Game Sense

Pedagogy for Performance, Participation and Enjoyment

Richard Light

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781136291692
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Physical Education

Game Sense is an exciting and innovative approach to coaching and physical education that places the game at the heart of the session. It encourages the player to develop skills in a realistic context, to become more tactically aware, to make better decisions and to have more fun. Game Sense is a comprehensive, research-informed introduction to the Game Sense approach that defines and explores key concepts and essential pedagogical theory, and that offers an extensive series of practical examples and plans for using Game Sense in real teaching and coaching situations.

The first section of the book helps the reader to understand how learning occurs and how this informs player-centred pedagogy. It also explains the relationship between Game Sense and other approaches to Teaching Games for Understanding. The second section of the book demonstrates how the theory can be applied in practice, providing a detailed, step-by-step guide to using Game Sense in eleven sports, including soccer, basketball, field hockey and softball.

No other book explores the Game Sense approach in such depth, or combines theory and innovative practical techniques. Game Sense is invaluable reading for all students of physical education or sports coaching, any in-service physical education teacher or any sports coach working with children or young people.

PART I

1
INTRODUCTION

Bunker and Thorpe’s (1982) modest publication proposing a model for teaching games in secondary schools that located learning within games put forward quite radical ideas about how games should be taught. It presented a challenge to the accepted focus on fundamental skills and was based upon their observations of how the focus on technique produced technically sound students who were not good games players. This publication and those that followed soon after stimulated a brief period of interest that was not sustained (Holt, Strean and Begoechea 2002). Bunker and Thorpe’s concept of teaching games by teaching in and through games did not really begin to take off until a little over ten years ago. This has seen Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) and a range of variations and similar approaches develop into one of the main areas of research interest in the physical education literature.

The past decade or so has seen growing interest in similar student/player-centred, games-based approaches to coaching and teaching games and sport. The identification of constructivist theories of learning at the end of the 1990s as a means of understanding learning in and through games played a significant part in this revival of interest by triggering interest from researchers in the possibilities offered by TGfU and the growing number of variations and similar approaches (see, for example, Kirk and Macdonald 1998; Gréhaigne and Godbout 1998b). This interest was stimulated by the establishment of a regular series of international conferences beginning in Plymouth, New Hampshire in the USA in 2001 that further stimulated research interest while also developing practitioner interest. The first conference, convened by Dr Joy Butler, attracted a large number of international researchers interested in TGfU and a significant number of local teachers. This was a turning point in the revival of interest in TGfU, with the ensuing publication of the conference proceedings beginning a valuable and ongoing series of edited publications on TGfU. The response of those who attended was very positive and it was clear that this was a good idea that should be continued. I convened the second conference in 2003 at the University of Melbourne in Australia, which attracted an even larger number of academics, with more from Asia, including a large cohort of teachers from Singapore and some local sport coaches. The third conference was held in Hong Kong, where teacher interest continued, with the fourth held in Vancouver, Canada, featuring a large number of Canadian teachers. The fifth conference is to be convened in July 2012 where it all started, at Loughborough University in the UK.

FIGURE 1.1 Practising hockey in small-sided games

TGfU variations developed from it, such as Game Sense (den Duyn 1997) in Australia, the Singaporean Games Concept Approach (GCA) and Tactical Games (Griffin, Mitchell and Oslin 1997) in the USA, and similar approaches such as Play Practice (Launder 2001) and the French Tactical-Decision Learning Model (Gréhaigne, Richard and Griffin 2005) form one of the more popular areas of research in the physical education literature. Play Practice shares much with TGfU but is not derived from it, as Launder emphasized at the Melbourne TGfU conference in 2003. In his keynote speech Rod Thorpe suggested TGfU and Play Practice were brothers, but in his invited address Alan Launder replied by emphasizing their differences, saying that, at best, they were distant cousins. There have been a number of edited books and conference proceedings devoted to TGfU that have been developed from the international conference series (see, for example, Butler et al. 2003; Light, Swabey and Brooker 2003; Liu, Li and Cruz 2006; Griffin and Butler 2005; Hopper, Butler and Storey 2009; Butler and Griffin 2010) and special issues of journals published on TGfU (Rink 1996; Light 2005a).

As well as stimulating interest from researchers and teachers, games-based coaching has caught the attention of sport coaching researchers and coaches. Alan Launder’s (2001) book on Play Practice is perhaps the best known example but a range of other books on coaching suggesting a similar games-based approach to coaching have been published (for example see Breed and Spittle 2011; Harrison 2002; Slade 2010), with a special issue of the Journal of Physical Education New Zealand devoted to the games approach to coaching (Light 2006). There has, however, been little specifically written outlining the Game Sense approach since the publication of a slim handbook (den Duyn 1997) that formed part of the valuable Australian Sports Commission (ASC) Game Sense package produced in the late 1990s.

