The Nature of Good Teaching

There continues to be ongoing debate about the qualities of a good physical education teacher. For a long time it was considered that keeping the students "busy, happy, good" was an end in itself. This emphasis affords little attention to what the students actually learn in physical education classes. Physical Education in our curriculum today has changed as has the way we live our lives, entertain ourselves and technology. Before we look at what is considered today to be qualities of good physical education teaching, we need to look at where the notion of ‘busy, happy, good’ has come from. Richard Tinning, David Kirk and John Evens outline the progression of what has been deemed to be quality physical education in Australian schools over the decades. Their study looks at the methods being used by physical education teachers and what actually happens in the lesson instead of characteristics displayed by teachers. The notion “busy, happy, good” was suggested to be a measure of quality teaching by Judith Placek in 1983. (Placek, 1983). Prior to Placek’s research one of the most commonly used tools to research the effectiveness of a teacher was the Academic Learning Time (ALT). An adaption of this was used for the research of effective physical education teaching research ALT-PE (Tinning, Kirk &Evans p. 139). This method of research was focussed on monitoring a student’s engagement and successful completion of the task. The research conducted by Judith Placek found that “for most teachers and student teachers the dominant concerns in teaching physical education are to keep the children ‘busy, happy and good’” (Tinning, Kirk &Evans, 1993).
“Success, in many cases, is not Sharon or Bob learning to jump shot correctly. Success is related to the immediate, observable happenings in the gym. Are the students participating (busy), enjoying themselves (happy), and doing what the teacher directs (good)? (Placek, 1983, p.54) When this was written in