Using a complex and nonlinear pedagogical approach to design practical primary physical education lessons

Abstract

This paper describes several practical activities that reveal how complex and nonlinear pedagogies might underpin primary physical education and school sport lessons. These sample activities, involving track and field, tennis and netball components, are designed to incorporate states of stability and instability through the modification of task and environmental constraints that challenge students to learn about movement. These activities challenge students individually and collectively to learn in relation to the cognitive, social, emotional and physical domains. Within these conditions, students are expected to ‘self-organise’ in order to take responsibility for their learning; this approach links with recent calls for a more expansive version of physical education supporting the holistic and lifelong development of physically active individuals. We further suggest that teachers using constraints-led pedagogies require high levels of capacity as they must draw upon their judgement, knowledge and teaching skills to appropriately facilitate and ‘scale’ dynamic learning contexts.

Can physical education and physical activity outcomes be developed simultaneously using a game-centered approach?

“…Atencio et al (2014) speculated whether such a linear and reductionist approach was useful for young learners, and Sproule et al (2011) have advocated moving classroom achievement beyond simply the body's capacity to move in ''correct'' ways. As this approach often produces classes low in MVPA (Fairclough and Stratton, 2005), a common intervention strategy is to add physical fitness activities for the improvement of MVPA within lessons (Lonsdale et al, 2013), a practice which may further limit student learning in favor of immediate cardio respiratory outcomes.…”

Nonlinear Pedagogy and the implications for teaching and training in table tennis

“…The application of a nonlinear pedagogical approach is supported by a set of key pedagogical principles that assist coaches in creating an effective and representative learning environment (see Table 1). Atencio, Chow, Clara and Lee 26 and Chow, Davids, Button and Renshaw 10 highlighted that through the application of NLP, a coach should carefully manipulate key constraints to design representative training tasks in an attempt to ensure a functional information-movement coupling during the activity, and stimulate the emergence of a variability of movement patterns, which is important for stable patterns of movement acquisition 12 . Besides these principles, Chow 27 and Chow, Davids, Button and Renshaw 10 emphasize that coaches should carefully plan the type of intervention through instructions and feedbacks, facilitating the exploration of a similar real-game context by the players in order to discover movement patterns that allow them to achieve tasks goals, enhancing players' exploratory behavior.…”

Running: A way to increase body awareness in secondary school physical education

“…Ur ett motorprogramsperspektiv är lärarens feedback central för elevens lärande (Hill & Turner, 2012), medan inställningen ur ett icke-linjärt perspektiv snarare är 'hands-off' (Renshaw et al, 2010). Lärarens uppgift är att skapa miljöer och strukturera lämpliga uppgifter för eleverna att arbeta med (Atencio et al, 2014). Även enligt det instinktiva perspektivet är lärarens roll mindre framträdande och styrande (Baumgarten & Pagnano-Richardson, 2010).…”