That was Then…This is Now:

Celebrating PETE’s Past While Facing The Challenges In Its Future

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Hello. My name is Mike Metzler, and I am a PETE professor at Georgia State University. The co-author of this paper is Lynn Housner, also a PETE professor, from West Virginia University. Lynn and I were asked to do the summary session at the 2009 NASPE PETE conference in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

Our paper was entitled, [slide 1] That was Then…This is Now: Celebrating PETE’s Past While Facing The Challenges In Its Future, and we are very are pleased that pelinks4u is allowing us to present our combined paper and slides to you. Due to a previous commitment, Dr. Housner was not able to be present in Myrtle Beach. However Lynn made a major contribution to what we said at the NASPE PETE conference, and deserves a full portion of credit for what you might find agreeable, as well as all of the blame for anything that rubs you the wrong way. Since he could not be there in person, I told Lynn that I’d give him up in a heartbeat, and there you have it.

We are going to start by highlighting some of the many notable achievements by the PETE professoriate over the last 40 years. Along the way, I’ll ask you to identify some of the most significant events in PETE history since 1970 - adding to our own list of major events and development in each decade. And, because we just can’t leave well enough alone, we’ll go from touting PETE’s successes to discussing some of the challenges facing our collective future - things that will require taking a long hard look at who we are and what we do, even suggesting that we re-examine some of our core values as a community of researchers, scholars and teacher educators.

[slide 2] The year is 1971. The event is the publication of the themed January issue of Quest, “Educational change in the teaching of physical education.” [slide 3] In that issue, Shirl Hoffman carries on a self debate over the question of “Which is better? - the traditional “PE method” or some of the more innovative, theory-based methods that had been introduced in the previous several years.” [slide 4] He was referring, mostly, of course, to Mosston’s Spectrum of Teaching Styles, and also to the pedagogy used for movement education and other inquiry-based instruction.

In the end, Hoffman admits that he couldn’t really answer his own question, because there existed no empirical knowledge base from which to do so. He lamented, [slide 5] “The writer confesses that he does not know what behaviors constitute good teaching and welcomes enlightenment. Regardless of the real or imagined merits of any method, new alternatives for teaching are always worthy of at least systematic and patient exploration.” (p. 56). Other articles in that same monograph, by Kate Barrett, Bill Anderson, Sylvia Fishman and Anderson, and Neil Dougherty presented similar assessments of the state of research on teaching physical education: lots of questions, lots of gaps in our knowledge base, and lots of frustration - but beneath all that, lots of hope.

[slide 6] Some of that hope was actually in the process of being fulfilled as those articles were published in 1971. In another Quest monograph, published in1977 Larry Locke declared that there was indeed, “New hope for the dismal science of research on teaching physical education.” Much of that hope came from his review of research on teaching that had been completed from 1970 to 1972. From that, he surmised [slide 7]:

“By stretching things a little we have accumulated no more than 50 studies, but the movement is underway and gaining momentum. If we have any dream of a physical education in which the instructional process is informed by knowledge born of disciplined inquiry, then the new forms of research on teaching are our foothold on the future.” (p. 11).

The 50 or so studies completed between 1970 and Locke’s 1977 article represented nothing less than the initial row of building blocks for an empirical foundation for teaching and teacher education called for by Hoffman, Barrett, and others. From that modest foundation, we began to build a respected field of study with four main components: 1) research on teaching and learning, 2) research on teachers, 3) research on teacher education, and 4) teacher education programming. The PETE professoriate can claim an impressive, if not long, history of significant events and developments that have served to move us forward in the four main areas just mentioned. What I would like to do now is touch on a sampling of what we consider to be the most important of those events and developments over the last four decades.

The 1970s

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[slide 8] Undoubtedly, the most important development in PETE’s history was the establishment of doctoral programs in the 1970s at several of the then-Research I universities. An academic discipline cannot exist, much less grow and mature, without rigorous doctoral programs and competent faculty mentors in them who can prepare the next generations of researchers and teacher educators. The most notable early PETE doctoral programs were led by Bill Anderson at Teacher’s College, John Nixon at Stanford, Mike Sherman at the University of Pittsburgh, John Cheffers at Boston University, Larry Locke at the University of Massachusetts, and Daryl Siedentop at The Ohio State University. I could cite Murray Mitchell’s 1992 JTPE article on the genealogy of PETE professors and students, but at this presentation I asked the audience to raise their hand if they either attended one of those programs or had a major professor who did - well over half of the people in the room raised a hand!

[slide 9] Pedagogically, the 1970s were dominated by Mosston’s Spectrum of Teaching Styles, a conceptualization of pedagogical knowledge that is still used in many PETE programs today. [slide 10] In that same decade, we established movement-based curriculums and instruction for Elementary PE.

[slide 11] Please pause your player and take a few moments to think about and write down your own significant events in PETE during the 1970s.

The 1980s

[slide 12] Those doctoral programs began to bear fruit for PETE’s rapidly expanding knowledge base in the 1980s as we established several distinct lines of inquiry. Among them were: numerous descriptions of teacher and student behavior with observations systems like CAFIAS and ALT-PE; teacher socialization; teacher-coach role conflict; the hidden curriculum; teacher and student cognition; teacher induction, and interventions to improve teacher education and P-12 instruction.

