Background: Teacher education is a complex endeavor designed to prepare preservice teachers for the task of teaching physical education to students in K-12 schools. Yet, there is widespread criticism of teacher education outcomes within the United States and around the world. Consequently, teacher educators have been increasingly called upon to…

Purpose: Practice-based teacher education (PBTE) has been proposed as an approach to combat forms of teacher education that create prescriptive understandings of teaching that are disconnected from practice. In physical education, PBTE is becoming more prevalent. Some have argued that many of its elements have been in use for some time, whereas…

Purpose: Little is known about how teachers acquire specialized content knowledge (SCK). We examine the hypothesis that SCK is not acquired from K-12 physical education and from extracurricular activities characterized by playing; instead, SCK must be explicitly taught to teachers. Method: Students were enrolled in either basic physical activity…

Purpose: Instructional tasks are a form of content knowledge that can be defined as specialized content knowledge (SCK). We examined the changes in the use of instructional tasks and SCK index scores of preservice teachers from methods to final practicum. Method: Five preservice teachers were observed through the methods practicum where they…

Purpose: This study reports on our efforts toward extending the conceptual understanding of content development in physical education by validating content maps as a measurement tool, examining new categories of instructional tasks to describe content development and validating formulae that can be used to evaluate depth of content development.…