Teaching Spatial Awareness is Small–Sided Games

Abstract

This article supports the use of strategy and tactics at games stage three (how to teach basic offensive and defensive strategy using small-sided games) as a best practices in physical education. Potential learning through game stages three and four (full-sided games) is only possible when teachers have advanced content knowledge to teach the implementation of strategies and tactics. This article focuses on handball as an example. The skills and concepts taught at game stages one (basic skills) and two (the combining of basic skills) are weaved as a vignette into the framework of the modified game and act as layers for further cognitive and psychomotor development. It is important to understand that the advanced methods used would need to be implemented over a period of lessons for the students to fully understand and contextualize the major concepts, which require the higher-order thinking skills of problem solving, synthesis, and application. When these concepts have been learned, students will be able to transfer their knowledge to other invasion game settings.