Background: Curriculum for Excellence, a new national policy initiative in Scottish Schools, provides a unified curricular framework for children aged 3-18. Within this framework, Physical Education (PE) now forms part of a collective alongside physical activity and sport, subsumed by the newly created curriculum area of "Health and…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to examine the challenges and benefits that emerged while using an innovative field-based student-centered inquiry as curriculum model in a secondary physical education methods course. Participants and setting: This study took place in the Southwest USA. Participants included 11 pre-service teachers who were…

Background: Physical education has long been caught in a time of "innovation without change". Yet, despite a wealth of pedagogical innovations and policies, which encourage a reconsideration of the "traditional pedagogy", teachers rarely move beyond the honeymoon period of implementation. Purpose: The purpose of this paper is…

Background: Emotions play a major role in the learning of pre-service teachers. However, there is a lack of in-depth research on emotion in the context of physical education (PE), especially during the practicum. Lazarus's model and its concepts of appraisal and coping is a salient theoretical framework for understanding the emotional…

Background: Many critical curriculum theorists in physical education have advocated a model- or models-based approach to teaching in the subject. This paper explores the literature base around models-based practice (MBP) and asks if this multi-models approach to curriculum planning has the potential to be the great white hope of pedagogical change…

Background: Facilitation within successful professional development (PD) requires individuals working with a cadre of teachers to examine and reframe their practices, navigating the complexities associated with educational reform initiatives. Although much has been written about the magnitude of the shift required of teachers within current…

Background: This study was grounded in the differentiated instructional model where teachers tailor content, process/support, and product in response to their students' levels of readiness and interest. The value of differentiated teaching is well established; however, the implementation of such a technique is difficult due to differences in…

Background: The development of intelligent, thinking performers as a central theme in physical education curriculum documents worldwide has highlighted the need for an evolution of teaching styles from the dominant reproductive approach. This has prompted an Australian university to change the content and delivery of a games unit within their…

Background: Teacher turnover has been identified as a major problem that represents instability in teaching. Teacher turnover can be divided into three components: attrition means that the teacher is leaving the profession; "area transfer" means that the teacher is changing his/her subject area and "migration" means that the…

Purpose: The aim of this article is to show a need for explicating "what" there is to learn in physical education (PE) with a particular focus on learning to move with the meaning potential seen as integral to moving. Further, the aim is to provide an example of exploring "bodily knowing" from the perspective of practical…

Background: In the physical education (PE) domain, teachers are given the freedom to make important educational decisions. Because of the common assumption that the decisions teachers make are based on a set of educational perspectives, a considerable number of studies have addressed the importance of studying the thinking and beliefs of PE…

Background: Physical education teacher education (PETE) offers a context for students to learn about the promotion of active lifestyles in secondary schools through their interactions and experiences during the teacher education process. However, previous studies have found low levels of health-related fitness knowledge amongst PETE students,…

Background: As the USA enters the second decade of the twenty-first century, it does so in a polarized political, social, and educational climate heretofore unseen in its relatively short history. Such a climate has implications for what role schools play in American society and especially how school-based physical education (SBPE) may need to…

Purpose: The purpose of this study was to systematically develop and validate an instrument to assess parental perceptions toward adapted physical education (APE) teachers, who work with children with autism. Methods: Participants included two expert panels and parents of children and youth with autism. The survey used a Likert-scale design where…

Background: This article draws on the literature relating to game-centred approaches (GCAs), such as Teaching Games for Understanding, and dynamical systems views of motor learning to demonstrate a convergence of ideas around games as complex adaptive learning systems. This convergence is organized under the title "complexity thinking"…