments, which mean much more to the researchers than practitioners. We teachers run with what comes to us without the benefit of having the time and space to really delve deep into the underpinnings to make sense of what we need for our context. Professional development practises and policy development have the quickest conclusions by supporting clearly defined linear steps in proprietary or popular models. Unfortunately, the business of developing the young does not follow such neat linear steps.
We sometimes inevitably do not give ourselves credit for the knowledge that is within us, just by doing what we do. We are so generous with this knowledge, that it may have been relegated as plain common sense when it is actually a very unique professional ability to discern, question, advise, etc. whatever that is necessary when it comes to teaching and learning in our field. It is difficult find a doctor or lawyer who will give advice without mentioning per hour cost, yet we freely, and almost as a responsibility, do it wherever and whenever to those in need. This professional advice is priceless and is the incredibly valuable ability we need to leverage on to decide what we use in the classroom.
Research is there to inform our practice and requires our in-depth practical knowledge to make sense of. We need to use information from as many models as needed to help us in our context. It is tempting to go deep into one area. With a philosophical stance and theory appreciation in our experienced roles, we will be attracted to research from the same genre. All of us have the ability to dissect our everyday practise to some level of theory and philosophical depth if given the time and space. We don’t all need to do it at the same time but be open to those amongst us trying to play that role to help us make that connection.
Questioning skills. Use of questions and the skills necessary for a teacher to have that questioning ability. This usually comes with the caveat that the teacher must be a skilled performer themselves to get the questioning right, through the lens of an expert observer. This might indicate to younger teachers who just come into service that effective questioning is an ‘experienced teacher’ skill only. (A teacher who is skilled in selected sports and an experienced teacher may not be synonymous even though we usually consider them as so.)
Skilled performers as good teachers. Related closely to above. Teaching models that require teachers to be skilled performers for ‘good’ questioning to take place. These teaching approaches are usually those that involves guided discovery through verbal facilitation or task-environment constraints manipulation.
The two points above points to the teacher as one recognising optimal movement output as a precursor to knowing how to design lessons. This premise assumes that the learner operates with a computational model for cognition, meaning whatever is presented to learners will directly be reflected in the learning outcome. An immediate problem to this assumption is reconciling it to the same teaching models that also do not assume a direct input-output learning model for learning. For example, if we believe that learners learn best by understanding what they are doing but we impose on them optimal teacher-decided movements. A conflict arises with a limited movement experience that cannot feed a broad movement exploration need. A common implicit belief is that a learner will understand good adaptable movement habits by merely introducing to them narrow ideal movements.
So while an understanding approach for example, or even a constraints led one, requires a broad learning landscape that allows exploration through carefully planned lessons that may include questioning, a teacher might struggle with the assumption that it is only possible if specific movement solutions are used. Over here, I will say the teacher needs to know well the learning process rather than optimum movement solutions. However, the later, in conjunction with the teacher’s own realisation how that fits into an explorative or discovery process, is also important.
Can a learning process expert, which I assume what teaching courses serve towards, literally learn a movement/skill together with new learners? For example, if I have never experienced Tchoukball before, can I teach it using guided explorative or discovery processes together with the learners? My powerful advantage over the learners is that I am aware of learning processes and I have a duty to teach.
If questioning is involve in a teaching process, can the teacher who has never played a game/skill before develop good ones that helps in the learning facilitation? The answer is yes if the realisation is that we facilitate the learning process rather than spoon feeding selected movements. Specific teaching questions is never key to the discovery/understanding process for the learner. In fact, we should work towards learners wanting to ask questions! It is never about the questions but about the intent of asking questions, i.e. to elicit feedback or guide learning for the teacher or to want to find out more for the learners.
Whenever questioning is part of a multi-step teaching approach, e.g. Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU), it may take on a live of its own due to it being considered as an independent ability of the teacher that connects directly to their skill level. The best way to build up questioning ‘skills’ is to be explicit about reflecting for the teacher and it goes the same for learners who we wish to seek learning from.
Using the above as guide, I am attracted to sharing and developmental opportunities that allow me the ability to design my own interventions for my own contexts. This is a challenge that requires time, energy and close community support.
So recently, it has been crazy. The amount of administration to support teaching seems to have almost overwhelm actual direct teaching matters. It is almost seems that because there is less direct focus on teaching but nonetheless an incredible amount of very genuine and sincere efforts to prep for eventual teaching scenarios, we drop the metaphorical ball of ensuring learning takes place. The preceding words do sound like a tired teacher rather than reality. However, encouraging events that happened recently was one sharing at an ASEAN (Association of South East Asia Nations) sharing opportunity. Another, was a request by a committed teacher-training establishment from a infighting suffering country requesting for help in wanting to implement a more comprehensive physical education (PE) training programme and lastly, a local nation-wide sharing opportunity that is yet to take place (at point of writing this paragraph). Do we need more space and time to think of teaching and learning?
