RECONCILING APPROACHES – A GAME CENTRED APPROACH TO SPORT TEACHING AND MOSSTON’S SPECTRUM OF TEACHING STYLES

Abstract

During the late 1960s and into the 1970s game-based approaches to sport teaching and coaching emerged in scholarly literature on sport and physical education teaching. Game based pedagogical approaches for games and sport teaching have been distinguished by some authors through the more prominent emphasis on guided discovery teaching and student/athlete reflective thinking than what occurs in the more historically common sport-as-sport techniques approach typified by a demonstration-replication, or ‘transmission’, method of instruction. However, guided discovery is also associated with another teaching approach that emerged in the 1960s, Style F of Mosston’s Spectrum of Teaching Styles. In this paper we posit that rather than be seen as competing approaches, game-based approaches and The Spectrum of Teaching Styles should be seen as complementary as both are governed by a fundamental proposition – pedagogical decision making. In particular, due to the Spectrum of Teaching Styles non-versus approach, it is theoretically impossible/contradictory for the Spectrum to be in opposition to or compete against any pedagogical approach. Our purpose is to examine two Game Sense learning episodes and to identify the decisions being made between the teacher and student/s. This will then allow these two Game Sense learning episodes to be placed on the Spectrum of Teaching Styles. By doing this it will detail  important pedagogical concepts and unify pedagogical decision making that take place when sport and games teaching is taken across the ‘discovery barrier’ and into an intentionally designed space to develop ‘thinking players’. In the Australian educational landscape, this discussion is timely given the Australian Curriculum Health and Physical Education key ideas to focus on both content and pedagogies that are educatively focused with an inquiry approach.

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