Teachers’ Constructs of Quality in Secondary Physical Education Teaching

The nature and meaning of quality physical education (QPE) for learners has long been contested. On this basis, the meaning of quality in PE teaching (QPET) attracts further contestation. Both the subject area and quality in teaching are often suggested to be socially constructed and are influenced politically, historically, personally, and socially. The need for this study was justified by calls for more holistic perspectives of QPET. It was also justified as hearing teachers' voices is important to understand what good teachers think, know, and believe. This research therefore explored how teachers construct QPET in secondary PE in England, United Kingdom.
An integrated, sequential, exploratory mixed methodological approach to understanding how teachers construct QPET was adopted. This included initial professional dialogues (IPDs), repertory grid interviews (RGIs), and lesson observations, with fourteen participants. The participants were from a range of career phases (in years), those phases being initial teacher education (ITE), 0-7, 8-15, 16-23, and 24+. The IPDs informally explored the teachers’ backgrounds and provided an understanding of the teacher’s careers. The RGIs explored how teachers personally construct QPET, and the lesson observations explored what aspects of QPET were enacted in practice. After a data reduction exercise on all of the participant’s RGIs, fifteen over-arching constructs of QPET were created. These fifteen overarching constructs formed the content of the rank-ordering task, which was the final data collection method administered as an online survey. This involved a wider participant base of PE teachers, head teachers and senior leaders.
The mixed methodology resulted in a complementary argument and was understood by drawing on Quay’s (2013) theory of experience. This theory acknowledged that the modes of being, doing and knowing in experience are understood both phenomenologically and pragmatically as an aesthetic whole. Three overall themes emerged from the results and findings due to integration of the data sets. Understanding these themes through the lens of experience as a theoretical framework allowed the construction of a definition of QPET, which was informed by the voices and practices of teachers. Referring also to constructive alternativism, this definition was also based on the likelihood of QPET being construed differently, even by the same person, depending on the time of asking. The definition informed the creation of a model of QPET, which is based on the premise that QPET should be perceived as a whole concept, which is both personally (self) and socially (through interaction) constructed.
Overall, different methods highlighted different and yet equally important aspects of QPET. Use of a mixed methodological approach to elicit the perspectives of teachers in different career phases allowed the whole perspective of QPET to be realised. As teachers in different career phases claimed to embody and perceive QPET in different ways, this highlighted that it may be unrealistic to expect any teacher to be high quality, or outstanding, as quality, is wholly dependent on their experience.