All the mentioned recent events for me are encouraging because these are stuff that drives me but still overwhelming because of the need to carve out time to have the motivation and energy to want to embark on being better at it. Something I realised recently that enforced a long held belief, we need time to think about teaching, time that is not indicated in some scheduled weekly slots labelled “Professional Development Time”. It is space and time that comes with joy and satisfaction in teaching and learning for teachers. There is no amount of scheduling that will provide this time. Rather there is a need for a whole village of teaching support, inspiration and motivation that will spark these spontaneous occasions of thought and reflective inspiring moments. My recent class experiences may be telling me that I desperately need this time.
There needs to be a very strong belief in our attempts to educate physically and this means much more than ensuring physical fitness and teaching a certain number of games. Many a times we unfairly relegate our efforts to merely ensuring physical fitness and the teaching of X number of games. We do not need teachers trained over multiple years to do that, honestly. Our roles are more complicated than what we give ourselves credit for.
The request for help from the small foreign teacher-training centre was eye opening. I have long believe in the idea of physical literacy that is connected very closely to existing cultural social environment. The needs of that country are very different from what I was brought up in. The centre’s main administrator (a Singaporean) was sharing how she introduced long distance running and the reactions her trainee teachers faced when back in their villagers doing long runs. It made almost no sense for a rural village deep in the outback wanting their residents spent precious energy running for recreation. The concept of running for fitness appeals to the individual trainees but rejected by their village culture. For many in the developed world, we might spent time on running as a vital part of PE. So is PE even necessary for such movement-for-survival culture? Can we transplant a PE training programme that is probably heavy in consistent outcomes across individuals to a culture that have very different concept of movement for recreation and living well? What is evergreen and overlapping in our needs and theirs? Definitely not fitness and optimum movement solutions I think. The preceding questions are good for anyone trying to figure out what they spending their entire professional life doing as PE teachers.
Corbin (Corbin C. B., 2021), in a very recent exploration cited historian Roberta Park, in the late 1980s, as predicting PE to be the renaissance field of the 21st Century, just like medicine that blossomed in the 20th century after being in the shadows before that. This is a very lofty ambition to pin to a subject which started out as mainly movement replication that was heavily influenced by gymnastics and athletics, described in the paper as originating from European countries. In the 20th century, Park suggested that PE morphed into sports-dominated PE. Park made the renaissance comment in the believe that as we research deeper into the needs and wants of PE, without doubt it will have to take on a more complex layer for individual development.
Corbin went on to mention the emergence of Conceptual Physical Education (CPE) as means to deliver knowledge, especially higher-order thinking. CPE is delivering physical skills together with the knowledge of what and why. This was initially also referred to as Fitness Education (FE). Corbin tracked the history of these PE approach in the United States of America and mentioned programmes that attempted to implement this push to leverage on PE more than what it was. In the USA, such attempts have been on-going for many decades and includes college level PE offering. They are ahead of many in terms of exploring longitudinally and living through the growth of PE. Incredibly, the Society of Health and Physical Educators (more known as SHAPE) was founded in the 1880s.
Corbin went on to recognised the recent emphasise on Physical Literacy (PL) as being aligned to the direction on CPE in the area of developing knowledge that allows the correct decision making when it comes to personal wellness. This is an interesting paper, long and probably not too attention grabbing to those not on a mission to connect the past to present for reflection. My purpose in delving into it very superficially is to really part of figuring out where we are at the moment. Sometimes it scares me to think that I have merely been babysitting play without a clear educative purpose. Just like a classroom teacher who works towards a topic at any one time, what are our directions? Just like a classroom teacher, we also have the dilemma of how to ensure deep learning and replicating desired solutions. Unlike a classroom teacher, our broad yet differentiated aims means that every student has a different outcome. What we can try to do is to deliver a consistent enacting and thinking process for students to develop in expected areas, albeit in their own directions.
I relooked at some data that I collected from my cohorts some time back on what PE means to them. Bit worrying for myself, I see nothing explicit or directly aligned to where I think PE should be via the students’ perspective. The data suggest a big emphasis on fitness activities expectations (externally regulated), on wanting to be with friends (relatedness), on wanting to play games of own choice (autonomy), etc.
I was probably not asking the right questions for my expected findings and even if the questions were more valid to my concerns, I expect responses will still be similar, i.e. away from explicit awareness of learning taking place. I don’t expect learners to be clear of the learning processes they going through at first, focusing only on their final successes in skill and knowledge acquisition. Teachers are the ones who should be clearly aware of learning processes taking place. Without teacher awareness, final movement outcomes may not directly point to most effective intervention. Successful teacher intervention in predetermined direction requires deliberate emphasis on learning and this takes time. Quick outcomes are usually preferred due to time constraints with short term learning taking place probably in spite of our efforts.
Works Cited
Corbin, C. B. (2021). Invited Commentary: Conceptual physical education: A course for the future. Journal of Sport and Health Science(10), 308 -322. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jshs.2020.10.004
I find these two words, Redundancy and Degeneracy, keep cropping up in my mind as I explore and delve further into how people adapt to the world they live in to hopefully get a better idea of learning. The words sort of represent a short cut for me to understand much of what is sometimes said about skill acquisition and learning in PE. Probably without giving justice to a proper definition, Redundancy refers to the fail-safes we have in systems to prevent too much reliance on any one process. This is vital in artificial systems and seems to be likewise in us too as complex systems. Degeneracy is a characteristic description borrowed from other sciences and suggest that different structures within a system can perform the same function or yield the same output.
