Managing physical education lessons: an interactional approach

Abstract

Physical education (PE) lessons involve complex and dynamic interactive sequences between students, equipment and teacher. The potential for unexpected and/or unintended events is relatively large, a point reflected in an increasing amount of scholarship dealing with classroom management (CM). This scholarship further suggests that unexpected and disruptive events negatively impact on learning and can have deleterious effects on teacher health. Despite considerable potential for these kinds of events, many PE lessons occur in structured, organized ways. The broad purpose of this paper is to consider how classroom action becomes ordered in PE contexts. To this end, an interactional approach is put forward including the specific analytic concepts of directives, epistemic authority and deontic authority. To exemplify the approach, the micro-dynamics of a situation in which a group of students are building a human pyramid is examined. The examination draws attention to: how the teacher engages in a series of interactions with the students to move the sequence forward; how the students themselves achieve order through their interactions with one another; and how the characteristics of the activity help to organize the students' behaviors and limit possibilities for action. The discussion is located against a backdrop of current CM scholarship. Reference is also made to two aspects of social context: the increasing prominence of managerial discourse in educational arenas and the significance of student-centeredness in pedagogical theory. Both aspects appear to influence how order can be achieved in PE today. The analysis raises issues related to pedagogy, management and authority which are addressed in the final two sections of the paper.

Keywords:

• Order
• Classroom management
• Interaction
• Student centered learning
• Directives
• Epistemic authority
• Deontic authority

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Oskar Lindwall and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and encouraging comments on earlier versions of this paper.

Notes

1. Piaget (1972, cited in Bergqvist & Säljö, 1994, p. 151) commented: ‘What one wishes is that the teachers would stop lecturing and instead stimulate the students’ own investigations and their own efforts and not be content with just handing over solutions to the problems to them’, a sentiment that is easily recognizable in contemporary texts (see for example, Wright et al., 2004).

2. IRE sequences have been identified in instructional texts in PE—see Wright and Forrest (2007) for a critique of model questioning techniques in Game Centered Approaches teaching resources.

3. These examples come from a list of 59 disruptive behaviors identified by middle and high school students in an extensive survey conducted by Cothran and Kulinna (2007, p. 218).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council [grant number 2010-5182].