Introduction

This basketball unit consists of four lessons that were taught to a grade 8 Physical Education class at Lansdowne Middle School in Victoria BC.  This unit was based on the Teaching Games for Understanding (TGFU) model which focuses on inclusion and full participation of every student in the class. We designed this website as a teaching resource for teachers around the world to help and broaden their knowledge base and give them new ideas to incorporate into their lesson plans.  The reason we chose to use a TGFU approach to teaching this unit is because the idea of TGFU is to learn tactical awareness by using miniature games that emphasize and exaggerate certain skills that are needed to play the main game without having to pull specific skills out a run monotonous repetitive drills to practice these skills.  TGFU also not only helps students to learn how to execute the skills, but also enables the students to learn how to use these skills to solve tactical problems that occur during regular game play.  We also chose this model for our unit plan because it promotes teamwork and and peer teaching.  It is also designed so that it will include students of all skill abilities so that students are not singled out or feel defeated because they do not match up with the skilled players in the class.

The two main ideas we took into consideration when designing this unit plan was that 1) there was going to be a large spectrum of skill abilities within this class, and 2) the students were in grade eight, therefore in previous years they would have done a great deal of drills and activities that centered around basic, specific skill development.  In light of this information we wanted to create a unit that incorporated and emphasized those skills, while focusing on how to solve tactical problems such as how to move to or create space by using those previously learned skills.

References

Metzler, M. W. (2005). Instructional models for physical education (2nd ed.). Scottsdale, AZ: Holcomb Hathaway.

Mitchell, S. A., Oslin, J. L. & Griffin, L. L. (1997). Teaching sport concepts and skills: A Tactical games approach (2nd ed.).