Volleyball: Play with Purpose to Develop Game Sense (Australia)

Chapter 6 described Play with Purpose and detailed how to apply it to a middle school physical education (PE) unit on touch football. We refer the reader to Chapter 6 for a more detailed explanation of the Play with Purpose approach. In this chapter, we will look in little more detail at Play with Purpose as explicit teaching and deliberate practice. Explicit teaching involves the PE teacher ensuring that students have a clear understanding in four areas: why they are learning something; how what they are learning connects to what they already know; what is expected (learning outcome/s); and how to achieve the expectations (clear achievement standard). Explicit teaching also requires the PE teacher to provide students the opportunity to inquire about their learning and provide them with clear feedback about their performance in relation to meeting the learning expectation/s. This chapter applies a Play with Purpose approach to teaching volleyball for an upper-primary (elementary) school unit of work. Specifically, the unit of work is for a year 6 class mixed-ability class.