What Is Sport Education and How Does It Work?

Sport education is a curriculum and instruction model designed to provide authentic, educationally rich sport experiences for girls and boys in the context of school physical education (Siedentop, 1994). Sport education has an important curricular implication; that is, it cannot be fitted easily into a short unit, multiactivity program. Sport education also has important instructional implications; that is, its purposes are best achieved through combinations of direct instruction, cooperative small-group work, and peer teaching, rather than by total reliance on directive, drill-oriented teaching.

Basic Features

Sport education has six key features, which derive from how sport is conducted in community and interschool contexts (i.e., they derive from the authentic form of the activity within the larger culture). These features are seasons, affiliation, formal competition, culminating events, record keeping, and festivity.

Seasons. The "unit" in sport education is often two to three times longer than typical physical education units. The operational assumption here is that less is more or that fewer activities covered in greater depth result in better educational outcomes than can be realized in the more typical, short unit, multiple-activity format.

Affiliation. Students become members of teams at the start of a season and retain their team affiliation throughout the season. Students plan, practice, and compete as a team. This feature also derives from evidence that suggests that much of the social meaning derived from sport experiences, as well as a large part of the personal growth often attributed to positive sport experiences, is intimately related to affiliation with a persisting group.

Formal competition. Sport seasons are typically defined by a schedule of formal competition interspersed with practice sessions. The affiliation and formal competition features combine to provide the opportunity for planning and goal setting that create the context for pursuing important outcomes that have real meaning for students