¶ … Physical Education Teacher If you think back to when you were taught physical education in school, undoubtedly you will have been taught by a number of different teachers and these teachers may have had quite different instructional techniques. What is likely is that certain types of teaching appealed to you more than others, which in turn may have colored your own thoughts about that particular sport or physical education activity. So, for example in hockey or soccer, the teacher may have used a lot of skill-drill activities where you were encouraged to practice various skills relevant to the game. In gymnastics perhaps the teacher's approach was more formal and you were expected to do exactly as that teacher instructed.

The debate centers around the notion of "teaching styles" and this brief paper sets out firstly to clarify some of the confusion that exists regarding the term itself and secondly, shows how one model of teaching styles is an effective and creative way of teaching physical education today (Mosston & Ashworth 1986).

What is meant by "teaching styles"?

The term itself has no agreed definition but the more widely accepted definitions refer to it as "a set of teaching tactics" and "instructional format" (Galton et al. 1980; Siedentop 1991).

In Physical Education circles the definition of it as "the general pattern created by using a particular set of strategies" provides a neat working definition (BAALPE 9).

Over the last thirty years a number of writers in the United Kingdom, as well as the United States, have identified particular teaching styles and related them to philosophies of teaching or to specific learning outcomes (Bennett 1978). Emerging from this work and that of other writers specifically in Physical Education are two important findings (Kane 1974).

Firstly, that integral to teaching styles is its effect on the involvement of students in the learning process. Secondly,...

His ideas on the interactions between teacher and student have been developed since his initial publication and have provided a framework for teaching physical education in different contexts all over the world. So influential has the framework been that it has been described as "the most significant advance in the theory of physical education pedagogy in recent history" (Nixon & Locke 1227). So why is it so successful? What is it about Mosston's ideas that make them so enduring? The answer lies in the framework for teaching which he calls the Spectrum of Teaching Styles (Doherty 2003).
The Spectrum of Teaching Styles

The Spectrum of Teaching Styles establishes a framework of possible options in the relationship between teacher and learner and is based on the central importance of decision-making (Mosston & Ashworth 1986). Mosston groups these into pre-impact, impact and post-impact categories and proposes that these govern all teaching. The pre-impact set is concerned with decisions made before teaching; at preparation phase and involves subject matter, learning objectives, organization and presentation. The impact set includes decisions relating to performance and execution while the post-impact set includes evaluation of performance and feedback from learner to teacher (Tinana 2003).

The Spectrum incorporates ten landmark styles based on the degree to which the…