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    The object of this unit, and ultimately for physical education, is to encourage student’s and give them the tools to live a healthy and active life.  In order to give students an education that encourages this behavior, the lessons need to be meaningful to the students.  For the lessons to be meaningful, students need to be included in their learning and understanding of why activities are done and what they accomplish.  This is encouraged by forming appropriate questions for the students to contemplate.  Questions help to structure the thoughts of the students so that they are directed in a way that is meaningful to their improved knowledge and skill level.  This can be helped when students understand how to modify a game or a structure to allow themselves success with a task.  When this is accomplished, student’s are playing a role in their education and making it meaningful for themselves.  So the objective of Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) is to create games that encourage kids to play outside the school and in the community as apart of an active lifestyle. 

    In order to create games for understanding a common ground must be found for all activities.  This way, no matter what activity is being modified and taught the underlying fundamental skills can transfer into any situation.  This increases the success of the students with different activities and sports by increasing their actual basic skill level.  These basic fundamentals can be broken up into off-the-ball and on-the-ball skills that are the same across tactically similar games.  All games can be grouped into four categories: net/wall, target, territory/invasion and fielding.  With each of these categories comes tactical goals and problems that can be taught and applied to many different sports within the category, also known as content analysis.  For example, field hockey is a territory/invasion game as it involves scoring on an opposing teams net in their territory.  The fundamental tactical goals, such as offense, can be broken up into off-the-ball and on-the-ball movements, such as supporting the ball carrier (off-the-ball) and when to pass (on-the-ball).  Those off-the-ball and on-the-ball skills can apply to any territory invasion game, such as soccer, rugby or basketball. 

    With the objective of making games that encourage the learning of basic tactical awareness skills, we built our unit plan. 

    First activity’s purpose is to review last class, and to maximize the students time of contact with the ball to allow for constant refreshers of what’s been learned.  The body, which consists of the activities in the middle of the lesson are to focus on new skills or progress on skills already learned in the previous class.  The last activity, or the culminating activity, sums up the lesson by applying the things that were taught into a bigger game context.  The purpose of the introductory lesson was to get a feel for the skill level of the students.  We started the class off with the very basics of field hockey, such as how to hold the stick and basic rules of the game, and observed to see how the students picked up the games.  By using the games model we were able to observe students and their level of skill and understanding they already had to offer, and how we could best build on that. 

    Our second lesson was to focus on passing, while still working on the dribbling skills of last class.  We started with a game that focused on reviewing the last class, and we used a game that would maximize the student’s contact with the ball to allow for greater practice and activity.  From here we progressed to another drill that still involved dribbling, with some passing.  And from here we really focused on strictly passing with the 3 vs 1 drill.  Similarly, with our third lesson, we reviewed the skills from the previous lesson and slowly introduced more complex drills.  The reason we went from the 360 Degree game to Advanced Square passing was because the boundary set up would easily flow together, minimizing time spent setting up the game perimeters.  For our final lesson, as the class was beginning to improve, we chose to introduce more offensive and defensive drills so the class had an opportunity to try some games that involved more tactical awareness and therefore more challenge.  I also helped them think of ways to modify the games during play to allow for more challenges or more success, and encouraged them to take a more cognitive approach to their learning in PE. The girls really enjoyed the activities and all left quite happy with the amount of success they were having.

References:

Bunker, B., & Thorpe, R. (1986).  The curriculum model. In R. Thorpe, Bunker, D., & Almond, L (ED), Rethinking games teaching (pp. 7-10). Loughborough: University of Technology, Loughborough.

Hopper, T. (1998). Teaching games for understanding using progressive principles of play. CAHPER, 27(1), 1-5.