The Influence of Physical Education Teacher Specialization on Instruction

Abstract

School Physical Education (PE) is a crucial component of the educational process, significantly influencing students' physical, psychological, and social development. To ensure its effectiveness, teachers should thoroughly consider both the content and organizational aspects of instruction. As a part of their education, teachers should acquire adequate skills, knowledge and abilities for teaching in this way. Teacher specialization indicates their official education for teaching respective school subject (here Physical Education), which plays a pivotal role in this context. The main objective of the research presented in this article is to analyze the influence of teacher specialization in PE on PE regarding the recommended structure of lessons and on effective time use in instruction. The research methodology is based on a quantitative approach, especially video-based analysis and the chronometry method were used. The recommended structure was observed in 21 out of 35 PE lessons. In the remaining 14 lessons, the concluding part was missing, which is crucial in terms of concluding moderate-intensity physical activity, as expected during PE instruction. Since even specialized teachers did not include the concluding part, it cannot be conclusively argued in favor of their education as PE teachers. Furthermore, it was found that PE lessons were on average shortened by 12 minutes and 59 seconds, not lasting the full 45 minutes – we introduced the working term "unused time" in the text to describe this phenomenon. Regarding the use of time in PE lessons, it was surprising to find that specialized teachers had a higher average loss time by 10.2% compared to non-specialized teachers.