| Alternative Approaches to Teaching Middle and High School Physical Education
Over the past few weeks I’ve had the opportunity to share information about the “Tactical Games Approach” to teaching sport skills with my college students. If you haven’t tried this approach, I encourage you to learn more and give it a try. By involving students immediately in modified games, you avoid students constantly asking, “When are we going to play games?” And perhaps more importantly, students see the relationship of skills practice to successful game performance. Teaching sport concepts and skills: A tactical games approach, a book by Steve Mitchell, Judy Oslin, and Linda Griffin is a highly recommended resource.
The positive response from my students, and their obvious skill improvement, reinforced to me the importance of getting students skillful enough to successfully play games. Too often we simply “expose” students to skills, but never give them enough time to become skillful. The “games” that result publicly display their lack of skillfulness. Some students quickly get off task, while others disguise their embarrassment by acting as if being unskilled is satisfying. It’s no fun for students, disappointing for teachers, and unlikely to motivate anyone to want to spend any longer than is necessary in this activity. And it surely fails to promote active and healthy lifestyles.
Contrast this experience with coaching, and many differences are obvious. I suspect about half of my college students are qualifying as physical education teachers because they want to coach. And they’ll probably do a great job. Unfortunately, as so often over the past 20 years, I’ll never see them again at any PE workshops, see their names celebrated for quality PE teaching, or see their schools recognized for an outstanding physical education program. It’s tempting to blame coaching as the problem, but it really isn’t. The fact is that coaching is frequently more satisfying than middle school and secondary PE teaching. Why is this?
Among the various differences, one that stands out to me is the fact that students in athletics actually become skillful. They spend long enough practicing to develop competency. And being competent, they enjoy games and sports the way they were meant to be played. Why would anyone want to persist in doing something they do poorly? But that’s exactly what happens in middle and high school PE programs where students are exposed to lots of different activities, yet master none. As a teacher, it is surely more enjoyable to see students improve to the extent they become skillful? Hence, the attraction of coaching. Coaches see improvement, and get to enjoy games and sports played at a level of proficiency that PE teachers rarely experience.
It’s important we reflect on ways we can make middle and high school physical education teaching experiences more enjoyable and motivating. And not just for the benefit of our students! Twenty to thirty years is a long time to spend most of the day being frustrated in exchange for the rewards of after-school coaching. It doesn’t have to be that way. No one is forcing us to try to teach so many skills to our students. And no one will criticize us if we choose to teach less, but better. We have so much to gain. How much more fun would it be to see real student improvement? And how much more motivating would it be for our students to learn what it feels like to be skillful?
I’ve included below a short piece I wrote for TEPE on this topic, because contrary to “coach-bashing” I think we can learn a lot by thinking about what makes coaching such a pleasurable experience.
Steve Jefferies, Publisher
PELINKS4U
What Can Physical Educators Learn from Coaches?
The following article first appeared in Teaching Elementary Physical Education [TEPE], November 2005. It is reprinted by permission from Human Kinetics. You can also go to Human Kinetics for more information on TEPE and other Human Kinetics journals.
Nearly 20 year ago, Daryl Siedentop wrote that in good high school physical education programs PE teachers rarely coached. His point wasn’t that coaching developed bad teaching habits, but rather that it was difficult to successfully combine both jobs.
The planning and preparation needed to effectively teach, or successfully coach, takes time. Trying to do both, while meeting family and other social responsibilities, can easily become a time management nightmare. And because successful teaching is less noticed, judged, or rewarded than successful coaching, it’s understandable that many teacher-coaches choose to focus most of their energy on athletics.
As a teacher-educator, I routinely tell our new graduates to consider avoiding coaching responsibilities when first hired. At the very least I suggest that they avoid immediately coaching 3 seasons and accepting head coaching positions. Sometimes I’m accused of not liking athletics or coaches. That’s not true. Athletics can be a wonderful educational experience. And recently I’ve come to believe that all physical educators - including those who coach - could learn a lot if they reflected more about the characteristics of successful coaching programs.
For example, the best athletic programs are run by well-organized individuals who spend many hours planning out their season. Coaches are goal oriented, and knowing what they want to achieve, plan accordingly. They write daily practice plans that build progressively upon the skills of their athletes. Each day has a focus. A typical 10-week coaching season includes 50 practice days, or more than 100 hours of instruction. During this time only a small number of skills are taught. The clear objective is to get participants skillful enough to perform competently in competitive games.
Coaches know that unskilled athletes will not perform well. Poorly skilled athletes will impact the success of their programs. During practice, coaches are careful to give personal feedback, assess individual abilities, observe and correct errors, and monitor their athletes’ motivation. They frequently take time to develop close personal relationships with athletes, and often with their athletes’ parents, because they recognize these relationships can make or break their programs.
How does this compare to effective physical education teaching? As in athletics, quality physical education programs take time to plan and prepare. But what about the focus? Coaches typically work with the most highly skilled students, and yet have a limited instructional focus. What sense does it make for physical educators to attempt to teach much more, to lesser skilled students, in a shorter time span?! Think about it. If students in elementary school meet twice weekly for 30 minutes, in an entire school year they will only have about 72 hours of instruction. But in less time than a coach will spend on developing the few skills needed to play one sport, physical educators often expect students to learn many different motor skills.
Because physical educators spend so much less time on skill instruction they have limited opportunities to assess, to provide feedback, to help students correct errors - in short, to become competent and skillful movers. The argument of course is that we need to provide children with many different movement experiences. But I wonder if we are fooling ourselves? Are we correct in believing that this variety will motivate students to become physically active? And where and when do we think our students are going to develop proficiency in these skills?
We commonly argue that students become bored if we continue with instruction on a limited number of skills for more than a few lessons. Is this true? Or is student boredom and frustration actually the result of not spending enough time on skills, to become competent enough to perform them successfully? How many athletes complain of boredom while participating in the same sport for an entire season? People don’t get bored when they are successful at something. As adults we persist in those activities in which we have skill, and avoid those we perform poorly.
What can physical educators learn from coaches? Perhaps our PE curriculums would be more successful if we focused on getting our students to become more proficient in a limited number of skills. And perhaps our PE teacher-coaches need to realize, that if they teach students in their PE classes the same way they teach their athletes, all students would enjoy a quality learning experience.
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