Preservice teachers enter teacher education programs with a well formed vision of what physical education should look like based on their past experiences (Hutchinson, 1993). The goal of teacher education programs is to channel, and possibly redirect, that vision though the course of the undergraduate program so that graduates possess the skills, knowledges, and dispositions to develop and teach developmentally appropriate physical education that fosters student learning. The socialization literature is replete with information regarding the effects that undergraduate programs have on preservice teachers. Additionally, literature provides information about perspective teacher's acquisition of content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), and curricular knowledge (Schulman, 1986; 1987; Housner & Griffey, 1985; Rovegno, 1993).
The purpose of the study was to document preservice teacher's conceptions of teaching as they progressed through a sequenced undergraduate physical education teacher education program. The three-year, longitudinal study, used a critical incident data collection technique (Flanagan, 1954; Byrne, 2001) at 6 strategic points during the program: initial program entry, conclusion of the marked entry course, after each of three methods courses, and the conclusion of student teaching. The critical incident form asked students to identify explicit events that represented effective and ineffective teaching and physical education programs. An additional question asked them to identify what led them to their conclusions. Over 400 responses split between each of the 6 data collection points were collected. Data were thematically analyzed using inductive analysis. Themes were then confirmed through peer debriefing to reveal three main themes.
The first theme Presage to Impact, discusses the findings that initially students viewed teaching in terms of themselves and what they would personally gain from the experience through the conceptualization of good teaching as teacher presage characteristics. By student teaching, their views had changed as they started to discuss effective teaching in terms of student learning. The second theme, The Differentiation of Curriculum and Instruction, examines the findings that students were increasingly able to separate curriculum from instruction as they matriculated through the program. The final theme, Coming Full Circle, discusses how students were able to incorporate their initial presage concepts of teaching with PCK and curricular knowledge obtained in the program to develop their uniqueness as a teacher. The findings of this study have significant bearing on the creation and sequencing of physical education teacher preparation courses and the development of preservice teachers content, curricular, and pedagogical content knowledge.