Traditional and game-based approaches to teaching invasion team sports: a theoretical essay

Abstract

This study aimed to identify, compare, and discuss the traditional pedagogical principles and contemporary teaching models of team sports. The team sports can be represented as complex and dynamic systems, in which teams are understood as a social microsystem. Traditionally, the teaching was supported by a rationalist worldview, with teacher/coach-centered proposals and guided by technicist and behavioral pedagogical approaches. In this perspective, reproduction (recipe) overlaps creativity (functional adaptation). With the change in the teaching paradigm, emerged game-based approaches and player/student-centered. Here, the theoretical foundations and practical implications of four models were discussed: i) Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU); ii) Sport Education Model (SE); iii) Non-Linear Pedagogy (NLP) and; iv) Game Pedagogy (understood as an approach and a model). Through the pedagogical principles of TGfU (game type selection, modification-representation, modification-exaggeration, adjustment of tactical complexity), NLP (representation, manipulation of restrictions, coupling information-movement, exploratory learning, reduction of conscious control of movement), SE and/or Game Pedagogy (street pedagogy, learning environment and game environment, including characteristics of challenge, imbalance, unpredictability, representation), it is possible that players/students learn by playing, and may even interfere and create your class/ training. The teacher/coach, therefore, is an active and passive mediator who manages and mediates problem situations and knowledge exchanges.