These pair of words may sound simplistic and maybe even having negative literal connotations at first, especially if you have never encountered it with relation to learning and probably off-putting to someone who wants to teach better and got no appetite for seemingly obscure concepts. To me, these words points to the reason for thriving and successful ecological (living things and PE for us) and artificial systems (the wonderful technology out there). I do not claim to understand it fully but I realised my impression of these words are heightened continuously as I explore more of why learners do what they do. In an analogous way, I feel that we also need to build in Redundancy and Degeneracy within our approaches to teaching.
So recently, I did the usual, after a long while, and type out my topics of interest (i.e. ecological, physical education) into a journal search site and came across a paper by Rudd ret al, An ecological dynamics conceptualisation of physical ‘education’: Where we have been and where we could go next. (Rudd, Woods, Correira, Seifert, & Davids, 2021). It was a paper published in a respected Physical Education (PE) practise journal, Association for Physical Education (AfPE) of the United Kingdom (UK). I mentioned the journal to emphasise the mainstream acceptance to wanting to explore a perspective of PE that might be uncomfortable. This paper explore the ecological perspective to the complexity existence that skills learning takes place in, i.e. why andhow movement emerges. This is perhaps opposed to the more palatable perspective of skills learning as solely mechanical and existing in a ‘simple’ environment of learner and teacher, i.e. how movement is created. This paper identifies the scientific areas of ecological psychology, dynamical system theory, complexity sciences and evolutionary biology as contributing knowledge in developing a theoretical scaffold, i.e. ecological dynamics, to understanding the phenomenon of emerging actions, grounded in comprehensive research. In easy to understand terms for me, it can be about education through the physical interacting with the world, when considering implications to PE.
Why this paper appeals to me at this point of my own professional journey? It is because it summarises in an understandable way of where we potentially need to explore much more of, as we ourselves expand on allowing our learners to explore their potential. This further exploration as teachers is nothing new and something we seem to always endeavour to in paper exercises but always not having the time to in reality. This Rudd paper (no pun intended) is worth spending some time on as a reflective way to look at what we have been doing and how to improve. However, as much satisfaction I get from this paper, I also realised the possibility of colleagues reading it going on defensive mode that is quite the usual in much academic sharing situations where there is a hint of ‘either this or that’ implication.
It was good to be led to very interesting summaries of our reliance on Cognitive Load Theory (CLT) (internal, external and germane cognitive load) and Fitts and Posner’s (cognitive, associative and automaticity stages) skill acquisition model. This has been a big influence on how we have been practise teaching whether we know it or not, at least for me it still is to some extent. Basically, a lot of the responsibility for handling knowledge, and therefore skill acquisition, is placed on how our brains, the anatomical structure within our skull, seemingly manages it. In PE, there is even the added conundrum where we as teachers may work on this cognitivist view while our fellow stakeholders sees PE as strictly a physical only endeavour to occupy students when their ‘cognitive load’ reaches breaking point from the class-based subjects.
What this paper examines is a re-envisioning of how we can involve the learner in a teaching situation, to re-balance better the traditional way of creating learning that is based mainly on what is happening within the learner. This re-balancing also needs to involve the world in which the learner is attempting to be better in. It is more a journey taken together with the teacher through carefully thought out lesson designs that consider task-learner-environment.
The concept of non-linear development comes in. It suggest the not so direct path that a learner takes in acquiring skills. While the planning and implementation strategy of a teaching approach is orderly and perhaps even be considered linear, the development of the learner within that structure may have to cope with non-linearity within the learner, between learners and all the time considering the relationship with task and environment. An example for this is when different students develop at different pace and they might not always mimic established, teacher-led techniques at their initial learning phase as their most natural progression. In addition, skills being taught means very little to the learner without focusing on a purpose that makes sense to the learner. This purpose connects to the role a task plays in creating meaning to the life of an individual, represented by a collective perspective to some extent (for practicality, we need to normalise for groups of learners at times). For example, we understand the role of play creating joy. How do we illicit the same feeling joy through play in crafting a purposeful task, if our intent in the learning process is as such?
We are also aware that understanding a concept creates the motivation to want to ‘learn’ more and thus will do well to offer it in our lesson designs. The ecological approached espoused in the papers, above and below, try to hypothesise the way we create movement, emerging solutions, as a result of needing to meet the requirements of what is meaningful to our learners.
I believe that not considering all the intricacies mentioned will still develop the learner but it happens in spite of our attempts in encouraging learning. After all, learning is an adaptation and overcoming mechanism. The difference is the effectiveness of deliberate facilitation of learners’ adaptation and learning (a causal-effect approach) as compared to one that occurs almost incidentally but credited to our practises (correlational).
