Joy Butler

Curriculum constructions of ability: enhancing learning through Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) as a curriculum model

This article examines the curricular constructions that influence our perceptions of learner ‘ability’ within games education. Games education has both inherent and intrinsic value for learners, and within this context, teachers make important choices about what they believe will be of most value and interest for students. This in turn impacts the way that the curriculum is constructed and developed. Extrinsic cultural and social values have also had an impact upon the discipline. These values have been usefully summarized by Jewett as five value orientations: (1) disciplinary mastery, (2) self-actualization, (3) social reconstruction, (4) learning process and (5) ecological integration. Identification of the philosophical principles which underpin the curriculum allows the reflective part of the praxis to take place. These five value orientations provide critical reference points for my exploration of the different ways in which two curricula constructions frame ability. Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) and the more familiar model of Technique-Based or Direct Instruction are considered, not to further the methodology debate, but to illustrate how each frames ability differently. This will be achieved by examining the context and culture within which each has developed. Finally, a closer examination will be made of the TGfU curriculum model in terms of the ways in which it defines learner ability. It is suggested that, TGfU offers a more inclusive way to think about ability in PE by employing a range of value orientations. As teachers encourage learners to invent their own games, they help them to develop respect for equal justice and for free and open inquiry (social reconstruction). In this way, learners come to appreciate and understand their responsibility to protect individual and collective rights and freedoms. When it comes to teaching democracy, it is clearly important to pay close attention to the entire context in which learning takes place, since by definition, the notion of democracy applies to individuals as they operate within community. The TGfU approach lends itself to the teaching of democracy in schools, since it empowers both teacher and learner and invites them to question the status quo (ecological integration). In this way, players focus on creating play as a shared experience, not just on being winners.

The Role that Socialization Can Play in Promoting Teaching Games for Understanding

esearch suggests that when people make a decision to enter a particular profession, such as physical education, they go through three distinct phases of socialization: recruitment, professional socialization, and occupational R socialization. This article will discuss how these phases can affect the ways in which physical education teachers teach games to their pupils. As teacher educators, we believe that physical education teacher education (PETE) programs should challenge students to consider alternate methods and strategies of teaching physical education. One such alternative strategy for teaching games is through a tacticalunderstanding approach. The recruitment phase comprises the experiences that people have when they are young. People who choose to become physical education teachers have been socialized into and through sport (Lawson, 1986). In particular, sport experiences in school (physical education classes, intramurals, and interscholastic sports), as well as experiences outside of school (recreational activities and youth sport programs), play a major role in helping someone decide that they want to pursue a teaching career in physical education. The professional socialization phase consists of the experiences that people live through when they are training to enter the teaching profession. These experiences occur at the higher education level and include courses of study, early field experiences, and student teaching. The final stage of teacher socialization is occupational socialization, which refers to the experiences that teachers have when employed as physical education teachers in schools. This phase is complicated, but it includes learning what works in the real world of teaching and dealing with conditions in the workplace that affect teachers, both inside and outside the class setting (Solomon, Worthy, & Carter, 1993).

Top 10 Research Questions Related to Teaching Games for Understanding

In this article, we elaborate on 10 current research questions related to the “teaching games for understanding” (TGfU) approach with the objective of both developing the model itself and fostering game understanding, tactical decision making, and game-playing ability in invasion and net/wall games: (1) How can existing scientific approaches from different disciplines be used to enhance game play for beginners and proficient players? (2) How can state-of-the-art technology be integrated to game-play evaluations of beginners and proficient players by employing corresponding assessments? (4) How can complexity thinking be utilized to shape day-to-day physical education (PE) and coaching practices? (5) How can game making/designing be helpfully utilized for emergent learning? (6) How could purposeful game design create constraints that enable tactical understanding and skill development through adaptive learning and distributed cognition? (7) How can teacher/coach development programs benefit from game-centered approaches? (8) How can TGfU-related approaches be implemented in teacher or coach education with the goal of facilitating preservice and in-service teachers/coaches’ learning to teach and thereby foster their professional development from novices to experienced practitioners? (9) Can the TGfU approach be considered a helpful model across different cultures? (10) Can physical/psychomotor, cognitive, affective/social, and cultural development be fostered via TGfU approaches? The answers to these questions are critical not only for the advancement of teaching and coaching in PE and sport-based clubs, but also for an in-depth discussion on new scientific avenues and technological tools.

