Content knowledge research and its hind side.

Content knowledge in PETE was a major question in higher education alike pre-service teachers' motor skills. The Ohio state university, led by Dr. Ward, has been a leading research group with regard to content knowledge in PETE for over a decade (Ward, 2009; Ward et al., 2018; Ward et al., 2020). Hastie (2022) recently published a review paper, and it seems worth reading more thoroughly to catch up the flow as well as bringing about reflections on what I am facing and doing these days.

The main rationale is that knowledge of physical education itself had scant attention in the research field compared to pedagogical content knowledge which had been a major issue during the 1990s. Because of that, they have studied about what teachers know about teaching motor skills and how to teach pre-service teachers to develop fundamental knowledge. I can't agree more that the fundamental maxim, "you can't teach what you don't know." Knowledge plays a critical role in terms of teaching and learning even if PE were used to considered as learning by moving. Also, they are not only talking about common content knowledge (CCK) defined as "the knowledge and skills one needs to perform a task", but also emphasizing specialized content knowledge (SCK) defined as "knowing how to teach particular concepts and recognizing the nature of errors that students make during performance" (Hastie, 2022). In physical education, according to Hastie's summary, CCK is about "knowing how to perform an activity" and SCK consists of three domains: (a) knowledge of instructional tasks, (b) knowledge of how to represent tasks to students, and (c) knowledge of errors that students might make when performing those tasks. The idea of making a concept map provides effective means to measure SSC in physical education, as well as providing a helpful visual aid possibly guiding curricula. Hasite defined a concept map as a "diagram that lists the skills a teacher would teach in a movement activity to a specific game level, together with a list and the sequence of instructional tasks they would use to teach each of those skills." Lastly, a knowledge packet is "a body of knowledge organized to emphasize the CCK and SCK that is necessary to teach a broad grade level" that can be used for intervention research and educational purpose of teacher education programs.

Example of concept map from Tsuda, Ward, and Goodway (2018)

Now that I am thinking of my confusing situation surrounded by three different expectations, Hastie's summary of content knowledge research helps me understand one aspect better. From their perspective, it is clear that physical education is about teaching motor skills, as Hastie also mentioned before in the main part.

"The research on teacher content knowledge is grounded firmly within the conception of teacher effectiveness being the extent to which teachers help their students learn motor skills (Ward et al., 2020). If we agree with and accept that notion, then effective teaching is characterized by the development of content that moves  students through simple to complex learning experiences toward a higher level of competency (Rink, 2014; Rink & Hall, 2008).

 

My question is where other parts are gone? In physical education, we have sold our subject as a holistic subject that can teach education's three domains: psychomotor, cognitive, and affective. From those researchers' point of view, does teaching physical education come down to improving motor skills itself?

Hastie, as one of the researchers in this group, is surely aware of the issue and re-commented in the introduction, "physical education, a subject area in school paralyzed by trying to be all things to all people (Hastie, 2017)." I related to his standpoint, along with the lines that Lund and van der Mars said to criticize SEL in PE, "Unable to solve the obesity program, the physical education field is not hitching its wagon to solving all of the mental health ills of the world by making SEL its primary mission" (Lund & van der Mars, 2022). I argue that that's the beauty of physical education. Not just improving motor skills, our students can experience real life that requires delicate soft skills to deal with multi-level issues, not to mention cognitive knowledge. It sounds absurd when we think about Hastie's mention, 'to be all things to all people, again. But, it is true. We can't tell if physical education is just to develop physical competencies. This is a fundamental part, not all of it. It is really important to keep researching CCK, SCK, and following concept maps and knowledge packets. I claim that those will be much more valuable when juxtaposing other parts.

So then, what if the reason hard for teachers to teach effectively was a lack of knowledge, and improving SSK by making concept maps is helpful to do that, why don't we use it to teach other aspects in PE? Teaching social and emotional parts, for example, has always been a difficult part to the point where just careful teachers would be fine to teach those areas. Without clear purpose and expectations, being a caring teacher cannot be an effective way however important it is. Agreeing with the fact that affective aspects cannot be learned in a linear process, making a concept map for SEL can be helpful for teachers who felt difficult to teach or had no idea to teach those. 
Affective parts also need much more clarity instead of insisting on their value of it. Or.... is it wrong from the starting point thinking that a concept map for an affective domain can be made?