Some of the authors above, together with Rob Gray – a very active practitioner/academic in perception-action work (ecological dynamics approach to skill acquisition), also published another paper that borrowed from the Social Anthropology based concept of Enskilment from Ingold (as cited in the paper). This paper suggest an Ecological-Anthropological Worldview of Skill, Learning and Education in Sport (Woods, Rudd, Gray, & Davids, 2021). Enskilment cuts through the usual division of mind, body and the world we operate in. The three components of Enskilment are Taskcape (the task environment and its intricacies), Wayfinding (discovery via the whole person interacting with context) and Guided Attention (the expert/teacher guiding). The two papers above have a similar message, as similar as two different scientific perspectives can be, written by mainly the same people. The former paper considers processes within the body to make sense of context interactions while the latter starts off with looking at interactions first to make sense.
Both papers may not be so well received by practitioners (teachers on the ground) not used to the related domains of studies cited to bring out the ideas, even though I feel the ‘story-telling’ approach of Social Anthology connects to us better. This brings to my mind the shame of having to miss so much valuable insights if we do not take risk with our professional development broadening.
Will looking at a behaviour, adaptation, learning, etc. with a wider view something we are comfortable with as practitioners? In the spirit of degeneracy, can we accept that being open to the complexity of even the processes that govern complex systems will help in our teaching mission. Not specifically looking for alternative structures but rather parallel structures working in tandem to accomplish purposeful movement. Perhaps with such thinking, we can better build in redundancies into our teaching, to meet ever changing learner needs within stable and unstable context.
Readings
Rudd, J. R., Woods, C., Correira, V., Seifert, L., & Davids, K. (2021). An ecological dynamics conceptualisation of physical ‘education’: Where we have been and where we could go next. Physical Education and Sport Pedagogy, 293 -306. doi:https://doi.org/10.1080/17408989.2021.1886271
Woods, C. T., Rudd, J., Gray, R., & Davids, K. (2021). Enskilment: an Ecological-Anthropological Worldview of Skill, Learning and Education in Sport. doi:https://doi.org/10.1186/s40798-021-00326-6
Recently, a few encounters got me revisiting a few problematic themes for me.
In a student-led and designed activity for a leadership programme, a group of student leaders introduced the touch-rugby pass as “you can only pass the ball backwards”.
These are students who went through our Physical Education (PE) system and the cue/rule they used was a direct observable expectation of a pass which they conveyed without modification to their peers. Quite a few of the students were throwing the ball by first turning around and passing it backwards, still toward their opponent’s end-zone, meeting the given cue exactly. I have been lamenting on this for our practise for some time, i.e. how we introduce movement evaluation cues directly as teaching cues to our learners. Much of the cues we derive from ideal movement solution may mean little to novices who are still exploring their own range of movement adaptations.
I ended the student leaders’ session by taking over and asking the students the following questions as a simple experiment on cues for learning for me;
Do they know what and where their end-lines were?
Can they differentiate where their own end-lines were and that of their opponent’s?
Will they understand if I say “you can only pass the ball parallel to the end-lines and towards their own end-lines”?
How does the ball move towards opponent’s end-line if they need to heed the previous passing advice?
I stopped at that and will have liked to follow up on this at the next possible session. My take and hope is that such an approach actually makes more sense to novices even though it seems like a lot of effort just to explain the passing-back rule. It makes more sense because we are connecting clear guides that connects to the overall game by putting in true (not relative) directional words in the communication. (I also wont suggest using negative cue, e.g. Do not throw the ball forward.)
Our cognition probably adapts better if we relate a cue that connects to some layer of an action that relates to an external outcome, e.g. move towards the side-lines, go to space that is not defended, pass ball over opponents, target the side that your team-mate is waiting, etc. Reason for this being learners need to understand the consequence of a needed action to the task and environment. These are opposed to cues that are internal to the learner only, e.g. backwards, above your head, below your waist, bend your hands, lift your stick, etc. You will notice the latter cues are usually what you will use to evaluate a technically ideal movement solution for your own evaluation of learning success of the learners. This is an extremely popular way of teaching for many.
This brings to the forefront for me the role of cognition and its influence on how we teach. Without making this paragraph a whole chapter on cognitive models, I still strongly support the idea of cognition as embedded in what we do. This may point to the possibility that our understanding of learning (a cognitive process) does not embrace enough the internal processes that happens. For example, direct teaching sometimes involves introducing a learning objective based on an external need of someone else that has little to do with what the learner needs to comprehend and therefore enact what is needed in relation to task, environment and learner’s value proposition, i.e. task makes sense only because its realised as an activity that adds value to the learner’s life at that point. This happens usually as a consequence of separating cognition and the physical to the detriment of their real existence.
When discussing a touch-rugby (this game seems to always awaken in me much thoughts!) session with a colleague, I asked about a drill that he used which I developed for myself as a result of much effort in figuring out what works best for the learners.
It was a reverse interception game where the team with the ball attempts to tag the team without the ball. I used it to encourage effective passing of the ball primarily. So, instead of being under pressure of interception while passing, they are now in a position to have more time to plan a passing strategy to tag their opponents.