Complexity Thinking in PE: Game-Centred Approaches, Games as Complex Adaptive Systems, and Ecological Values.

Background: This article draws on the literature relating to game-centred approaches (GCAs), such as Teaching Games for Understanding, and dynamical systems views of motor learning to demonstrate a convergence of ideas around games as complex adaptive learning systems. This convergence is organized under the title ‘complexity thinking’ and gives rise to a comprehensive model of game-based learning that addresses theoretical and practitioner considerations relevant to researchers and teachers. Complexity thinking is also partnered with an ecological integration value orientation to reinforce the dominant purposes of game-based learning in physical education. Key concepts: The study of game-based learning from a complexity thinking perspective relies on the foundational alignment of game characteristics with those of complex learning systems. Both complex learning systems and games are (a) comprised of co-dependent agents, (b) self-organizing, (c) open to disturbance, (d) sites of co-emergent learning, (e) open to varying experiences or interpretations of time, and (f) able to evolve their structures in response to feedback. Considering games as learning systems opens the door to consideration of the system being as sustainable and adaptable as it can. Sustainability, adaptation potential, and engagement levels emerge from the ‘game as learning system’ discussion in order to provide insight into the functioning of the game. High levels of engagement and sustainability are the presented goals for teachers working from a complexity thinking perspective. A number of key concepts from systems literature, such as attractors, affordances, attunement, and disturbances, are discussed as identifiable and manipulatable dimensions of game-based learning. Implications for the PE profession: Physical educators are well positioned to notice learning as it emerges and to construct environments that focus learning without forcing learning. Complexity thinking concepts such as flow, coupling, engagement, attractors, affordances, attunement, and disturbance, in combination with the pedagogical principles advocated by GCAs, provide a robust set of analytical and teaching tools. It is to be hoped that a deepening of understanding of how game forms and game play lead to learning during games will improve the quality of learning experiences in games and foster increasing and prolonged engagement by students.

Emergent learning focused teachers and their ecological complexity worldview

Although Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) has gained ground, pedagogical models are sustainable only when situated in a comprehensive worldview and consistent epistemology. After considering the five values orientations offered by Jewett, Bain, and Ennis, the authors conclude that ecological integration offers a useful starting point in this regard, but taking this a step further, they offer a worldview that they call ecological complexity, woven together from social constructivism, complexity, and ecological thinking. Since the authors argue that teachers who espouse this worldview focus on emergent learning, they have coined the term emergent learning focused (ELF) teacher to describe the pedagogical approaches that might result. These encourage the spontaneous play seen in the schoolyard, playground, or village green as opposed to work in the factory. ELF teachers encourage learners to develop holistically as they construct meaning, positioning themselves in the ecosphere of which they form an integral part. The authors apply ecological complexity to Inventing Games, in which learners invent and refine games within the TGfU classifications. They argue that as learners work together to invent and develop ownership of their games, they engage in a cognitive apprenticeship that prepares them for life in the wider community. Specifically, learners develop core social and emotional learning skills in a process that the authors have termed situated ethics. As game play structures and constraints work in balance to produce disturbances, learners adapt and game play evolves. Learners learn to navigate these adaptations and evolutions by creating sustainable democratic processes. Teachers who operate from an ecological complexity worldview see all educational agents—learners, teachers, administrators, curriculum, school, community, and culture—as parts of a sustainable learning system. The authors conclude by offering the building blocks they believe might move this system closer to sustainability in games education.

