ACTION RESEARCH AND SUPERVISING
STUDENT-TEACHERS
PART
3: RESULTS FROM AN ACTION RESEARCH
PROCESS
By T.F. Hopper
University of Victoria
Published in RUNNER, 35(2), 36-40
© This material may not be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying without the permission of the copyright holder
Phase
2: Developing a practical theory for
games teaching
This paper is the third in a series of
four papers. The purpose of this series
of papers is to describe how action research can offer a more practical, less
judgemental model for supervising student-teachers on teaching practice in
schools. Three supervisors (qualified
teachers) supervised 10 student-teachers teaching games to children in after
school programmes. Each course involved
ten classes made up of children aged 7-9 or 10-12. Class sizes ranged from 10 to 26 pupils. These children paid a nominal fee to attend
the sessions. The children were not
particularly accomplished at physical activity and varied considerably in
physical ability. Weekly classes ran
for one hour after school for a ten week period. In part 2 the student-teachers had established their own
procedures in class through a team-teaching process with the supervisors. When the supervisors taught they responded
more to what the children did rather than telling the children what to do. The student-teachers admired this approach
noticing that the children got excited from playing modified games and
developing skills from the demands of the games. This was an approached related to the teaching games for
understanding (TGFU) model (Bunker & Thorpe, 1986).
The action research cycles evolved in
three phases. Each phase consisted of a
number of cycles of the action research process (plan, act/observe &
reflect)[1]. To assist the reader in recognizing the
relationship between plan, act/observe,
reflect and re-plan, these
aspects in each cycle have been highlighted in brackets. To give the reader a sense of my position as
a supervisory teacher in the account I have included my thoughts in italics.
Cycle 4: Game vocabulary
Lessons
by student-teachers tended to follow a pattern — a warm-up activity with a body management focus, a skill
development segment to teach a skill or set of related skills, then, if time
permitted, a modified game (act/observe). In order for student-teachers to respond to their pupils they required the
ability to recognize the pupils’ needs in a situation as it develops. Supervisor prompts were successful in
encouraging student-teachers' use of general and selective feedback to pupils
as they engaged in tasks. A prompt,
however, was not effective in helping student-teachers perceive what the pupils
could be gradually aiming towards in the modified versions of the adult games
being played (reflect). To help student-teachers make connections
between body management type activities (tag type games), equipment handling
(closed or invariant skill manipulation of objects and equipment), game strategies,[2] game tactics,[3] and the ability to effectively use skills in game
situations, summary sheets known as BESTAT (Body management, Equipment
handling, Strategies, Tactics And Technique) were developed by the group (re-plan). Figure 1 shows an example of a BESTAT sheet for court type games
(wall and net).
I
took responsibility for authoring the BESTAT sheets making reference to Ellis
(1985) and Almond (1986) for the classification of games. The BESTAT sheets
listed aspects of territory or invasion type games (i.e., football, soccer),
court or net/wall type games (i.e., tennis,
squash), and field or fielding/run type games (i.e., cricket,
baseball). Each section of the BESTAT
sheets listed generic components common to all games within that classification. For example, typical of territory-type games
is the body management skill of sprinting and changing direction; whereas,
rapidly changing direction in a small space by moving sideways, forwards and
backwards is more typical of court games (see Hopper, 1994; Sanford-Smith &
Hopper, 1996).
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Insert Figure 1 in about here
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The group members used the BESTAT sheets
to give a vocabulary to describe what children were doing and to focus on the
possibilities for helping pupils play the games more effectively. This information also helped
student-teachers to make the activities purposeful for playing the recognized
adult game better. For example, a
student-teacher pointed out that changing direction without falling was
important in a modified flag-football game the children were playing, then
started a tag game that concentrated on balance and change of direction. The pupils practiced a split step (feet
shoulder width apart with weight leaning back) after running to enable
themselves to have a solid base from which to change direction. This practice improved their agility in the
tag game as well as in the flag-football game subsequently played. The tasks set by the student-teacher seemed
to make more sense to the children, resulting in them buying-in much more to
what was being taught (act/observe).
