Productive Pedagogies and Teachers' Professional Learning in Physical Education

This paper examines a professional development and learning intervention that sought to improve teachers' understandings of, and capacities to teach, "critical evaluation" in senior school physical education (SSPE). Physical education (PE) teachers and researchers formed a professional learning community (PLC) to deliver critical evaluation workshops for students and teachers of SSPE over the course of a year. The PLC used action research and engagement with the Productive Pedagogies framework as a pedagogical language with which to plan, develop and reflect on their own understandings of critical evaluation. Data were collected by interview, observation and written reflections. Inductive analysis and the constant comparison method were used to analyse the data. The results of the teacher's efforts to enhance their understanding of critical evaluation as teacher professional learning in PE are discussed in this paper.