Background/Purpose
Contemporary curricular reform places great emphasis on the need to prepare teachers who are capable of comprehending their subject and making adaptations throughout the lesson to enhance student learning. In physical education, learning to teach in ways that are responsive to students is critical in all lessons but particularly important when planning and teaching contemporary team sport and games models such as the Tactical Games Model (TGM; Mitchell, Oslin & Griffin, 2003) and Teaching Games for Understanding (Bunker & Thorpe, 1982). These student-centered models emphasize indirect methodologies, which allow opportunities for students to engage in problem solving. The TGM advocates the use of a game, practice, game format, with question and answer segments as a way to engage students and enhance their tactical awareness. The success of this method rests on teachers' ability to ask meaningful questions and facilitate these instructional segments in efficient and effective ways. Although questioning is a key element of games teaching, little research exists that details the pedagogy of questioning (McNeil, et. al. 2008). This study provides a micro analysis of the instructional time, content, and sophistication of questions within games lessons.
Method
Participants were three teachers who regularly model the tenets of the TGM, two of whom were males, and one female. Each participant identified a unit of study and two lessons were video-taped for the purpose of question analysis. Lessons consisted of 30-45 minutes with several question and answer segments.
Analysis/Results
Data collection and analysis included reviewing video-taped lessons, fully transcribing the question segments, and recording field notes to provide detailed accounts of the teacher questions and student responses. Researchers independently analyzed the transcriptions using a question matrix that included categories and ratings for the question content, sophistication, and degree of alignment of student responses to the lesson goal.
Conclusions
All three teachers utilized questions that represented a progression from simple recall to application type questions, reinforcing TGM's potential for promoting problem solving. Teachers' content knowledge appeared to be a critical factor influencing the alignment of student responses to the lesson goal and the efficiency of using a guided discovery method. Findings have implications for further research on the role of content knowledge and the design and sequencing of questions for games based lessons.