How is sport meeting the playing for life philosophy for Australian Sport through the physical literacy strategy?

 Physical literacy sits under the playing for life philosophy of Australian Sport

Alongside the Game Sense approach

Sporting Schools positions the use of the Game Sense approach as the pedagogical backbone of the schools  programs

The Game Sense approach targets technical and tactical skill development for education in movement and so clearly targets the physical domain of learning. The approach develops the cognitive domain of players as central to Game Sense approach is ‘developing thinking players’. The key pedagogical tool is ‘asking questions’ and play with purpose. The Game Sense approach also works on the affective domain as the coach has a different relationship with players when they are athlete-centred rather than transmission and reproduction centred, and a Game Sense approach impacts the emotional domain as players tell us they prefer the experience of being coached using a Game Sense approach.

Coaches often think they are using a Game Sense approach and therefore are pedagogically aligned with the development of the domains of physical literacy, but when we look at their coaching as a Spectrum of Teaching Styles we see their dominant practice remains command + practice style instruction rather than the discovery + practice styles that would be evident in a Game Sense approach. Mitch Hewitt's research into tennis coaches teaching styles is insightful in this area.

Many coaches also think a Game Sense approach is ‘one style’ of coaching, guided discovery. It is not. Certainly in Game Sense coaching we want the emphasis to be in what Mosston called in the Spectrum of Teaching Styles called ‘production style’ coaching where the players are doing the problem solving, however, Game Sense coaching might also look like Inclusion Style where players are working on different aspects of their game craft in specialist position groups or groups looking at different improvement areas. It might look like Practice Style during a warm-up where players are undertaking an increase in physical and cognitive intensity as they work through a progression of closed to open drills. What we see is a cluster of teaching styles where the main teaching style in a Game Sense approach will be one of the discovery ‘production’ styles, but no style is excluded in a Game Sense approach as it is athlete-centred, and so the challenge for the coach is to choose the right teaching style for the player to achieve the learning purpose of the task. SueSee, Pill and Edwards explained this well in their paper RECONCILING APPROACHES – A GAME CENTRED APPROACH TO SPORT TEACHING AND MOSSTON’S SPECTRUM OF TEACHING STYLES see the paper here and SueSee also explains this in his book chapter in The Spectrum of Teaching Styles in Physical Education see the book here. From this explanation, what we see is that The Spectrum of Teaching Styles is a useful model through which to see if coaches are using the Game Sense approach to be pedagogically aligned with the Physical Literacy strategy in order to promote playing for life.