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This study describes and interprets (a) a student teacher’s decisions about task content and content progression across an elementary and high school sport unit and (b) those aspects of his pedagogical content knowledge that he used to explain and justify his decisions. The student teacher’s pedagogical content knowledge of dividing and sequencing subject matter can be summarized briefly: first, tell about the biomechanically efficient body position, and second, play games. Both the student teacher’s decisions and pedagogical content knowledge and guidelines for content progression that are in the curriculum literature are interpreted by using broad theoretical perspectives of knowledge and learning that pervade educational thought. Taken-for-granted perspectives that knowledge and learning are molecular are questioned, and the potential of more holistic, nonlinear perspectives is considered.

This case study tells the story of an in-service elementary physical education teacher, who made a large-scale change from an activities approach to a movement approach based, initially, on “Every Child a Winner” (Rockett & Owens, 1977). Five psychological dispositions facilitated the development of the teacher’s knowledge: (a) the disposition to understand the approach accurately and deeply and to do the job right, (b) the disposition to accept that the approach was difficult to learn and to persist in seeking clarification, (c) the disposition to justify and develop a practice in keeping with a sound educational philosophy and theoretical foundations, (d) the disposition toward change and to learn and implement new ideas, and (e) the disposition to suspend judgment of new ideas. Dispositions can be important aspects of teacher thinking and can help to explain successful knowledge development and teacher change.

This interpretive case study describes five norms of the school culture that facilitated a teacher’s (the second author) adoption and learning of a constructivist approach to physical education. The second author used a movement approach initially based on Every Child a Winner. The first author conducted field observations at the elementary school across 3 years and formal interviews and numerous informal interviews each day of field work with teachers, principals, staff, and children. The five norms or set of norms were (a) the set of norms defining the school philosophy, (b) teacher learning, (c) teacher participatory power and responsibility, (d) continual school improvement, and (e) the tendency “to feel that we can do anything.” The paper describes how the norms influenced the physical educator and the physical educators’ role in creating and maintaining the norms.

Within the past 10 years there have been an increasing number of calls for collaboration between researchers and teachers. A small but growing body of literature has begun to study the collaborative process. The purpose of this study was to examine the collaborative research process between an elementary physical educator (the second author) and a university researcher (the first author) and to describe what the process meant to each during our longterm collaboration. The study examines the effect of collaboration on both teacher and researcher. Standard participant observation methods with an autobiographical component were used. Two major themes captured the meanings of the collaborative research process: shared privilege and shared empowerment. These themes are discussed in relation to the research and literature on collaborative research.

This study used developmental theory to examine changes in four preservice physical education teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge during a 20- lesson middle school volleyball unit. Participant observation methodology was used including interviews, field observations, and document analysis. Data were analyzed using constant comparison. Three main shifts in their knowledge were identified. First, the teachers moved from poorly predicting students’ skillfulness and blaming students when those predictions caused problems, to valuing the matching of tasks to students’ skill levels. Second, they understood motor development differently as their inability to recognize skill development caused problems in helping students learn, and they were then mentored by experienced teachers to better see and facilitate learning. Third, the preservice teachers grew to respect and emphasize student emotion in teaching, realizing that overlooking emotion led to problems in teaching. The discussion focuses on common pitfalls in teacher development and the need for attention to emotion in the research on teacher knowledge.

The purpose of this study was to describe four accomplished teachers’ enacted pedagogical content knowledge of teaching hand dribbling to third grade children. We aimed to investigate and make accessible the knowledge and wisdom of practicing teachers. We videotaped three sequential lessons of each teacher and conducted formal and informal interviews. Three themes emerged from a grounded analysis of the data: (a) approaching dribbling content as a network of connected movements and tactics, (b) refining movement patterns based on knowledge initially acquired in younger grades, and (c) teaching the cognitive processes (learning orientation, self-regulation, movement and tactical analysis and critique, and making decisions) embedded in and relevant to lesson dribbling activities.

The purpose of this study was to describe third grade children’s movement responses to dribbling tasks taught by four accomplished teachers and how children’s dribbling varied with changes in task constraints. Children in four intact classes were videotaped during three dribbling lessons as part of their physical education program. Videotapes were analyzed to provide descriptions of children’s movement responses. Typically, when children dribbled while walking or jogging they controlled the ball, pushed with finger pads, and looked at the ball. When dribbling tasks were more difficult, in general, there was less ball control and more slapping with palms (less mature patterns) while at the same time more instances of children lifting their heads to look up (a more mature pattern). Task constraints had differential impacts on different dribbling elements. One implication is that teachers need to consider this differential impact in designing practice conditions and in selecting assessment tasks.