I wrote this book in response to this lack of writing specifically focused on Game Sense and a more general lack of authored books written on game-based, understanding approaches to teaching and coaching. This involves addressing what I see as a need to actually define or outline what Game Sense is and how it is different to TGfU and the other games-based approaches to coaching and teaching. As I outline in Chapter 2, TGfU has developed over three decades into something that is, in some ways, different to Bunker and Thorpe’s original ideas (Thorpe and Bunker 2008; Almond and Launder 2010). Game Sense has also developed since 1997, but not as much, because it has received far less attention and what has been published specifically on Game Sense in physical education and coaching has been written by scholars in Australia (see, for example, Brooker, Kirk and Braiuka 2000; Brooker and Abbot 2001; Light and Georgakis 2005b; Light and Evans 2010). There are some practical publications available that offer useful ideas for taking up a Game Sense type of approach, with many very useful examples and training games that are both sport-specific and generic (see, for example, Pill 2007; Slade 2010; Breed and Spittle 2011). However, there is nothing that pays significant attention to pedagogy (how to do instead of just what to do), is strongly research informed, rigorously theorized with a sustained line of thinking that still offers practical ideas.

The idea for writing this book arose from the development of my teaching in collaboration with several colleagues in different universities (particularly at the University of Sydney with Dr Steve Georgakis) tied into my programme of research on pedagogy and learning. It was also motivated by my work with pre-service and in-service teachers and coaches in Game Sense workshops in Australia, Macau, Taiwan, Japan, France, Canada and the UK. In my teaching I have continually been pleased with student and teacher responses to the Game Sense approach and have developed teaching that balances the need for them to understand basic theory, read the research and experience it as both learners and teachers (or coaches). In my more recent work I have sought to establish a dialectic between theory and practice for them to become mutually informing that has involved grounding theory in practice (see, for example, Light 2008a; Light and Wallian 2008). My work with French colleagues, and with Professor Nathalie Wallian at the Université de Franche Comté in particular, has helped me work through this challenge. This dialectic between theory and practice and my attempt to facilitate a balance between theoretical and practical learning is reflected in the book. For readers to get the most from the book they need to move between the chapters in Part I and the practical chapters in Part II, think, and develop a stronger and deeper understanding of this pedagogy as they put the ideas to work.

One of the key features of Game Sense, TGfU and similar approaches is the understanding that learners develop about playing the game or sport rather than just being able to perform techniques isolated from the game. I take a similar approach to helping teachers and coaches learn to use Game Sense. I want teachers and coaches to have a basic understanding of how humans learn and how Game Sense pedagogy can enhance and shape this learning to empower them in their teaching and coaching to make decisions about how they teach and what they teach rather than relying on handouts. At the University of Sydney, where Game Sense formed a strong theme in the personal development, health and Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) programme, I was very pleased to receive e-mails from some students on their practicum and a few who had recently graduated and taken up positions in schools outlining units or games they had developed and tested in their teaching. Many of these I then used in my teaching of pre-service teachers. This provides an example of the value of helping pre-service teachers develop deep understanding of what they are doing and how teaching Game Sense always involves learning for the teacher or coach. Drawing on Davis and Sumara (1997), this can be seen as the teacher/coach and students/players being partners in learning.

As busy professionals, teachers and coaches often look for practical ideas that they can immediately implement and can be disinclined to spend time reading theory because they don’t see its relevance. Indeed, they can be quite averse to anything tagged as theory. The problem with this is that they can become too dependent upon ‘experts’ to provide quick-fix solutions to immediate problems and fail to build enough of an understanding of learning and pedagogy to become independent enquirers. From my experience of teaching undergraduate physical education and health teachers I have found that beginning with positive first-hand experiences of Game Sense, asking students to reflect upon and analyse this experience, then explaining it through understandable theory works well in producing thinking, independent games teachers. While I still get some students asking for ideas on teaching a particular sport during teaching experience or after graduation, I have also had some great ideas come in from them as I outlined in the previous paragraph. In this way they apply their knowledge and develop their own games and activities that, with colleagues, I have often taken up and taught to the next ‘generation’ of PETE students.

Taking this same approach in setting out this book means that it is necessary for those reading and using it to begin to take a Game Sense approach, or to further develop their Game Sense teaching, to read it all and not just pick out an odd game or activity to use at training or in class like picking items from the shelves of the supermarket. However, I have not in any way been prescriptive about precisely how to teach or what to teach. Some publications on TGfU have set out to clearly define and determine how it should be taught, step by step. I have taken a different approach that I feel sits better with the very notion of Game Sense developed by Rod Thorpe and the ASC. Instead of setting out ‘how to teach Game Sense’ I have, instead, set out a framework for Game Sense teaching and coaching within which practitioners can make decisions about how and what they teach by drawing on my own experiences of teaching to offer examples of a Game Sense approach to a range of major sports/games. Working within this framework provides more freedom and room to move for teachers and coaches but does then require them to read and think through the chapters in Part I and to make connections between this section (Chapter 5 in particular) and the chapters in Part II.

