Why I have 'latched on to' the Spectrum of Teaching Styles

I am fortunate to have been invited to give hundreds of workshops, talks and presentations the past 20 years. Many of these are at professional development events. Professional development is 'big business' with globally billions of dollars annually invested in teacher and educator continuing learning (Kraft et al., 2018). The rationale for this spend is improvement in student outcomes (teacher PD) and player outcomes (coach PD). However, in both the teacher and sport coaching space where I professionally do most work, the issues and conversations about what is needed in professional development is largely the same as when I entered Teachers College in the early 1980s:

                    - How do we get more children and youth more active and more often active?

                     - How do we retain more people in sport participation?

                    - How do we address the decline in general movement ability?

Recently, the Active Healthy Kids Alliance released Global Matrix 4.0. It 'paints a picture' of countries like Australia confronting a movement ability 'crises'. However, as Stephen Harvey and I wrote in our review of 20 years of research on movement competence here this movement ability crisis is now well documented and established. Therefore, we have intergenerational loss of movement ability which is confounded by the suggestion that movement confidence supports the choice to be active, and movement competence underpins movement confidence. The children of 30+ years ago are the parents of today. Parents are key initiators, enablers and sustain-ers of their children's development of the habit of physical activity. If parents are not role modelling a physically active life there is a pretty good chance their children won't grow into the lifelong habit of physical activity.

This morning, I was reading a research paper investigating coach use of a 'contemporary' non-linear pedagogy. Another 'non-traditional' sport pedagogy, the Game Sense approach, was invested in by the Australian Sports Commission in the early 1990s to address retention in sport participation using a 'game-based' rather than 'drill-based' approach. After field trials, the Game Sense approach was 'released' in 1996 as the preferred pedagogy for Australian sport and in particular, the development of fundamental sport skills. It is still visible as the underpinning pedagogy of the Sport Australia Playing for Life strategy. Yet, it probably remains an innovation for most coaches, for as the paper I was reading this morning lamented about the authors of that papers preferred 'non-linear' model, the historically common (some say traditional) drill based model for sport teaching persists. At the same time that this 'drill based' coaching model persists, the same concerns for sport retention persist that ideas like the Game Sense approach as play with purpose were targeted to address nearly 30 years ago.

When I was at Teachers College in the early 1980s, it was envisioned that people in the 2000s would be more active and healthy as computers would enable us to do the same amount of work in less time, freeing up more time for leisure activities. Since the 1980s, there is a substantial body of work on the health benefits and social capital benefits of physically active leisure time. In Australia, in the late 1970's into the 1980s the national Life Be In campaign was used to promote informal sport and active recreation participation to address low fitness levels, rising inactivity, sedentary behaviour and health costs. Similarly, the Active Australia campaign of the early 2000s. 

The irony of the vision of the 1980s that computers would enable us to work more productively enabling more leisure time and by outcome more active and healthy communities is that Australia now ranks in the top third of countries for working long hours.

Critical literature in the areas of PE and sport coaching for 30 years has been calling for change to historical common curriculum and teaching approaches. In a 2014 blog here on writing about 'how we develop our PE programs?' I suggested central to reforming practice is developing 'teachers' as pedagogical and content experts. PE teaching (and sport coaching) environments should set high expectations for participant learning. In a 2016 blog here I suggested that for sport and physical education to be educative spaces and places that promote the possibility of physical activity teachers and coaches need to think about the functional use of the knowledge, skills, and abilities they are enabling in their 'students'.

To be transformative, where I believe professional development for physical education teachers and sport coaches needs to go is towards teaching rather than on the practice of the teacher or coach. I believe there needs to be a focus on pedagogy. Pedagogical frameworks that go beyond generic descriptions of practice to offer a comprehensive account of the complexity of teaching for learning. Drawing on the work of Kennedy (2019), I see a need for a focus on the broad qualities and dimensions of pedagogy that make teaching for learning conceptually manageable. It is here that I believe Mosston's Spectrum of Teaching Styles offers guidance in its non-verses account of the complexity of teacher deliberate design of clusters of pedagogy for clearly identified learner outcomes.