My colleague told me that it was an established drill that he picked up from his own rugby training and he found it very useful. This is where I lamented the long route which I took in figuring it out for myself as oppose to being able to just picking it up from an expert course or book much earlier. On reflection, I realised that I probably just wasn’t in the right frame of professional development when I was younger and probably had little interest in looking at teaching further than breaking skills down exactly into bits for teaching. The value of learning from understanding is true even for us teachers except that we are expected to expedite this for the benefit of effective teaching the soonest.
This added an impetus to my own recent reflection on what has changed or happened for me all these years. Ever since I first had the realisation while teaching of the common recurring themes of Passing, Scoring, Interception and Positioning (use to call this Movement) that keep cropping up for me, I have gone through much realisation. I started out using these labels as rule modification guides, adding in action behaviours a bit later and finally connecting these categories to the science and art of overall development and learning that may not be so linear.
Back then, movement was a simple straightforward action leading to an expected solution and now it is a whole philosophy and science of why, what and how we move in life. In the same vein, I think I need to reflect what has changed for me as a teacher on the ground. I realised my shifting from a technical aspect of Physical Education (PE) to a philosophical one. Being a philosophically guided teacher is not a popular choice in a busy school environment. Many of us are driven by the explicit love of selected sports with an unclear jump to needing to teach movement as a broad life skill, resulting in PE teachers finding joy in teaching only certain games. This is often enough for a PE teaching career but I see changes arising where more depth is needed from us.
My well-meaning colleagues yet again commented that they find it difficult to understand what I am trying to share.
I am not sure if this is a result of a nuts and bolts culture where we want instantly workable solutions or not towards early principle understanding of why things work. I realised my deficiency in providing the former and lack of clarity when sharing the latter. It is not a case of wanting to be academic but rather just a very deep-set belief that it is important to understand the whys of behaviour. My ideal situation is to able to work with an expert practitioner who believes in the whys as much as I lack focus in the whats and hows. I believe our professional development climate also need to reach this balance of expertise awareness and practise. It is a struggle to find this in a busy school culture heavy with admin and short of time.
One drawback in my Professional Development is that I had a very technical one as a personal choice. It was all about technical qualifications from bodies that are run with very little or no reference to pedagogical consideration, usually by non-teachers or specific activity experts. It was qualification courses that are usually attended by very motivated and proficient people who absorb technical knowledge like sponges, very unlike what our learners experience in schools. They were more appropriate for after-school activities than PE lessons I realised, unless there is some conversion process that we use with our pedagogical understanding of learning processes.
Teaching has started out for me as a natural transition of someone who had an active physical experience and wanting to carry on that lifestyle, without any clear explicit thoughts on wanting to nurture others. In my work environment back then, I tried charting a path on wanting to be a good administrator rather than a good teacher, realising on hindsight. I have yet to reach either but clearer now on how important the latter is, years later but I guess never too late.
For a long time, I felt it is important to be scientific, driven by a sense of awe of scientific work rather than learner needs. Later on, I realised how much more the science makes sense when the philosophical backing is strong, e.g. a student learning how to run into position to receive a moving leather projectile technically and scientifically seems very simplistic and unnecessary until we present it together with the beautifulgame. The game is such only when we realised its contribution to an individual’s life. We make a big assumption when we assume this is a given or that just going through the motion of a technical lesson, movement appreciation automatically takes place. A philosophical position for me represents a powerful force that influences internal personal and professional compasses in whatever we do.
Recently in a sharing, the issue of dealing with students who do not meet specific technical outcomes, i.e. not able to execute a skill, was brought up. If we are focused on content and assessmentas a 2-part process, the struggle to find the best strategy to teach a specific skill will keep cropping up as we go through learners with very varied abilities and expectations that are beyond needing to show an action because the teacher says so. If we throw in pedagogy into the ring with content and assessment as a continuous cycle (not a linear one starting from one of the components) of equal partners, then we will have more aligned teaching practises to what we want to assess, perhaps lessening the issues of how to teach a specific skill. If we developed pedagogy closely with the sciences of learning and the role of the individual in a developing society/environment, then we might not have such specific technical outcomes as primary but rather as secondary indicators only, second to the more important demonstration of understanding why any selected technical expectations are deemed as milestones.
Then, there might be a push away from counting attempts, mimicking model movement answers, etc. and a bigger focus on the possibilities of the human body learning a necessary life-skill. This does not mean that we have a bunch of learners who can only recite verses of understanding but useless in play. The two are not dichotomies and we need realisation that it can easily mutually complementing. This issue parallels attempts we see in education when we try to separate the mind/cognition and the body. The mind is not an anatomical structure but a function that exist through whole body action.
I have long subsume game under the bigger umbrella of recreational movement. I have to almost agree that this may not be necessary as a condition for an effective lesson designer. However, I do strongly believe that there needs to be a physical activity – game – movement philosophical/social/scientific approach (is this Physical Literacy that clarifies the value proposition mentioned in earlier paragraph?) that needs to appear in every teachers’ training or early experience in PE.
