Secondary Teachers’ Views of Effective Teaching in Physical Education

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to reconstruct high school physical education teachers’ views of effective teaching and to examine the underlying rationales behind these definitions. The participants were 14 experienced high school physical education teachers. Three methods of data collection were employed: critical incidents, the Q-sort technique, and informal interviews. Inductive content analysis was used to examine the critical incident forms, and the resulting themes formed the items in the Q-sort. The teachers’ underlying rationales for the rankings in the Q-sort were examined in the informal interviews. The overall results revealed that the majority of the teachers in this study defined effective teaching as a hierarchy of pedagogical practices in which organization, management, discipline, and control form the base, with student success being the ultimate goal.