A didactic analysis of content development during the peer teaching tasks of a Sport Education season

Abstract

Background: Research on Sport Education (SE) has shown the curriculum model to be effective in motivating students to undertake specific role responsibilities and engage in the student-led tasks of the curriculum. Despite this level of engagement, emerging evidence suggests that student leadership within the peer teaching tasks of the curriculum can be problematic for the development of student content learning. Purpose: To utilize a defined didactic research methodology, to examine the development of content knowledge and performance of a team of six students participating within the peer teaching tasks of a SE season of tag rugby. Setting and participants: A team of six students, within a co-educational class of 27 eighth grade students (mean age = 13.2 years), from a middle school in the US mid-west. Students participated in a 15-lesson SE season of tag rugby with each lesson being 45 minutes in duration. Research design and data collection: The didactic protocol included collecting data regarding student intentions, actions and interpretations of content through the use of lesson observation and pre- and post-lesson participant interviews. Data analysis consisted of the identification of problematic episodes in the teaching–learning process or Critical Didactic Incidents (CDIs) during the peer teaching tasks and a search for configurations in the data across episodes. Findings: Participants demonstrated a high level of engagement and compliance with the intended content of the peer teaching tasks. Results revealed the instructional approach of peer teaching to be efficacious in developing participants' knowledge of many of the lower complexity tag rugby content learning goals of the unit. The provision of pre-lesson coaching task cards and teacher intervention within tasks were effective strategies in aligning student learning with intended teacher learning goals. Participants failed to learn higher order content during peer teaching primarily due to deficiencies in the student coach's ability to elaborate content through appropriate demonstration, error diagnosis and task modification. Conclusions: Teachers utilizing the SE curriculum must adequately prepare the student coaches for the peer teaching tasks by teaching them, not only relevant content knowledge, but also pedagogical principles required to effectively elaborate the intended content to peers. The didactic methodology may provide a sharper lens to understand the dynamic evolution of content that occurs within the situated contexts of instructional tasks.