Using a complex and nonlinear pedagogical approach to design practical primary physical education lessons

Abstract

This paper describes several practical activities that reveal how complex and nonlinear pedagogies might underpin primary physical education and school sport lessons. These sample activities, involving track and field, tennis and netball components, are designed to incorporate states of stability and instability through the modification of task and environmental constraints that challenge students to learn about movement. These activities challenge students individually and collectively to learn in relation to the cognitive, social, emotional and physical domains. Within these conditions, students are expected to ‘self-organise’ in order to take responsibility for their learning; this approach links with recent calls for a more expansive version of physical education supporting the holistic and lifelong development of physically active individuals. We further suggest that teachers using constraints-led pedagogies require high levels of capacity as they must draw upon their judgement, knowledge and teaching skills to appropriately facilitate and ‘scale’ dynamic learning contexts.