The 1980s also saw us building an infrastructure to support our research agendas, disseminate new knowledge, and guide the conduct of teacher education programs. [slide 13] The Journal of Teaching in Physical Education was started in 1981by Mark Freedman and myself, largely to fill the need for a reputable research and topical journal for the rapidly expanding PETE scholarly community. [slide 14] The need for JTPE quickly became evident as it went from being produced on my kitchen table in Blacksburg to being bought out by Human Kinetics Publishers in four short years, at which time it had a global circulation of over 1,200 subscribers.

If the dissemination of knowledge is the lifeblood of an academic field, then JTPE has served that function well in PETE for nearly thirty years now. Wow! Can that be true? Seems like only yesterday when Mark and I met as his stuffy apartment in New Jersey and discussed how we would start this new journal, while watching the Red Sox and Yankees on TV. He was the Yankees fan, I was the ‘Sox fan!

But the PETE professoriate didn’t stop there. [slide 15] In that same decade, we developed other ways to disseminate our expanding knowledge base. The Big 10 Body of Knowledge Symposium was hosted by Tom Templin and Jan Olson at Purdue in 1982. The resulting Proceedings [slide 16] became a treasure trove of readings for PETE professors and graduate students. In 1984 we participated in our own separate scientific section at the Olympic Scientific Congress in Eugene, Oregon. In 1986, led by Lynn Housner, PETE entered the Big Leagues by establishing the AERA Special Interest Group for Research on Teaching and Instruction in Physical Education. Just one year later, the SIG hosted its first Invisible College [slide 17], which promoted a more informal way for us to interact about issues relevant to research and teacher education.

Both the SIG and the IC are still going strong today. And, what did we talk about in Falls Church 22 years ago? Teacher socialization, the Spectrum of Teaching Styles, Teacher Education Reform (a la The Holmes Group), instructional skills, teacher knowledge, research on teaching, and reviewing scholarly writing. No matter how some things change, many things manage to stay the same.

[slide 18] In the 80s we had a sufficiently large knowledge base on teaching that it could be packaged into texts for pre-service and in-service teachers, [slide 19], most notably those by Daryl Siedentop and Judy Rink, facilitating a focus on effective teaching skills for PE that we still recognize as a large part of “Best Practice” today.

[slide 20] We also continued to expand our research paradigms in the 1980s, with many PETE researchers turning to an array of qualitative inquiry methods for data collection and analysis. That shift surfaced at the Purdue conference, and became evident to all as Larry Locke published his 1989 tutorial on qualitative research in the staunchest of quantitative journals, Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport. I suspect that Jerry Thomas and Karl Newell, are still wondering how that could have possibly happened in their lifetimes.

[slide 21] We also took on key issues for the conduct of physical education programs in P-12 schools in the 1980s with two themed issues of JOPERD, one appropriately called “High School PE: Problems and Possibilities” and the other called “Profiles in Excellence” which highlighted several exceptional PE teachers who were able to overcome the many obstacles that stood in the way of providing quality instruction. [slide 22] We also devoted entire conferences, apart from the annual AAHPERD conference, to issues in P-12 PE, such as the 1984 conference on preparing elementary specialists.

[slide 23] Please pause your player and take a few moments to think about and write down your own significant events in PETE during the 1980s.

The 1990s

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[slide 24] The infrastructure we built in the 1970s and 1980s served us well as we headed into the next decade, which also saw a number of significant developments and events taking place in PETE. [slide 25] Among the most important developments was the publication of the first Standards for Beginning Physical Education Teachers in 1995, which were among the first set of standards published by one of the NCATE SPAs.

[slide 26] It was during the 1990s that we developed a number of curriculum models and instructional models designed for physical education’s unique and broad set of student learning outcomes. We had curriculum models that were based on things like Skill Themes, Adventure Education, Fitness, Sport Education, and more; We even had one that came with a strong empirical base to support it - SPARK, developed by Thom McKenzie and his colleagues and funded from a series of large federal grants.

[slide 27] We also saw a number of instructional models being introduced or gaining widespread acceptance in those years. Teaching Games for Understanding was developed in England in the 1980’s but came into prominence in the US as the Tactical Games model with the publication by Griffin, Mitchell and Oslin. Along with that model, Hellison’s TPSR and Siedentop’s Sport Education seemed to appear in a large number of teacher education programs and P-12 almost overnight. The truth is, those models had been around for some time—it just took us a while to shift our notion of pedagogical content knowledge from teaching styles, to instructional strategies, to instructional models.

[slide 28] The PETE community was productive and dynamic enough that it could support focused conferences, as a way to disseminate our still-expanding knowledge base, and to present Best Practice in the conduct of our teacher education programs. If my memory serves me correctly, this is the fourth NASPE PETE conference since 1999, and we can add to those the Historic Traditions conference in Pittsburgh in 2007.

[slide 29] Please pause your player and take a few moments to think about and write down your own significant events in PETE during the 1900s.

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