ABSTRACT

While teaching pre-service physical education teachers about Game Sense at the University of Sydney in 2006 a student asked me, ‘Richard, we are convinced about how good Game Sense is for teaching games and team sports and I will definitely be using it when I start teaching but what about other sports like swimming and athletics that are not team sports? How can Game Sense help teach them?’ I replied by saying that, as they were not games you couldn’t use Game Sense, per se, but that you could apply its principles to any sport. This question started me thinking about what the principles of Game Sense actually were with a suggestion for four pedagogical features set out in my book, Game Sense: Pedagogy for Performance, Participation and Enjoyment (Light, 2013a). Writing this book encouraged me to think about how these principles could be modified to help teach individual sports like swimming in which technique is so important. While there are tactical aspects of swimming in the longer events there can be no doubt about the central importance of technique (see Light and Wallian, 2008; Lang and Light, 2010). By individual, sports I mean sports in which participants most commonly compete as an individual, such as swimming, archery, croquet, golf, martial arts such as judo and karate, canoeing, diving and surfing. In all these sports, and many other individual sports, there are team events, which could be seen as not being individual competition but the dominant form of competition is on an individual basis. Individual sports are also distinct from team sports due to the comparative lack of interaction between teammates and because they have less tactical complexity. At the time of being asked how Game Sense can inform coaching and teaching

individual sports at the University of Sydney, my daughter was a successful age-group swimmer who won several events at the NSW state championships the following year. As a parent of a committed swimmer I lived in the world of age-group swimming, which provided me with some useful insights into young people’s experiences of competitive swimming (see Light, 2016), the culture of the sport

and its coaching. I had come to know her coach, Dene Roulstene, well and respected him as a thinking coach who developed excellent relationships with his swimmers and was very good at helping young swimmers realize their talent. I talked with him about applying the features of Game Sense pedagogy to swimming with a focus on reflection, dialogue and inquiry and invited him to come to the university to work with my students in a unit in which I wanted to begin to answer my student’s question about using Game Sense when teaching or coaching individual sports. He was open to my ideas and happy to design and coach a session on reducing resistance in dives and pushing off the wall that emphasized reflection upon experience, dialogue and collaborative problem solving, which helped me develop my ideas on how athlete-centred coaching could be employed in swim coaching. Like most good collaborations we both learned something from the experience, as I suspect the students did. In 2007, I spent four months as Invited Professor at the Université de Franche-

Comté (France) where I engaged in many conversations with Dr Nathalie Wallian (she was an associate professor at the time) on using constructivist perspectives to inform pedagogy for teaching and coaching individual sports. Our discussions led to the publication of what I think is a significant article on informing the teaching of swimming with constructivism, which I believe was the first such study (Light and Wallian, 2008). I have since written a number of articles on learner-centred, inquiry-based approaches to coaching swimming in French and English (see Light and Lémonie, 2012; Light, 2014a) and have had a number of discussions with some excellent swimming coaches such as Australian Olympic coach Rohan Taylor. Establishing a dialectic between theory and practice is central to my development

of, and research on, coaching pedagogy and is something that Nathalie Wallian emphasized in our conversations in Franche-Comté and in our article on a constructivist-informed approach to teaching swimming (Light and Wallian, 2008). This encouraged me to put theory into action by offering to coach my daughter’s primary school 4 x 100 metre track relay team to work through some ideas I had on coaching individual sports while helping out the school. As a busy academic I no longer have the time or opportunity to coach and to develop and test pedagogical ideas in practice. Running workshops with teachers, coaches and academics provides the opportunity to reflect in and on practice, but opportunities to coach in real-life settings and introduce innovation do not often arise. This experience of coaching is reported on in more detail in chapter 10 but, briefly, I was interested in taking on the challenge of employing a learner-centred, inquiry-based approach in a very technique-intensive aspect of the track relay. From being a parent coach for the beach sprint in the nippers (junior lifesaving), I knew that the quickest way to get improvement was by focusing on starts and baton changes and so chose to focus on changing the baton. I began with a direct instruction approach where I showed them the precise

technique I wanted them to use, but used an athlete-centred approach to help them learn how to do efficient changes as a shared task involving two young athletes in practice through reflection and discussion between pairs and between all four girls.