Cycles 5 and 6: Working from game
situations using a "teaching games for understanding" (TGFU) approach
Examining the BESTAT sheets and reflecting on discussions with
their supervisors resulted in the student-teachers being more confident about
working from game situations with the children (act/observe). This
confidence led to more personal concerns being expressed by individual
student-teachers regarding what they wanted to achieve (reflect). For example, some
student-teachers wanted children to make more intelligent choices. They found that pupils tended to choose
adult equipment even though they were unable to play the game with such equipment
(reflect). The action research group decided that teaching children how to
intelligently choose equipment initially involved providing only limited
equipment choices (re-plan). The
result was that children played with the equipment provided and were more able
to address the challenges set by the student-teacher (act/observe). It was
concluded that though children complained about not being allowed to use adult
size equipment, with teacher guidance and encouragement they soon learnt that
playing with the modified (shorter, lighter or in a case of balls slower
bouncing) equipment enabled them to play more vigorous and exciting games than
before (reflect).
Student-teachers also tried to get the
children thinking about what they were doing by asking focused questions such
as, “Why do we need to change direction?”; “How does a wide base help you
change direction?”; “What can a player do to stop an opponent from receiving a
ball in space?”; or “What was the most effective way to hit a ball accurately?"
(re-plan). These questions asked the pupils to think, explain, and show
through demonstrations that they understood.
Questioning also developed tactical awareness for pupils in game play. For example, earlier on in the courses the
teacher defined all rules for games.
The teacher introduced the games by showing and explaining them to the
children. If a game was too easy the
children considered it boring and if a game was too difficult some children did
not participate. If the children had
played the game before, depending on their previous experience, they considered
it to be either brilliant or boring.
Once the children began to determine initial rules and subsequent rule
changes to make a game better they started to take responsibility for the
game. Children started to realize the
need for certain rules and how they could tactically take advantage of
situations that rules created (act/observe).
One student-teacher indicated that
initially she confused the children in her lessons when she tried a questioning
approach. The children did not expect
to be asked questions or to ask questions themselves, they would stand
passively waiting to be told what to do.
The children were not used to making decisions. In later lessons, after coaxing out answers
and questions from the children in each lesson, the student-teacher said that
the children asked, "What happens if...?" The children were able to imagine possiblities in the play of
their games. The student-teacher
indicated that she was now able to respond to pupils' needs in a way that made
sense to her and the pupils (reflect).
Another student-teacher agreed with this
perspective. When she had initially
asked children about how they should score in a game, a child responded,
"Don't you know how to play the game?" However, later in the course the same child had suggested a way to improve the
slow-pitch game by saying, "Well the game would work better if the batter did
not have three strikes, only one, then the
fielders would always be busy and the waiting batters would have less
time to wait".
Though
I have been an advocate of the Teaching Games for Understanding (TGFU)
approach, and tended to teach within this model of teaching, as did my
supervising colleagues, I did not tell students to teach in this way. Student-teachers were encouraged to teach
the best way they could. It is my
belief that supervisors modeling teaching behaviours as situations arose in
classes enabled student-teachers to construct their own style of teaching
within a TGFU model. Student-teachers'
teaching constructions came from seeing situations as a teacher and feeling a
change in lesson quality when the
supervisors taught. At the beginning of
the action research process all the supervisors avoided telling student-teachers what to do. Lesson planning sessions for a 50 minute
lesson initially took over an hour to plan.
During lesson planning, supervisors tried to explain possibilities and
encourage student-teachers to come up with their own ideas based on what they
thought the pupils needed to play a game more effectively.
Cycle 7: Blue print lesson plan
With this increased insight into
possibilities for lessons, a concern arose about the need for detail in lesson
planning (reflect). Student-teachers would list objectives related
to the learning domains (cognitive, affective, social and psychomotor) but when
actually teaching they were more focused upon managerial problems with
children, equipment and the available space.
