Enacting a new physical education curriculum: a collaborative investigation
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Previous research shows that enacting a new curriculum is a complex process. Teachers can be enthusiastic and committed to new curricular objectives, but they can also experience frustration and disappointment. Scholars have suggested that teachers who perceive lack of support, or tensions between their personal philosophies and the educational principles underpinning a new curriculum, struggle to enact new curricula in line with their intent. Our purpose in this article is to illustrate how two Physical Education (PE) teachers experienced the enactment of a new official curriculum. An action research approach was used as design of the study. Researchers cooperated with two PE teachers for 18 months. The empirical material consisted of 50 sets of field notes from the two teachers’ teaching lessons, transcripts from one semi-structured qualitative interview with both teachers following the completion of the school year. The material also consisted of reflection logs produced by the teachers containing written notes about their experiences of the curriculum enactment. We used literature on educational change (Fullan, M., & Hargreaves, A. (1991). What's worth fighting fore? Working together for your school. Ontario Public School Teachers’ Federation) as our theoretical framework. Our findings show that the teachers experienced the curriculum enactment in contradictory ways. Shifting from previous PE practices that focused on sports activities and emphasized teacher instruction, to pedagogical practices informed by the new PE curriculum (including sociocultural perspectives of learning and assessment), led to uncertainty, surprise, satisfaction, as well as distrust. Our findings also showed that the teachers’ experiences of the enactment were influenced by perceived gender biases. We argue that teachers’ beliefs and the teaching culture were particularly influential dimensions regarding the two PE teachers’ experiences of the curriculum enactment. Practitioners and researchers attempting curriculum enactment in the future should pay careful attention to such dimensions, especially given that tensions and uncertainty often occur during any educational change.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".