Core Practices for Teaching Physical Education: Recommendations for Teacher Education

Overview & Synopsis

Purpose: To identify and define a set of core practices for physical education teacher education (PETE), to situate these practices within existing conceptions of core practices in other subject matters, and to validate the core practices using expert opinion and the evidence-based pedagogy literature. Method: A total of 45 PETE teacher educators, consisting of 22 research experts and 23 faculty members, were purposely selected to establish a consensus on core practices. The procedures draw upon guidelines from evaluation and program planning, medicine, nursing, and health education. Data were collected over e-mail. Results: From an initial set of 18 core practices, 16 practices were further developed and refined by the experts. These 16 practices were further validated by seeking evidence from the physical education literature and by using meta-analytic effect sizes. Discussion/Conclusion: The results of this study can be used as an invitation to the field to improve the authors' teacher education efforts.