ABSTRACT
School PE has a long history of adopting different curriculum models and, to a lesser extent, trying different pedagogies. One of the early pedagogy research efforts was the search for the best method of teaching (read “pedagogy”). The intent of this “methods research” (as it became known) was to find which pedagogy was superior. Of course superior in what sense is a key issue. There were many methodological problems with these early studies, not the least of which was the fact that “the researchers often set out to ‘prove’ that the innovative method was better” (Siedentop 1983, p. 39) than the traditional method with which it was compared. In the final analysis little was learned from this line of study except perhaps that we should be guarded in accepting claims that any one pedagogy is universally best for all children in all settings and across all subject or activity areas. As we will see later, there have been more recent attempts to compare different pedagogies and there are modest lessons to be learned from their findings.
