Game Sense for Teaching and Coaching

International Perspectives

Richard L Light, Christina Curry, Richard Light, Christina Curry, Richard L Light

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367674960
• eBook ISBN: 9781000364255
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Physical Education
• Index: Biological Sciences

Sport coaching has grown significantly as an area of research interest with an expanding number of sport coaching programs offered. The past decade or so has also seen significant interest in games-based approaches to coaching and teaching games. On a global level, Game Sense is one of the most recognized athlete-centred approaches for team sports, probably close behind Teaching Games for Understanding.

Game Sense for Coaching and Teaching provides an understanding of how an Australian approach to coaching has grown and developed as it has been taken up across the globe. While the focus is on Game Sense, the book also offers insights into how any coaching or physical education (PE) teaching approach changes as it is adapted to different contexts across the world, examining the theoretical, historical and philosophical foundations of sport coaching and teaching in schools.

This book is particularly useful for undergraduate and post-graduate sport coaching and PE courses but is also likely to be of interest for all practicing sports coaches or physical education teachers and lecturers.

1
GAME SENSE
Its History, Development and Future

Richard L. Light

The Idea of Game-Based Learning

Game Sense is a pedagogical approach for teaching and coaching games and team sports that sits within a range of methods and approaches referred to as GBA (game-based approaches). GBA vary in terms of how learning is theorized and the epistemology they sit on, the extent to which the teaching/coaching process is structured and what the aims of the approach are but, in practice, look very similar. They all locate learning within games or game-like activities, emphasise questioning and take an inquiry-based or problem-solving-type approach that involves dialogue and reflection. In academic debate we can all be a little precious at times about theoretical differences such as what learning theory best explains learning in and through GBA. At the 2017 ACPHER Game Sense for Teaching and Coaching conference in Adelaide I made this point as provocateur, following Ian Renshaw’s keynote on constraints-led theory. In this volume, we have a similar difference of opinion on theorising learning in and through Game Sense expressed by Shane Pill in Chapter 3 and by me in Chapter 4, yet at a practical level, there is not much difference between us.

In physical education and sport pedagogy, and most other disciplines and sub-disciplines, there are very few real innovations or new ideas. Instead, they tend to be developments or redevelopments of ideas, or reorganising of them. This is why history is important in discussions about sport and physical education pedagogy. This is why we always need to recognise where ideas come from and how they have been shaped by changing social and economic conditions. My father studied in a master-of-education program after World War II at The University of Sydney and was immensely influenced as a teacher by the thinking of John Dewey, who is considered to be the most influential thinker on education in the 20th century. His genealogical approach sits within the history of philosophy and is shaped by Darwin’s theories and views of the world (Lamont, 1961). Dewey strove to reconnect philosophy to the mission of ‘education-for-living’. At the turn of the 21st century I found his perspective on learning exciting and enlightening for thinking about sport coaching and teaching physical education. This was many years after his death in 1952, and his work continues to influence thinking on education, including GBA (see Quay and Stolz, 2014). The ideas of the great thinkers in the West and the East are part of a long development of knowledge over thousands of years.

Game Sense was developed from Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU), but ideas about coaching team sports by locating learning in games had been suggested before Bunker and Thorpe’s ground-breaking publication in 1982. For example, over the 1960s Wade (see 1967) advocated the use of small-sided practice games in football (soccer) to develop tactical knowledge, skill in context and improve skill execution through the increased touches of the ball in games when compared to drills. He promoted taking a problem-solving approach in which the teacher or coach guides the student or player towards solving the problem without telling them what to do. He urged teachers to have imagination and to think creatively when teaching football, which I suggest is equally as important, if not more so today. Wade (1967: xiii) suggested, ‘Clearly the teacher who can set problems and also guide a child towards appropriate solutions has an advantage. But any teacher with imagination can set problems and guide a child toward possible answers’. Does this sound familiar half a century later?

