Learning to teach games for understanding: Experiences from four pre-service PE teachers in the Hong Kong Institute of Education

This paper reports a qualitative study of how 4 skilled pre-service physical education teachers, who were attending the final year of a four-year full-time Bachelor of Educaion Degree programme, perceived their learning-to-learn experiences of TGFU. Attached to Lawson's occupational socialisation and interpretive inquiry perspective, data were collected through interviewing and writing of critical incidents. Although all participants perceived TGfU positively as a viable approach of PE instruction contributing to pupils' cognitive development and providing fun, they only regarded their socialization of TGfU experience as pedagogical knowledge in the form of teaching procedures which could map well with the current education reform in Hong Kong. Thus, half of them showed hesitation of adopting the model in their future teaching. They were troubled by the anticipated practicality problems and the impacts of their anticipatory socialization. The inadequacy of "tactical knowledge" of individual games threw them into confusion. They could not be sure whether the games education should be oriented towards "cognitive" or "skill" and whether it should focus on "technical" of "thinking" dimensions. They felt doubtful about whether the learning sequence of games should be from "tactic-to-technique" or from "technique-to-tactic". To such an extent, pre-service PE teachers should be acquainted with in-depth theoretical understanding of TGfU and equipped with tactical skills concerning the games they teach. Copyright © 2006 The Hong Kong Institute of Education.