We need to move PE away from it being considered as just an opportunity to keep students busy and help them meet the necessary movement quota for healthy living. In the preceding sentences, it reflects a common issue of equating physical education to physical activities, daily exercise requirements, keeping student physically active as an attempt to recuperate the cognitive, etc. These all should be secondary indicators of desired outcome that are useful but do not define or prescribe the intervention. This happens when we want quick results in observable proxies of healthy living, which are not valid, it does not cause healthy living habits, or reliable, it changes at every measure depending on what behaviour you are orchestrating at the moment.
I was watching a semi-pro football team training recently. They definitely spent a fair amount of time building up their capacity in various developmental aspects through different drills and activities. Especially in the area of set pieces and fitness from the short time I manage to observe. Different people were leading different groups. I can sort of make out who the coach, the physical trainer, the assistants, etc. were. They were working with the different groups with different expectations with eventual outcomes probably about contributing to overall play. Picking out any one activity, I try to consider if I will use it for my own students during Physical Education (PE) and the conclusion was probably not exactly but modified to meet an objective that probably wasn’t the original intention of the football team’s. This is also always a thought when I observe my peers at work. I try looking closer at our differences in the way we handle teaching. That got me thinking about how we always seemingly manage to do the job regardless of approach. If we assume that internal learning process effectiveness and outcome quality is related in the same direction, not a realistic assumption, the question arises of how are learners adapting to different approaches. I am not referring purely to the obvious learning outcomes of what and when but also the why in teaching strategies.
The next understanding that I wanted was what if the same group of learners pass through different teachers at any one learning phase of their life, e.g. in a term. This also happened to me quite a bit recently as I took classes of colleagues who could not be around. How is it possible that if learners use very specific learning mechanism within themselves, they still manage to get through different teaching environments rather seamlessly despite the different learning landscapes? (Learning mechanisms here refer to the detailed functional and mechanical processes within the body that allows learning to be recognized and locked-in. This is represented by ideas from ecological dynamics, cognition theories, fMRI (functional MRI) studies, etc. – everything that I am not well versed in but trying to know more of at a practitioner level. It does not refer to differentiated learner needs and popular teaching implementation styles that shows learning taking place from an input-output perspective.)
Of course, one probable answer is that learning mechanisms have the ability to adapt to reach an objective that is desired, in spite of what we do as teachers. What influences this adaptation? If we know this, can we better facilitate intentional facilitative constraints, as oppose to creating unintended barriers to learning?
For example, if internal learning mechanism work by the process of generating an outcome, what happens when we forward-feed a decomposed (deconstructed) action of a desire skill or objective?
At the one extreme of forward-feeding, does the learning mechanisms change fundamentally or is there ability in the mechanism where the learner will adapt inputs to fit into its original need to generate a response.
This may suggest a teacher connection that can create learning pathways that are not the expected, as opposed to learners learning only in a way dictated by strict scientific laws. Can the teacher in the learner-task-environment action landscape manipulate the learning mechanisms in a big way? The teacher constraint is a directly active one that is different from the task and environment passive constraint, i.e. they exist in the way the lesson is construed by teacher. Can this teacher constraint go as far as changing internal learning mechanisms?
All these seem awfully like inconsequential insights but the interest for me on this came when I keep observing how different teachers can create similar outcomes via very different ways. The jury is out on the efficiency in terms of quality and time needed of such similar outcomes. These different ways are not usually analysed in relation to necessary internal learning mechanisms other than there is a successful outcome and therefore the strategy is effective.
We sometimes see this in the teacher who seem to have successful outcomes in unique ways that we may not all understand and therefore put it to their personality, charisma or just plain old experience.
This is a significant shift in my own personal journey to understand learning, where I spent a lot of time looking at internal (to the learner) learning processes that do not consider teacher personality, charisma or experience as much as perhaps it could. Recently a colleague shared an article https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/opinion-what-makes-a-great-teacher-pedagogy-or-personality/2019/09 that suggest the X-factor that we observe from successful teachers cannot be separated from the fundamentals of good teaching, i.e. pedagogy, self-awareness, knowledge of content, passion for content, etc. We do tend to isolate the more obvious teacher behaviour of personality, charisma and experience from the fundamentals of good teaching. One drawback to this is writing off teachers without it and on the flipside, suggesting that it is needed for teachers to succeed.
My extended thoughts on these are the extent that these holistic combination of qualities able to shape the internal learning processes of learners. For example;
Can embedded cognition elements also exist effectively when considered as external and facilitated that way, i.e. assuming it’s external influence in lesson design regardless of its actual mechanics,
Can observable decomposed component skills be just as effective in teaching offerings as generating skills from fundamental needs and movements, and
Can affective/physical/cognitive education be taught as a stand-alone understanding before being embedded in an authentic or represenattive context (similar to first point)?
