Task planning for sports learning by physical education teachers in the pre-service phase

Planning the learning task is one of the principal actions that a teacher should engage in, and it is important to know how teachers in the pre-service phase plan learning and communication tasks and the feedback that they use in the classroom. The aim of the present study was twofold: i) to characterize the learning tasks designed by the pre-service physical education teachers; and ii) to identify the relationships between the variables that define the learning tasks and the phases into which a session is structured in Physical Education Teacher Education (PETE) in the pre-service phase. The sample comprised 695 learning tasks designed by fourteen pre-service phase teachers. The independent variable was the lesson structure and the dependent variables were the learning means, the game situation, the game phase, the space where the students practice, the use of the ball in the task, and the kind of feedback provided in the learning tasks. The high predominance of exercises, unspecific games, and no opponent situations, coupled with the low percentage of reflexive feedback, indicates that the pre-service teachers give prevalence to technical over tactical learning. In addition, pre-service teachers show preferences for some of the task characteristics for each part of the lesson structure. Teachers in PETE pre-service phase tasks tend to follow a more traditional methodology, despite having received information about the different methods of sports teaching in their initial training. The current findings seems to indicate a resistance to changing a traditional model for other models centered on game comprehension.