The 1960s was a period of new thinking about education that challenged the status quo with progressive education (see Dewey, 1916/97) and child-centred teaching challenging the traditional approach. In the UK during this period Mauldon and Redfern (1969) proposed the use of games in primary (elementary) schools instead of drills to develop skills. These ideas on teaching and coaching were not limited to the UK, with Mahlo (1974) taking a similar approach in France, and it was in this context that Thorpe and Bunker, and later Len Almond developed TGfU. In response to concerns with British universities graduating physical education teachers with good skills but who were not good players, Thorpe, Bunker and Almond located learning in games that were modified to suit the learners/athletes. They were used to develop skill in game contexts, tactical understanding, decision-making, awareness and all the other important interacting components of game play. One of the keys to the success of TGfU in achieving these objectives was the use of questioning as a central feature of the approach.

Bunker and Thorpe’s response to the problems they saw was practical and relatively simple, but effective. They focussed on the game itself as a whole instead of on breaking down into core or even fundamental skills or technique and drilling them in isolation from the game. Locating learning in games designed and modified to suit the needs, experiences, skills and other abilities of the learner gave relevance and meaning to what was learned. It also addressed their concern with student boredom by bringing back the fun and joy that games can promote. When I was developing my teaching of Game Sense and TGfU at The University of Melbourne from 2000 to mid-2004, this is what struck me most when teaching pre-service teachers. It is what they most commented on and wanted to provide for their students during practice teaching and some of our visits to local schools to teach games. It is also something that really appealed to US masters’ students when I was coaching at the two Global Coaching Symposia, I was invited to in 2018 and 2019 where I lectured and ran workshops on Positive Pedagogy for sport coaching (see Light and Harvey, 2019, 2021). Indeed, one of the students contributed a chapter in the second edition of Positive Pedagogy for sport coaching on his attempts to make American football training fun (see Sneed, 2019).

Over the past two decades, TGfU has changed significantly from Bunker and Thorpe’s (1982) proposal. Growth in attention paid to TGfU was most marked over the course of the 1990s in the USA, where it challenged the dominance of the ‘skill drill’ approach and stimulated a tactical versus technical debate. It led to suggestions for changes (see Kirk and MacPhail, 2002) to the conceptual model of TGfU that were followed up with its development into a model with six stages. With this approach, learners pass through six stages in a cyclical representation that might occur across a range of levels from a single lesson or training session to a unit of work for the term in physical education. Since then development of TGfU into a model has seen it increasingly structured with current interpretations significantly different from the 1982 version.

When asked about the difference between TGfU and Game Sense Rod Thorpe said that “… I see Game Sense as incorporating more of the original teaching games for understanding” (Kidman, 2001, p. 26). As a pioneer in the early development of TGfU, Len Almond confirmed the extent to which TGfU had changed over 30 years in his presentation with Alan Launder in the TGfU symposium at the 2010 AIESEP World Congress. There he explained how, when first conceptualised, TGfU was just a loose idea or concept, and how far its current interpretation is from the 1982 concept. He suggested that TGfU had been designed to be a ‘starting point’ from which improvement in student learning in physical education could evolve. Thorpe and Bunker themselves addressed this issue in their keynote address at the 2008 International TGfU Conference in Vancouver, Canada. They recognised the need to develop TGfU but questioned whether or not the current form (at the time) of TGfU had moved too far away from the original intent and principles to still be called TGfU. In conversations with Rod Thorpe at the 2003 Melbourne conference he suggested to me that the current interpretations of TGfU at the time were very good, but perhaps were not TGfU as he had conceived it.

The Development of Game Sense

Over the course of the 1990s, Rod Thorpe’s regular visits to Australia to work with Australian coaches led to collaboration with the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) in the development of Game Sense. Game Sense is less structured than TGfU and is very similar to the original idea of TGfU developed by Thorpe, Bunker and Almond. The term refers to coaching that bases learning within (modified) games and uses questioning to make it player-centred. It aims to develop thinking players (den Duyn, 1997). Thorpe gave structure to the existing use of game-based training by many Australian coaches, but his most significant contribution was the emphasis he placed on questioning (Light, 2004). Asking questions instead of telling players what they should do moved the focus of coaching from the coach to the players.