If physical/cognitive/affective responses to an affordance allows the learner to fulfil a need to accomplish an objective provided for by that affordance which was designed and put in place by a teacher, will it be reasonable to say that teacher expectations can also significantly influence how a response come about? This might suggest we can get similar learning outcomes from different learning scenarios, i.e. the learning process of reacting to an affordance may or may not be universal but different circumstances can deliver similar outcomes. This can also suggest the existence of multiple internal pathways that might indicate differences in the way learning takes place with different teachers. Are the two-way arrows depicted in Diagram 1 manipulating internal learning mechanisms in the learner possible?
The above may seem reasonable and popular perspectives for practitioners but may not be thought of together with internal learning mechanisms, i.e. a bottom-up approach. Much more effort is usually put into top-down perspectives, i.e. looking at implementation strategies that work and replicating. As a practising teacher, all these are important to me as a person who looks probably a bit too much into the whys (sometimes I feel like that) of learning in a very time-starved profession where lots needs to be done within a class and even more so out of it. I am also seeking out understanding to validate what I have been doing for over two decades, towards both extremes of right and wrong. The later will be a scary thought but necessary to move forward.
My understanding at this point in time is that descriptors like decomposition (deconstructing a skill), generacy (generating a skill from a need or a fundamental movement that represents a basic need), affordances (providing that possibility of a desired outcome), etc. get their significance from well-meaning science and ultimately demonstrate multi-faceted processes. The understanding we have of these descriptors are subjective to us and the learners for whom we offer the learning environment we are designing for. Conflicting processes can be at play in the designing of a lesson and within the learner in it. For example, the learner may face a deconstructed skill introduction (decomposition) but use a skill generating internal mechanism to make sense of it. It might even be the opposite if indeed theories of traditional cognitive sciences are reasonable. Can the way a teacher offers a lesson change the internal mechanism of learning for a learner, resulting in clear alignment between teacher approach and internal learning mechanisms? This question is probably too simplistic to capture what is really happening.
Currently, as teachers, we rely on our field’s current capacity and resource availability to accomplish what is needed in the required amount of time.
After about three years of formally putting personal thoughts to paper in order to expedite a more deliberate reflection habit within myself and hopefully growing it in the community, what are my outcomes? I must say that every one of my articles were written as a result of an observation, some experience, some reading and connecting it to what I think I need to do better as a Physical Education (PE) teacher. The role of a PE teacher beyond tangible specific outcomes within specific sports/fitness domains deliverables are seems vague to me, even now. When asked, which is often, what do we do in the department, I end up struggling with answers that are full of words that attempts to be all encompassing but ending up vague. This is especially so when compared to the academic subjects where results of test and exams are very popular indicators of success. In the same vein, I don’t hear these departments putting much emphasise on the need to have broad and holistic educational aims that are non-technical but they get some respite from it as tangible operational outcomes in the near future seems more popular than long term benefits as key performance indicators. However, the broad educational aims and needs are constantly being acknowledge at the policy and whole-school publicity level.
If the above sounds pessimistic, it probably is to some level as the energy I derived from probing is a result of a personal lack of understanding and wanting to overcome it. A deeper comprehension of Physical Literacy and the place of it in life is an approach that I took to make sense of what I am supposed to do as a teacher. It is difficult for me to accept that our main job is sending out pupils into the real world only with outcome-focused experiences in fitness, health and selected games, even though I accept that this could be sufficient after all.
This maybe an unfair oversimplification. I find outcome-focussed experiences occupying a lot of the discussion for PE planning. There is a lack of attention to why we do things. There is lack of depth in the underpinnings of why we do things. There is a lot of emphasis on the what and how of fitness, health and activities. I will go out on a limb to say we are expected to operate as instructors, train like instructors, do professional development like instructors and usually give up to that role. There is also intention and effort being put in by PE teachers in developing pupils holistically but this is usually assumed separated from the focus of PE, where technical clarity of established skills reigns supreme. There is a lack of leveraging on the role of voluntary non-survival movement and what this means in leading a better life. Is this Physical Literacy?
The above preceding paragraphs could very well be a result of misinformed expectations due to own lack of capacity to embrace PE as an activity driven subject. It is a vicious cycle where the more energy put into exploring the whys results in less time in the whats and hows, which potentially effects the interest level of pupils and external observers where the active robustness of a PE session is an important evaluation of success. Again, is this sufficient?
Recently again, I ponder on the role of a Physical Literacy (PL) position to help in our understanding and role as PE teachers. In whatever educational community we belong to, we have loads of clear directions of what needs to be done through subject syllabus, model scheme of work, model lesson plans and countless examples of activities. What we may not have is the clarity of why we do what we do.
For example, we are clear that we want PE to be effective in creating a generation of responsible citizens that can take care of themselves in health through a responsible lifestyle that includes physical activities and knowledge of health and fitness. If wanting to go deeper, a brief summarised thinking like this may not affect sufficiently the understanding of the role of physical movement in individual development. How has movement evolved from important survival needs (we use to move for survival) to just as important recreational needs (we move to improve quality of life beyond that for survival)? This understanding takes much effort from an individual teacher to encourage exploring and delving deeper but it needs institution support structures, i.e. training, professional development and practise. I imagine no amount of formal words and directives can create this type of personal teacher thinking. It is often that this is the furthest thing from the mind of a technically skilful teacher imparting specific skills to their pupils, e.g. a passing drill is just a passing drill for better game play.