We experienced great success in terms of results, enjoyment, learning how to learn and developing a better understanding of each other. This experience made a significant contribution to the development of my ideas on applying Game Sense pedagogy to individual sports and suggested to me that this approach can work in practice. I continued to develop my ideas and to think about the importance of under-

standing the core ideas or concepts of Game Sense and other GBAs and how humans learn for pre-service teachers who could go out and make a difference. This led me to think about what the core features of Game Sense pedagogy were to offer a framework within which teachers and coaches could develop their own approaches to it. As I am very clear about in my book on Game Sense (Light, 2013a), I did not want to be prescriptive and set out ‘non-negotiables’. Instead, I wanted to frame what a Game Sense approach looked like and what its features were to offer coaches and physical education teachers some room to interpret and develop their coaching and teaching along these lines. I have since strengthened my ideas on this to avoid talking or writing about

what is or isn’t an authentic version of a GBA or referring to models that teachers or coaches should follow. Once I had identified the four core features of Game Sense it was quite a simple task to modify them so that they could be applied to coaching individual sports and other activities with me reducing them to three features. The emphasis of my research and teaching is on helping coaches and/or physical education teachers develop a sound understanding of theories of human learning and the philosophy underpinning GBA and Positive Pedagogy to enable them to interpret them and adapt them to their existing knowledge and dispositions. A very similar argument for helping teachers and coaches learn to employ a Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) and Game Sense approach to games teaching has recently been proposed by Stolz and Pill (2015). While in Melbourne from 2011 to 2014, I read an article on Positive Psychology

that was having a significant influence on teaching in many Melbourne schools, with the Dean of the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at The University of Melbourne, Professor Field Rickards, planning to set up a Positive Psychology centre. As I read further on Positive Psychology I was encouraged to think about my experiences of teaching practical classes in Game Sense and how this seemed to facilitate the positive wellbeing that Positive Psychology works at promoting. Indeed, my experiences of teaching and coaching using TGfU and Game Sense since 2000 have always been satisfying, not only due to the learning I see but also the happiness and joy that seems to accompany discovery, learning and the positive social interaction that is present in a good Game Sense class or session (see Light, 2002). I felt Positive Psychology had something to offer in the development of pedagogy

for coaching and teaching that was not limited to team sports and by enhancing the positive experiences of learning that GBA promote. By this time I felt I had progressed well with modifying and adapting Game Sense pedagogy so that it could be applied to individual sports and other activities that were not team sports but could not think of a suitable name for it, so I decided to call it Positive Pedagogy. A subsequent search for others’ use of the term suggested to me that, although there

were some differences between them and what I was doing, there were also basic similarities. In particular, George’s (2006) ideas on Positive Pedagogy for teaching music resonated with my ideas and feelings. My reading of, and thinking about, Positive Psychology and how I could use it

to inform and support Positive Pedagogy brought to mind some work I had read by medical sociologist Anton Antonovsky that was informing the development of the new Australian national physical education curriculum through the concept of a strengths-based approach to teaching (see McCuaig et al., 2013). This work draws on the strengths-based approach used in social work that takes a positive approach to help clients deal with adversity by being ‘future focused’ and drawing on the strengths they bring with them to solve or deal with the problem(s) they face. Antonovsky’s concern with the affective and social dimensions of life and his focus on experience fits in well with the same focus in my work on teaching and coaching. By aligning with what GBA pedagogy can develop in learners, the three elements of his Sense of Coherence (SoC) model that most contribute towards wellbeing offer a means of enhancing the positive learning experiences that Positive Pedagogy can offer. In this book there are frequent references made to ‘traditional’ ways of coaching

that are contrasted with GBA and Positive Pedagogy and which I feel oblige me to outline what I mean by ‘traditional’ coaching. I use the term ‘traditional’ in reference to long-established practice that favours direct instruction and the reduction of complex movement to distinct components, that (in reference to teaching) Davis and Sumara (1997, 2003) call a ‘complicated’ (mechanistic) approach they compare with complex approaches. This is similar to Dewey’s ‘progressive’ ideas on teaching that he compares to traditional teaching to suggest that ‘the history of educational theory is marked by opposition between the idea that education is development from within and that it is formed from without’ (Dewey, 1938a, p. 1). The traditional approach to teaching is guided by the principles of behaviourism, a mechanism that involves the ‘manipulation of students toward predetermined ends and ignores the experience of the students themselves, viewing it as a contamination of the process’ (Hopkins, 1994, p. 12). Writing on, and thinking about, educational theory and approaches to sport

coaching tends to exaggerate differences and split different approaches into exclusive opposites such as instruction versus facilitation, passive versus active learning and traditional versus progressive approaches which is something I try to avoid, as best I can, in this book. As Light, Evans, Harvey and Hassanin (2015) suggest, there is not one ‘traditional’ approach in coaching but, instead, a spectrum of coaching approaches ranging from coaches who rely exclusively on direct instruction, skilldrill, monologue and the reduction of the sport or activity to discrete components to coaches who almost exclusively use an athlete-centred, inquiry-based approach.

This book comprises fifteen chapters preceded by the introduction and followed by reflections in ‘Concluding thoughts’. The core of the book is divided into three

parts which are: (I) The development of Positive Pedagogy, (II) Pedagogical features of Positive Pedagogy and (III) Applications.