Sport Education: A Retrospective

Abstract

My purpose is to provide a personal history of the development of the curriculum and instruction model I call Sport Education, to review some theoretical and practical connections of Sport Education to other curricular and instructional models, and to explore a few issues related to the continued development of the model. I'm grateful to the Adelphi AIESEP organizers for providing me the opportunity to do this. It was at the Adelphi AIESEP Congress in 1985 that I was first able to show what the Sport Education model looked like, using sides of 5thand 6th-grade children in a soccer season as the exemplar, so it is fitting that this personal retrospective is presented at this Congress. The ModelSport Education is a curriculum and instruction model designed to provide authentic, educationally rich sport experiences for girls and boys in the context of school physical education. I will briefly review the main features of Sport Education, as they have been fully described elsewhere (Siedentop, 1994(Siedentop, , 1998. In Sport Education, students participate in seasons that are often two to three times longer than typical physical education units. Students become members of teams immediately, and this affiliation allows students to plan, practice, and compete together, as well as benefit from all the social development opportunities that accompany membership in a persisting group. A schedule of competition is organized at the outset, which allows learners to practice and play within a predictable schedule of fair competition. A culminating event marks the end of the season and provides both the occasion to mark progress and the opportunity to celebrate successes. Records are kept and used for purposes of motivation, feedback, assessment, and the building of standards and traditions. The entire season is festive with continuous efforts made to celebrate success.If you were an observer in a gym of a 5th grade teacher doing Sport Education volleyball, you would likely see students enter the facility for class and go in groups (teams) to one of three court spaces (home courts) where they would immediately begin to work on either a warm-up, stretching, or a series of skill drills. These would be led by a student (coach) and organized by another student (manager). The teacher would be doing last-minute preparations and interacting with students. At some point a skill or tactic practice might begin, or teams might

The ecology of cooperative learning in a high school physical education Pprogramme

“…The CL learning environment encouraged high OTR scores with its small groups, active tasks, and plenty of balls to allow for many opportunities to practice the skills. As Siedentop (2002) has reminded us that, "small-sided games are preferred because they increase opportunities to respond" (p. 410).…”

“…In this manner, the students are involved in more decision making and understand how their learned skills are applied to the game situation. Another example is the sport education model (Carlson & Hastie, 1997;Hastie, 2000, Siedentop, 2002, which is also student-centered and provides tasks that challenge students to use strategies and make decisions. Students act as the coaches of teams, and take on responsibilities that include scheduling games, resolving disputes, coaching, refereeing, scorekeeping, and keeping game statistics.…”

Effect of a Sport Education season on the technical learning and motivational climate of junior high performance swimmers.

“…In contrast to a teacher-directed approach, Sport Education follows the assumption that learning results from an interactive and cooperative construction of shared meanings between students devised by means of authentic learning environments and meaningful activities (Siedentop, 2002). As such, Sport Education sessions within physical education are framed within a six features structure referenced to community-based sports.…”

A Constraint-Led Approach to Coaching and Teaching Games: Can going back to the future solve the «they need the basics before they can play a game» argument?

“…Games Centred Approaches (GCAs) to teaching and coaching such as Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) (Bunker & Thorpe, 1982), Game Sense (Thorpe, 2005), Sport Education (Siedentop, 2002) and the Games Concept Approach (Tan, Wright, McNeill, Fry, & Tan, 2002) created great interest across the world with academics suggesting that GCAs can make a positive contribution to physical education (PE). Advocates provide a number of benefits from adopting GCAs in lessons including (a) its potential to enhance participant motivation, (b) potential for tactical transfer, and (c) development of decision-making skills and effective decision-makers (Oslin & Mitchell, 2006).…”