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This study used cognitive developmental theory to analyze how teachers learn to teach sport education. Two groups of undergraduate pre-service teachers were studied, one group during their secondary methods and corresponding field-teaching courses, the other during an independent teaching course. Data were collected through ethnographic observations and interviews, and analyzed using constant comparison. Findings revealed that the teachers encountered three pitfalls in learning to teach sport education. First, group one teachers struggled with the tactical instruction in sport education and, in response, retreated to the safety of decontextualized skill drills or non-instructional games. Second, group one teachers, in their descriptions of future pedagogical intentions, expressed resistance, for a number of reasons, to incorporating most of the unique characteristics of sport education into their future secondary classrooms. Third, group two teachers misunderstood the role of skill development in sport education. The discussion centers on mechanisms of knowledge acquisition related to learning sport education, and recommendations for teacher educators and future research.

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This study describes and interprets (a) a student teacher’s decisions about task content and content progression across an elementary and high school sport unit and (b) those aspects of his pedagogical content knowledge that he used to explain and justify his decisions. The student teacher’s pedagogical content knowledge of dividing and sequencing subject matter can be summarized briefly: first, tell about the biomechanically efficient body position, and second, play games. Both the student teacher’s decisions and pedagogical content knowledge and guidelines for content progression that are in the curriculum literature are interpreted by using broad theoretical perspectives of knowledge and learning that pervade educational thought. Taken-for-granted perspectives that knowledge and learning are molecular are questioned, and the potential of more holistic, nonlinear perspectives is considered.

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