TITLE:
Life Skills Through School Sport: A Participatory Teacher Development Program
AUTHORS:
Julie Vang Knudsen, Lise Maria Elkrog-Hansen, Lars Breum Christiansen
KEYWORDS:
Positive Youth Development, Coaching, Sport Academies, Sport Psychology, In-Service Education
JOURNAL NAME:
Advances in Physical Education,
Vol.10 No.3,
August
28,
2020
ABSTRACT: School sport participation can promote life skills in children and youth,
but teachers could use an explicit teaching
approach to fulfil the potential. Therefore, we conducted a
participatory teacher development program,
which should promote students’ life skills through school sport at three Danish
boarding schools. The aim of this study is to present the program and the
teachers’ experiences with the explicit teaching approach and the development
program itself. The study design is based on participatory action research and
comprised four phases in which the teachers
were involved in the design, planning, implementation and evaluation of a
life skills course for their students. The
evaluation was based on focus group interviews with the teachers involved. The teachers found it beneficial to work explicitly with life skills
in school sport and stated that the program provided an opportunity to view their practice from a different perspective.
Furthermore, they emphasized that school
sport could readily be structured in ways that increase the student’s development of life skills. At the same time, the
teachers found the explicit teaching strategies challenging due to priority of
time and difficulties connecting the sports practice to other life
contexts. Finally, the teachers experienced positive and engaged students who
most likely increased their understanding of life skills.