Playing the three games at the end of the last class really solidified my understanding of Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU). My biggest take away from that experience was how much fun I had. I thoroughly enjoyed and was equally engaged in all three of the games, even though I knew that the first two were played to prepare us for the third game. I will definitely incorporate this model into my teaching practice because it is fun, it helps to develop skills for a more complex game, and the skills developed can be transferred to other games in the same category. In the TGfU model, I found step five to be very interesting. Some sources call this Skill Execution and others call it Application of Skills. In this step, students identify and practice the skills they need to improve their performance (Ophea, 2014). The Teacher Candidates that taught the striking and invasion games made sure to follow this step. They stopped us in the middle of our games to ask us what we needed to do in order to be more successful in our objective. I found that this really helped me to refocus and play more strategically.

On the Ophea website, Individual Pursuits was included as a category of TGfU. I am curious to know more about how TGfU can be incorporated in a yoga or gymnastics lesson. I also wondered whether TGfU could be a useful model for a dance lesson. Hopefully we will learn more about this in upcoming classes.

References

Ophea. (2014). Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) Approach. Retrieved from http://www.playsport.net/about-playsport/teaching-games-understanding-tgfu