Self-reported and observed teaching styles of Swedish physical education teachers

ABSTRACT

Physical education scholars have identified a number of factors that affect how teachers translate policy into practice. It is becoming clear that to create learning experiences that reflect the intention of guiding documents, teachers need to employ appropriate teaching styles. The aim of this paper was to determine whether the teaching styles used by a group of PE teachers provide opportunities for students to meet objectives relating to creativity, problem solving, personal responsibility and independence. The first part of the investigation involved the use of a questionnaire based on Mosston and Ashworth’s Spectrum of Teaching Styles (Mosston, M., & Ashworth, S. (2002). Teaching physical education (5th ed.). Boston: Benjamin Cummings. (United States). The second part involved observations of six primary and middle school teachers’ physical education lessons. The results suggest that PE teachers may not use different pedagogies for different reasons. The paper is concluded with a consideration of how a teaching styles framework can help teachers to meet diverse curriculum objectives.

KEYWORDS:

• Spectrum of teaching styles
• Swedish curriculum
• curriculum alignment
• pedagogy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Brendan SueSee has been a lecturer at the University of Southern Queensland for 2 years after being a secondary school teacher for 21 years in Australia. He completed his PhD at the Queensland University of Technology in 2012. His passion centres around creating learning experiences to maximise involvement and helping people achieve their goals. His research interests are around pedagogical styles, particularly Mosston & Ashworth’s Spectrum of Teaching Styles.

Dean Barker has worked as a physical education teacher in New Zealand, Australia and Switzerland. He completed his doctoral thesis at the School of Human Movement Studies at the University of Queensland, Australia (title: Health and Physical Education Teacherś Constructions of Teamwork: A Discursive Analysis). In 2007, he began work as a post-doctoral researcher and lecturer at the Institute of Exercise and Health Sciences, University of Basel, Switzerland. In July 2011, he left Switzerland to work as a senior lecturer at the Department of Food and Nutrition, and Sport Science.

Deańs research interests revolve around physical education and sport pedagogy. He has adopted a broad, socio-cultural approach to his research and employed various qualitative research methods and analytic frameworks. Current investigations in which he is involved focus on migration and sport/physical education participation, learning in elite sporting communities, and teacher/learner perspectives in physical education.

Notes

1 Some research suggests that teachers of both genders prefer reproduction cluster styles (Abdurrahman & Nilüfer, 2012; Jaakkola & Watt, 2011; Kulinna & Cothran, 2003; Zeng, 2016) while other investigations suggest that female teachers use production teaching styles more often than males (Al-Mulla, 1998; Macfadyen & Campbell, 2005).