The desire to challenge the pupils in the learning domains as the pupils
responded to the learning environment tended to work against detailed lesson
plans that indicated exactly what the children should be doing. As one student-teacher said, "You are
told in your university courses to write a detailed lesson plan that seems to
take a month to write but which you can scrap at a moment’s notice if you need
to -- sure you will." The group
agreed that the need for detail in lesson planning was to help see what was
possible, but until one had experience to reflect upon, then one had limited
ability to see lesson needs and possibilities.
The writing process prepared the student-teachers to see more in their
lessons, especially if things did not go according to plan. The conclusion was that planning required the
influence of knowledge of real pupils to be meaningful, but detail in lesson
planning was needed initially to enable a novice teacher to realize what was
needed and possible in a lesson.
Reflections on the degree lesson plans met objectives guided the construction
of subsequent lesson plans (re-plan). It was impossible to plan more than one
lesson ahead for the student-teachers; however, the supervisors, based on their
previous experience teaching games course, had a sense of what would be needed
in the next few lessons. In a sense the
lesson plan was seen as a blue-print from which to work rather than as a map to
follow.
Lesson planning became more flexible with
student-teachers relying more on diagrams and less upon written descriptions of
what they wanted to happen.
Student-teachers were able to respond to the situations they
created. Children started to play with
ideas. For example, a supervisory
teacher recalled how one student-teacher, Erin, taught batting-fielding type
games with pupils of ten to eleven years of age (act/observe).
The children's games had been moving towards
baseball so Erin wanted to enable them to use the body management skill of
sliding into a base. Rather than
telling the children to slide, a skill that can hurt especially on a smooth but
hard wooden floor, she set up a tag game.
Four children stood on mats that were two metres apart, the other eight
children had to run through the mats without being tagged. Initially, with Erin's encouraging, the
children ran through the mats fast, some got through in the confusion, but in
the first assault most of the children were tagged. In the second assault only 3 children were left. It looked like none of them had a
chance. All three ran at the same time
for different gaps. Two were
immediately caught, but one pupil, Don, dove to the ground as he approached the
mats sliding beneath the tagging pupil's hand.
All the children were very impressed.
Erin was thrilled. This was a
'teachable moment', one she had hoped for.
She asked Don to demonstrate his slide emphasizing how he bent his
knees, and while keeping his body rigid, took his lowered body weight on his
hands, sliding forward. The class
erupted with sliding bodies dusting the floor.
Even Erin joined in. Some
children found it difficult but repeatedly tried, after 2 or 3 minutes all the
children could slide to some degree.
I
watched the lesson. Erin owned the idea
and responded to the moment. She told
me it was a turning point, a point where she
she felt she had made a large step towards becoming a physical educator.
Conclusion so far
This
anecdote points to how Erin as a representative of the other student-teachers,
had started to teach in a way that asked pupils to make appropriate decisions
based on the environments being set by the teacher. In the final phase of the action research project the
student-teachers were asked to supervise peers from the university who had not
had any experience teaching games to children in schools. In this situation the student-teachers were
able to encourage the university students to develop a TGFU approach.
REFERENCES
Almond,
L. (1986). Reflecting on themes: A games classification. In R. Thorpe, D. Bunker, & L. Almond
(Eds.), Rethinking games teaching, (pp. 71-73). Loughborough: University
of Technology.
Bunker,
D.,& .Thorpe, R, (1986). The
curriculum model. In R. Thorpe, D.
Bunker, & L. Almond (Eds.), Rethinking games teaching, (pp. 7-10).
Loughborough: University of Technology.
Ellis,
M. (1985). Classification of Games.
Unpublished paper Department of
Physical Education and Sport Studies, University of Alberta: Edmonton.
Hopper,
T. (1994). Can we play the game? RUNNER, 32(2), 21-22.
Sanford-Smith,
K., & Hopper, T. (1996). Teaching the Mind and Body: Connecting Physical Education and Language
Arts. RUNNER, 34(1), (In press).
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Figure
1. An example of a BESTAT sheet for court
games.