In 1997 the ASC published a valuable set of resources that comprised a booklet (den Duyn, 1997), a video and a set of activity cards that drew on coaching practice in Australia showing a range of modified games in each of the four game categories. ‘Playing for Life Activity Cards’ designed for teachers and based on the Australian Health and Physical Education (HPE) curriculum are available on the ASC website. They are structured around the four TGfU game categories with an extra category of ‘Movement exploration’ included. At around the same time, the late Allen Launder (2001) was developing Play Practice as a games-centred approach to teaching a range of sport skills (Launder, 2001). The Americans who had developed Tactical Games (TG) were helping academics in Singapore develop a version of TG, labelled the Game Concept Approach (GCA), specifically for the Singapore context. GCA was endorsed by the Singapore, Ministry of Education in 1999 as part of its Thinking Schools, Learning Nations policy (Rossi, Fry, McNeill and Tan, 2007).

At the time, the ASC and local coaches wanted to avoid association with school-based physical education and being too prescriptive for coaches to encourage existing good practice while providing some structure for the development of Game Sense coaching and ‘thinking players’. There is no pedagogical model but I have suggested four core features of Game Sense (Light, 2013). From the first publication on Games Sense (den Duyn, 1997) it has had an impact on coaching across a range of sports in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and some other countries (see for example, Dixon, 2010; Light and Evans, 2010). The convening of the 2019 Game Sense for Teaching and Coaching conference in Tokyo suggests expanding interest in it.

Not long after its introduction Game Sense was promoted by state and national sporting bodies such as in touch football and soccer through professional development and accreditation courses but also had a significant influence in physical education teaching. When taken up in schools, the differences between Game Sense and TGfU are often difficult to see, leading some researchers to suggest that there is no difference (see Kidman, 2001). The two terms are often used to refer to the same approach to physical education teaching in Australia, but there are differences, particularly in relation to the differences between sport coaching and teaching in school physical education (see, for example, Light, 2004; Light and Evans, 2010).

The focus of Game Sense on sport coaching, the involvement of the ASC and Australian coaches in its initial development and its focus on coaches instead of teachers, led to a less prescriptive approach than TGfU that provided room for coaches to adopt it for part of their coaching while maintaining other existing practices. Even when applied in physical education classes its looser, less prescriptive approach can be appealing to teachers. On the other hand, this can lead to a misunderstanding of Game Sense as being just playing games and neglect of its pedagogy. This is commonly an oversight on the part of governing sports bodies that just provide a series of training games under the heading, Game Sense.

Game Sense for Sport Coaching

When applied to sport coaching, Game Sense is not used to introduce players to a game or show them how to play it as it would be in schools. It is used to fit into a season of competition whether for the local under nine years soccer team or a professional rugby team. Game Sense offers an ideal approach for developing young players who have deep knowledge and an inquiring mind who would respond well to the expectations of more senior sport. It also offers much at the most elite levels (see Light and Evans, 2013; Chappell and Light, 2015; Jones, 2015).

The practice games used in Game Sense typically aim at improving or changing specific aspects of the team’s play that can be very tight in the case of older, more experienced players. This could involve tending to a weaknesses in play identified from analysis of the previous competition match (or matches) or working on an aspect of play designed to exploit a perceived weakness in the next opposition’s playing style, or to respond to an opposition strength. If used in this way then coaches might find one specific training game or activity to, for example, redress a team’s deficiency in skill execution under pressure, to improve decision-making under pressure or to improve a tactical aspect of game play.

Using modified or specifically designed games, setting up problems to be solved, asking questions instead of telling players what to do and encouraging reflection and dialogue are the same as in TGfU and other GBA. However, the focus of club or high-performance sport coachi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• About the Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Game Sense: Its History, Development and Future
• Part I Theorizing Game Sense
• Part II Game Sense and Culture
• Part III Coaching and Teaching Issues in Game Sense
• Part IV The Development of Game Sense
• Concluding Thoughts: Game Sense for Teaching and Coaching Globally
• Index