In the practical chapters I draw on my own experiences of using these units or activities but try to outline problems that have arisen for me or might arise in teaching or coaching. The exceptions to this are Chapters 9 and 16, where I asked Christina Curry, from the University of Western Sydney, to collaborate with me by drawing on her experience of teaching ultimate frisbee and oztag to undergraduate students and secondary school students. Every activity or modified game presented in this book has thus been tried and tested in the field. The most important thing for people using this book is to understand that it is the pedagogy that is important and to have an idea of how learning emerges or unfolds from it. Many teachers and coaches use modified games but don’t get maximum value from them because they don’t adopt a student/player-centred approach such as Game Sense (see, for example, Light and Evans 2010). The practical examples are just that. They are only examples from my teaching experience (and some from Christina Curry’s experiences). They are drawn from experiences of teaching in pre-service teacher education programmes, coach education, primary school physical education, secondary school physical education, teacher and coach workshops and undergraduate and postgraduate workshops in Australia, Europe, Asia and North America.

I have set out the practical chapters as a unit of work beginning with a simple game and building in complexity as learning progresses to culminate in a full version of the game or a modified version of the game. This is intended to show how physical education teachers can structure and enhance learning by moving from simple to complex learning environments while building and scaffolding on previously generated knowledge. Generalist primary school teachers could, alternatively, just take one game and teach it for a single physical education lesson. Although a sound understanding of games is certainly very helpful it is not a prerequisite. Primary (elementary) school generalist teachers should not be intimidated by the challenge of teaching games due to any concern over a lack of specific experience or knowledge of the sport. Taking up a Game Sense approach means that their understanding of pedagogy and the student-centred nature of it is more important and that they will learn about tactics and skill as they teach by facilitating learning and, as Davis and Sumara (1997) suggest, becoming a partner in it (also see Light and Georgakis 2005a). On the other hand, coaches of youth teams would typically have a sound understanding of the sport they are coaching. They might still, however, just take one game, but it would be focused on a particular aspect of play that they want to specifically work on and adapt to their needs and to their players’ ages, experience, dispositions and knowledge. While using the activities and modified games presented in the practical section (Part II) I want to repeat my suggestion that teachers and coaches go back and re-read sections of Part I when necessary to solve problems or just improve their Game Sense teaching/coaching. Teaching and coaching must always involve learning for the teachers and coaches as well as their students/players.

The book

The first six chapters provide an understanding of the development of Game Sense, of how learning takes place through it, the differences between teaching games in physical education and coaching sport when adopting a Game Sense approach, an outline of its key pedagogical features and a chapter on assessment. These six chapters cover important issues and considerations for the adoption of a Game Sense approach that are linked to the following eleven chapters, focused on using a Game Sense approach for teaching/coaching specific sports. This is not a separation of theory and practice but, instead, an attempt to ground theory in practice to establish a dialectic between them. It is essential to understand and refer to Chapters 1–6 when implementing the units or particular activities presented in Chapters 7–17 or when adapting them to particular needs, learners and/or desired learning outcomes. In this way Chapter 5 is likely to be most useful in taking up the Game Sense pedagogy to get the most from the modified games and activities suggested in the sport-specific chapters.

Each of Chapters 7–11 is devoted to a particular team sport and with a strong emphasis on invasion games as these are the most common and arguably the best suited to a Game Sense approach. As I have suggested, moving between the sport-specific chapters and Chapters 1–6 will help enable teachers and coaches to successfully implement the examples and empower them to understand how to modify and adapt them and to build upon them in developing their own practical ideas. Just as the learners (students/players) should formulate ideas, test them and evaluate them, so teachers and coaches should be prepared to try out the ideas suggested in this book for teaching/coaching, reflect upon them, evaluate them, make changes and try again.

Chapters 1–6

There is now a range of student/player-centred, game-based approaches to teaching and coaching that are similar to TGfU, with many, like Game Sense, directly derived from it. There is also some confusion about what Game Sense is and how it is different to TGfU. I intentionally use capital letters to differentiate Game Sense as a distinct pedagogical approach from the idea of game sense as a broad concept of embodied, practical understanding of the game (a practical sense of the game or what Bourdieu [1986] calls le sens pratique). Indeed, the blurring of differences between the two uses of the term leads to misinterpretation of Game Sense and often to neglect of its pedagogy by teachers and coaches (see, for example, Light and Evans 2010). Chapter 2 traces the development of Game Sense as a variation of TGfU focused on sport coaching to highlight the differences and similarities between them while touching on some important issues in the use of Game Sense for teachers, coaches, students and academics. Among these are not only the influences that cultural and social contexts exert on the teaching or coaching of Game Sense and TGfU in local settings, but also the ways in which their development is influenced by larger social, cultural, economic and political contexts. Despite recognition in the literature of the importance of context for learning, there has been little attention in the TGfU literature paid to the larger cultural and social contexts or fields within which learning environments are constructed....