Busier, happier and good(er) – 40 years on from “busy, happy, and good” as success in teaching PE

In 1983, Judith Placek published ‘Conceptions of success in teaching: Busy, happy and good?´ In this much cited book chapter, she argued that PE teachers and pre-service teachers had little concern for student learning, and often conceptualized successful teaching quite differently than researchers. For the four PE teachers and 29 PE majors, success was visible in PE when students were ‘busy, happy and good’ (Placek, 1983, p. 54). Over the last 40 years, Placek’s arguments have been picked up extensively in PE research and ‘busy, happy and good’ has often been used as catchphrase to critique a particular approach to PE that emphasises student participation, enjoyment, and discipline. In other words, ‘busy, happy and good’ has, in many ways, evolved into a slur to ‘put down’ teaching practices that de-emphasize privileged forms of student learning (mainly skill acquisition). Our intent is not to criticize Placek’s work nor dismiss the notion that a PE practice that exclusively focuses on enjoyment, participation and discipline is problematic. Instead, we aim to add nuance to the use of ‘busy, happy and good’ in PE research and practice by connecting the concept to broader issues in education and pedagogy. To do so, we argue that ‘success in teaching' is not a neutral term. Instead, they are always - as Armour et al. (2017) contend - political, educational, and embedded in societal aspirations. In a sense, it all depends on what students, and indeed teachers, are busy, happy, and good doing. In revisiting Placek’s argument we consider how the concept ‘busy, happy and good’ has been used in PE research over time. Here, our overview reveals that it is described in different ways in research in relation to PE (e.g., an orientation, an objective, a syndrome, a mentality, a model, an agenda). For this paper, we have identified four major uses of the concept with no major shifts regarding its use over time. First, ‘busy, happy and good’ is used as a general statement indi