TGfU: A Model for the Teaching of Games with a Changed Focus in Games Teaching – A Commentary

The 1982 Spring Edition: 18(1) of the Bulletin of Physical Education contained a collection of articles with a different method to the common ‘traditional’ games and sport teaching approach, which Mosston described as Demonstration-Explanation-Execution-Evaluation and Tinning as Demonstrate-Explain-Practice. Len Almond as editor of the 1982 Spring Edition wrote that the collection of articles represented an “attempt to raise issues and questions about the role of ‘teaching for understanding’ in the games curriculum”. While the 6-step model that has come to be known as Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) is well known, perhaps less well known is the curriculum model for secondary school PE proposed by Thorpe and Bunker. Thorpe and Bunker extended the application of the model written initially for secondary school PE into primary school PE games curriculum as a ‘foundation course’ based on the pedagogy of sampling games in game categories and proposed a secondary PE games program based also on game categories.