Teaching Games for Understanding:  Reflections and Further Questions--Chandler
Summary by Darryl Dix 

 

Issue/focus:  In the article, “Teaching games for understanding: Reflections and Further Questions”, Timothy Chandler outlines what he perceives to be the strengths and weaknesses of TGFU and then speculates on how TGFU might be extended and elaborated in the future.  This elaboration he calls TGFUFL--teaching games for understanding for learning.
 
Reasoning:  Chandler feels that TGFU is nothing more that UFL (understanding for learning) then it must be combined with “fostering teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge”.  This approach would then stabilise the link between teaching and learning as the ends of the process while better “exemplifying the complex nature of the interactions between those factors that both effective teaching and vital learning require”.
 
Conclusion:  The strengths and weaknesses of the TGFU approach are:
 Strengths:
-It takes into account both learning and motivation theory
-An approach which fosters both deep-seated knowledge and the ability to display that knowledge, is going to be more successful in developing expertise than one that doesn’t.
-It offers students an approach which aids motivation
-It seems to further game-playing ability more readily than traditional methods
 Weaknesses:
-It requires teachers to be truly knowledgeable about the deep structure of games, the four categories of activity, and the relationships among them.
-Its emphasis on pragmatism-doing what works-with regard to contextualised or game dependent skills.
 
Significant Information:   “Skill learning is not for playing games; rather, playing games is for skill learning”.
 
Assumptions/Personal Comments:  I think that Chandler made some good points in his article about TGFU, but I don’t think that he gave enough credit to teachers.  He seemed to make is sound as though teachers only knew one sport and thus would have a hard time transferring what they knew into other sports.  Furthermore he says that it is asking a lot from teachers to modify games in such a way that they never violate the underlying principles of that game.  He should give teachers a chance to modify these games rather before speaking what he thinks.