ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a brief overview of the literature reporting physical education teachers' actions in schools. It acknowledges a number of studies reporting teachers' practices as over-reliant on forms of 'direct' teaching, and provides an examination of three key research traditions to demonstrate the ways in which contemporary research has never really managed to capture 'real-world' teaching. The chapter sets out the methodological stance for a study that looked to avoid the problems and pitfalls identified in the majority of the research literature. It reports two main findings following qualitative observation and teacher interviews: firstly, that teachers' construal of teacher–learner relationships as 'reciprocal' in nature provided latitude to interact with the learners in their classes in a variety of ways; secondly, the variation displayed in the practices of these teachers enabled five framing categories to be constructed as they represent the patterns of interaction identified in the study.