TGfU--Would You Know It if You Saw It? Benchmarks from the Tacit Knowledge of the Founders.

This paper explores the tacit expert knowledge and understanding about games curriculum and pedagogy of three men, Len Almond, David Bunker, and Rod Thorpe, credited as the founders of the Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) model. The model emerged from teacher practice in the late 1970s and was little theorized at the time, apart from a handful of articles written by the founders. This paper attempts to retrospectively theorize and represent the founders’ ideas in terms of the beliefs, intentions, and actions they believed to be fundamental to TGfU. From here, some benchmarks are proposed so that TGfU can be more easily recognized when it is being practised and researched. Data were collected through two online sequential questionnaires, informal personal telephone interviews, and emails. All data were member checked throughout the two-year study. Both of the questionnaires were completed by the three founders in the persona of their ‘ideal’ TGfU teacher, in the hope that this would lead to greater clarity of response. The first questionnaire, called the Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI), was developed by Daniel Pratt and builds a profile of teacher beliefs, intentions, and actions, which are then grouped into five perspectives and ranked by personal bias. Questions posed on SurveyGizmo formed the second questionnaire, which helped the founders reflect further about their ideal teacher’s beliefs, intentions, and actions, as they became apparent in the dominant and recessive perspectives identified in the TPI profiles. The findings were grouped into the founders’ beliefs and intentions about: (1) learners and learning; (2) content; and (3) teachers’ role and responsibilities. The data forming what the founders’ considered to be best pedagogical practice formed eight areas for consideration to include: (1) preparation; (2) management; (3) starting a TGfU lesson; (4) continuing a TGfU lesson; (5) teacher behaviours; teacher focus during a game; (7) teacher expectations; and (8) learning environment. This paper aims to provide a starting point for further research, debate, and reflection as we engage with the founders’ intentions – to provide students with teaching that is an overt social, cultural, and relational activity, as well as a set of plans, practices, and actions.

Stages for Children Inventing Games

This article offers practical advice for teachers interested in using Inventing Games (IG) as a way to facilitate learning about game structures, rules, and the principles of fair play that they can apply not only to game play, but to everyday life as members of a democratically organized society. Inventing Games gives students the opportunity to create their own games and understand the underlying constructs of games within a particular category of the TGFU games classification. This article focuses on the invasion game category, which includes games such as basketball, hockey, football, netball, soccer, and ultimate Frisbee. The IG process involves ten stages, which can be organized into a unit over varying numbers of classes, depending on the desired outcomes, grade level, experience, and student ability.

An Introduction to NCATE and NASPE/NCATE Beginning Teacher Standards

JOPERD • Volume 77 No. 2 • February 2006 W e have all been there. The door is closed, for once, against the demands of our importunate students. Piles of un-graded papers teeter on our desks as we labor through the writing of the report for the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE). Why do we have to justify everything? We understand our programs. We know why we do things the way we do. If only we had more time to do the real work.... Classroom teachers appreciate the value of assessment and evaluation of their students, even though it can sometimes feel like an “interruption” to the learning experience. They value accountability, understand that it produces a cycle of refl ection and improvement in their programs, and see assessment as an integral part of the learning experience. The same holds true for our physical education teacher education (PETE) programs. We need to know for certain that we are providing the best possible education for beginning teachers, and thus for their future students. We want to offer teacher candidates excellent preparation for their teaching careers, and if we do indeed offer worthwhile programs, we would also like such programs to be recognized. In the same way, prospective teacher candidates shopping for the right program welcome hard and fast criteria to help them make their choices. If educated consumers understand that NCATE accreditation means quality and excellence in the teacher education program, why would we not desire that institutional approval? This is particularly important in a discipline in which teacher preparation programs have demonstrated variability in their methods and effectiveness. “Teaching is where medicine was in 1910,” Darling-Hammond points out (cited in Wright & Lederer, 2005, p. 4). She adds that “many teachers lack access to that knowledge (how people learn and how to teach effectively) because the programs that prepare them are so variable and because so many teachers, especially those who serve our nation’s most vulnerable students, do not ever go through a systematic preparation program” (Wright & Lederer, p. 4). If we accept that accreditation is, like exercise, unavoidable though sometimes a chore, we might still question the necessity for an assessment that is based on standards. The answer to this question lies partly in the choices we have made about the assessment of our younger students. The United States has opted for national standards as a way to measure and evaluate K-12 students’ performance, rather than choosing to implement a national curriculum, as in some other countries, such as the United Kingdom, Singapore, and New Zealand. This is, in part, because each state is at liberty to adopt or reject federal initiatives where education is concerned, since the constitution did not grant the federal government any authority over education. The fact that most states An Introduction to NCATE and NASPE/NCATE Beginning Teacher Standards

