The Reflection of a Physical Education Student Teacher's Teaching Experience

Student teaching is one of the important parts of physical education teacher education (PETE) program. It provides physical education (PE) student teachers the opportunity to apply their knowledge from course work to teaching... [ view full abstract ]

Student teaching is one of the important parts of physical education teacher education (PETE) program. It provides physical education (PE) student teachers the opportunity to apply their knowledge from course work to teaching field experience. In this study, the 5-week intensive teaching practicum was part of the senior year teaching practicum course. It was broken into 1 week for observation and 4 week for teaching. The purpose of this study was to analyse a PE student teacher’s reflection on field experience during intensive teaching practicum. The research questions were: (1) What were the PE student teacher’s reflection during his teaching practicum? (2) What were the difficulty and problem-solving strategy in teaching PE? The participants were one male PE student teacher and his practicum teaching class which consisted of 43 male tenth graders. Eight lessons of multiple activity PE class were taught. The data were collected from reflective journals, student learning sheets, unit and lesson plans, peer observation reports and videotaping of the PE lessons. The data collected were analysed by inductive content analysis (Patton, 2002). Triangulation and member checks were used to ensure the trustworthiness of this study. The results indicated that: (1) The five aspects of the PE student teacher’s teaching reflection were pedagogical, content, pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), social and environmental issues. (2) The main problems faced were identified as curriculum design and classroom management. (3) Various strategies were used to cope with the problems. For instance, classroom management technique and the use of instructional based models were adopted. Based on the findings, several practical suggestions were raised to serve as references for PE student teacher, PE educator and personnel related to PETE program.

Keywords: Teaching reflection, physical education teacher education, curriculum design, classroom management, instructional based models