Teaching about planning in pre-service physical education teacher education: A collaborative self-study

Learning how to develop lesson and unit plans is recognised as a priority for teacher education programmes; however, recent empirical research on planning is scarce, particularly in physical education. The purpose of this research was to analyse how and why we teach physical education pre-service teachers (PSTs) to plan in the ways we do. A secondary purpose was to consider alternative approaches to teaching about planning based on this analysis. Over one academic term, we used collaborative self-study of teacher education practice methodology and gathered several forms of qualitative data, including reflective journal entries, recorded video conversations, and teaching artefacts. Through sharing and interrogating our assumptions about the nature of planning and how to teach PSTs about planning, we came to see several flaws in the approaches we had typically used, particularly in terms of the emphasis given to the products (i.e. developing and submitting complete lesson plans) over the processes of planning, and how this emphasis did not necessarily support PSTs’ learning. This was partially because we found it challenging to model our processes of planning for PSTs in authentic ways. We agree that planning is and should be a central part of learning to teach; however, this research suggests that the ‘typical’ actions in how we teach PSTs about planning may be ripe for disruption and redesign. This research provides a rationale for a better balance to be struck between teaching about planning-as-process and teaching about planning-as-product.