We Are What We Teach: TGfU as a Complex Ecological Situation

Simone de Beauvoir (1953, p. 66) has famously said that “the body is not a thing, it is a situation.” She thus contradicts the distinction drawn by Descartes between the body and the mind—a division that has haunted the physical education curriculum for many years, as many physical educators have attempted to educate the body, rather than educate the human being through the body. In this presentation, I suggest that the space opened up by de Beauvoir’s distinction is the space in which teaching games for understanding (TGfU) was born and still exists. It is a distinction that aligns our teaching, our philosophical stances, our research, and our governance. To see the body as a “thing or vessel” that exists for and by itself implies that it can (and must be) “schooled” through individualistic skills-based approaches to teaching and learning. Traditionally, these approaches have involved students being taught skills through teacherdirected side-by-side or serial drills. Along with many other TGfU commentators and educators, I have drawn attention to the dangers and limitations of these approaches, which ignore important components of learning, including transfer, tactical understanding, problem solving, and social and ethical learning. To see the body as a “situation,” on the other hand, honors and explores the ways in which students connect to other bodies and to the sociopolitical context in which they live and breathe, as it engages them in collective learning in context. Thus, the intentions, beliefs, and actions of teachers look very different as they implement the TGfU approach within a worldview I have described as ecological complexity. As Parker Palmer (2007) suggested, this philosophical orientation determines who we are when we teach. When we facilitate TGfU learning experiences effectively, we naturally become focused on emergent learning and can be described as emergent learningfocused teachers. Such educators understand that their work takes place in contexts and intersections that include the group, the team, the class, the school, and the community. They are interested in learning that is sustainable and serves the interests and needs of all these different bodies. When teachers situate themselves in this way, their entire pedagogy will tend to flow in a certain direction when it comes to such issues as authority, decision making, and knowledge sharing. They become part of a dynamic and sustainable system of learning that aligns itself with other educational initiatives that seek to accommodate and encourage new democratic forms of participation (The New London Group, 1996). As I trace and discuss the history of TGfU during the last 30 years, I will also suggest that the orientation of ecological complexity has influenced and guided the development of its etymology and governance, so that its organizational and political structures have emerged looking somewhat different from the hierarchical governance structures more typical of traditional educational organizations. TGfU has always been and still is a grassroots organization (somewhat akin to social movements such as Occupy) as it has gained ground with practitioners and theorists alike through small conferences, town hall meetings, informal networks, and new media sites. Its activities have been organized through flexible and adaptive communities of practice such as the TGfU Task Force, the Association Internationale des Écoles Supérieures d’Éducation Physique TGfU Special Interest Group, and its International Advisory Board. It has also learned from and emphasized local initiatives throughout the globe and drawn them together in a dynamic community of practice that has paid attention both to theoretical investigation and practical implementations. In this way, TGfU has reflected new forms of decentralized organization, composed of individuals who may not be from the same countries or institutions but nonetheless come together as a virtual community. To survive and stay robust, such grassroots decentralized communities must remain flexible and adaptive as they attend to changing circumstances. They do so by reflecting the collective voice, responding to accepting emergent ideas and new directions, and