It seems that the above paragraph is hinting on the necessary need to have a philosophical stance. Is it possible to understand physical literacy without a philosophical stance? If without an explicit and/or implicit study and understanding of movement and life philosophy, does literacy statements sound like repeats of syllabus statement? The understanding of philosophy and its role to teaching is part of any teacher training but how effective is its attempt to connect to everyday teaching practises and its long term application? Is it taken merely as a teacher-training subject with its uses only limited in that period of internship? In a life-skill subject like PE, where most teacher are successful exemplars of leading a physical life (see previous article on learning from failures of the physical life to understand PE better), it is sometimes difficult to see the role of PE as more than just expected physical movements. I feel that students also do not explicitly see the subject deeper than its current movement form, corresponding with teaching intervention experienced. It has a status of a seemingly dead-end subject where no future connection is necessary other than being expected to replicate learned movements and behaviour. However, PE activities are usually loved for its instant fun and play element.
What do we need to change and exactly why?
Is this even something that we want to explore further to teach better?
I also keep revisiting the notion of why we need to consider the learning process in PE at a level that is beyond the observable. For me, this is a major contributing factor to understanding physical literacy and strengthening a personal teaching philosophy, connecting it to the role of movement in life and how it came to be. This was compounded by a recent discussion amongst colleagues on how best to introduce the squat technique to students, representing the many discussions over close and open skills that takes up a lot of time in our fraternity. The textbook answer to the proper squat involves much technical specifications that are mainly internally focused. I see a difference in cues used by experts to identify and evaluate movement and the cues that are presented to novice learners that corresponds to how learning takes place.
The Turing test, originally called the imitation game by Alan Turing in 1950, is a test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. Turing proposed that a human evaluator would judge natural language conversations between a human and a machine designed to generate human-like responses. The evaluator would be aware that one of the two partners in conversation is a machine, and all participants would be separated from one another. The conversation would be limited to a text-only channel such as a computer keyboard and screen so the result would not depend on the machine’s ability to render words as speech. If the evaluator cannot reliably tell the machine from the human, the machine is said to have passed the test. The test results do not depend on the machine’s ability to give correct answers to questions, only how closely its answers resemble those a human would give.
The Turing Test is an evaluation of artificial intelligence ability to think like a human. If this test is valid, an assumption will be that humans think and therefore learn much like an advance computer and therefore it is appropriate to test a computer for human thinking process by using parameters that are typical for it, i.e. inputting instructions that are binary, decomposed actions, etc. The Chinese Roomargument is a retort to this test. A key point for me here is that cognition may be a multi-faceted process that is not merely be reverse engineering a desired outcome superficially and then putting it together to facilitate the cognitive process.
Searle’s thought experiment begins with this hypothetical premise: suppose that artificial intelligence research has succeeded in constructing a computer that behaves as if it understands Chinese. It takes Chinese characters as input and, by following the instructions of a computer program, produces other Chinese characters, which it presents as output. Suppose, says Searle, that this computer performs its task so convincingly that it comfortably passes the Turing test: it convinces a human Chinese speaker that the program is itself a live Chinese speaker. To all of the questions that the person asks, it makes appropriate responses, such that any Chinese speaker would be convinced that they are talking to another Chinese-speaking human being.
The Chinese Roomargument points to the fact that we place values on symbols as part of a thinking ‘machine’, to make sense of it or to be able to respond because we are expected to for survival or otherwise. It suggest that we can have absolutely no idea what a symbol means but can fully respond to it by some conversion process that is not the ‘learning’ cognition that is expected. This conversion process is behind closed doors (embedded somewhat) and may not be obvious to an external observer of outcomes. The teacher may be feeding symbols, e.g. cues and commands, thinking that learning is being facilitated intimately when in fact a conversion process is taking place that is just coping with the teachers expected outcomes.
The question I pondered for a while is what if this is acceptable for us as teachers. Meaning, it may not be our business as teachers to intervene at detailed processes behind closed doors but just focus on the effective feeding of information. Of course, my gut feel is that if we are thinking about this then it ought to be our business also. If we are not thinking about it, it is no surprise when some of us do not explicitly seek out processes deeper than teacher input – learner output level, i.e. we spent a lot of time at being masters of implementation strategies.
I liked the perspective offered behind these two simple illustrations to my lay mind. It got me thinking deeper even if not in the best possible direction as intended. My conclusion at this stage is that as teachers, we balance what we feed under the door with the need to also make a deliberate attempt to facilitate what is happening behind that door. We may not have the time, the expertise nor in the right fields to be overtly concern with theoretical sound combinations of cues that directly and indirectly facilitate learning. We also have to consider the holistic development of the child that involves the affective and the different domains involvement of daily school life that have its own influences to learning processes.
Reinventing The Game - RTG 