Effective Physical Education Content and Instruction: An Evidence-Based and Teacher-Tested Approach

As a physical educator (or student preparing to become one), you need to know more than the skills, techniques, and tactics of the sports and activities you teach. You need to understand, among other things, how to create task progressions, how to organize and adapt those tasks, and how to detect and correct student errors. Effective Physical Education Content and Instruction will help you learn how to do just that.

Theoretical Framework and Evidence-Based Plans

This text provides a theoretical framework to work from and gives you ready-to-use, teacher-tested content that is evidence based. Sample block plans are designed to help students of differing ability levels engage in skillful play. You'll be able to draw from teaching progressions that are game-like, developmental, and sequential in nature.

Effective Physical Education Content and Instruction offers the following:

• Sequential units with block plans

• Ready-to-use instructional tasks and warm-ups

• Teaching cues

• Explanations of common errors, their causes, and how to correct them

• Content maps for each unit

• A web resource that houses enlarged versions of the content maps, along with sample student awards and fair play guidelines

The content maps provide a roadmap for success in the attainment of goals and outcomes. The cues in the text, which assist in the detection and correction of student errors, act as an additional aid to help students achieve success.

Content Proven to Be Highly Effective

The approach and content in Effective Physical Education Content and Instruction have been proven to increase student learning as compared to other approaches. In fact, in one of the largest-ever intervention studies on teaching effectiveness in physical education, teachers who were taught to use this approach and content significantly improved the quality of their teaching and produced some of the highest learning gains for students reported in the physical education literature.

Book Organization

The book is organized into three parts. Part I lays the groundwork for successful teaching—undestanding and acquiring content knowledge, then conceptualizing and organizing that content for teaching. Part II explores the keys to teaching fundamental skills—understanding early elementary locomotion, and teaching elementary gymnastic skills. Part III consists of specific sport units for elementary, middle, and high school students, with each chapter providing the following:

• An explanation of the approach

• Maps that define the content and its interrelationship

• Block plans, warm-ups, and lesson organization

• A series of instructional tasks, which include the following: the purpose of the instructional task; equipment needed for instruction; a description of the instructional task; teaching cues; common errors, their causes, and how to correct them; and diagrams, as applicable.

Based on Extensive Research

Effective Physical Education Content and Instruction is based on decade-long research conducted by Phillip Ward. It has been deveeloped in collaboration with a team of master teachers who know the content and how to teach it. The result of their work is a rock-solid theoretical framework that offers practical applications, developmental progressions from beginner to advanced, and scheduling options. By using a framework that is proven to be effective (as evidenced by research), you can focus on tailoring the instructional plan to your students so they can acquire the sport skills they need, enjoy their participation in physical education, and make the most of their time in your class.

Human Kinetics is proud to publish this book in association with SHAPE America, the national organization that defines excellence for school-based health and physical education professionals across the United States.

Dr. Phillip Ward is a professor of physical education teacher education in the department of human sciences at The Ohio State University. Dr. Ward is passionate about physical education and teacher education. He is director of the Learning to Teach Physical Education Research Program, which develops pedagogical content knowledge for teaching physical education. Dr. Ward has authored or coauthored more than 100 research papers and book chapters and has presented over 150 papers at international, national, and state conferences. He has served as an invited lecturer at 22 universities worldwide, including Belgium, China, Israel, and Japan, as well as at 16 international conferences. In 2014, he received the SHAPE America Curriculum and Instruction Honor Award. In 2015, he received the American Educational Research Association (AERA) Research on Learning and Instruction in Physical Education Outstanding Scholar Award. He is a fellow of the National Academy of Kinesiology and a research fellow of SHAPE America.

Dr. Harry Lehwald is a senior lecturer of physical education in the department of human sciences at The Ohio State University. He and the other faculty at The Ohio State University were awarded the 2014 Physical Education Teacher Education Honor Award from the National Association for Sport and Physical Education (NASPE). In addition to his teaching, he has provided in-service teacher training and presented workshops and research on the topic of content knowledge at state and national conferences, as well as in Russia. He is a member of the Learning to Teach Physical Education Research Program at The Ohio State University. He has also coauthored several articles dealing with content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge. He served on South Carolina's elementary physical education assessment writing team. Prior to his time in higher education, he taught and coached in public schools for 11 years and coached track and field and cross country at the collegiate level for 13 years, winning two Coach of the Year awards.