THE SOCIAL CONTEXT AS 21
and contrary to what one might expect, Carly indicated that she gave poorly behaved students
more responsibility:
They (poorly disciplined students) just lack concentration and we tend to give
them responsibility, be a coach, be in charge of their group, and that tends to
then increase their motivation. They want to take part because they’re being
the coach, acting as the teacher that kind of thing.
Despite Carly being in the minority, it is encouraging that not all teachers use
maladaptive strategies towards poorly disciplined or poorly motivated students.
In addition to student motivation and discipline, some teachers in the present study
said that they change their teaching strategies, depending on their perceptions of student
ability in PE. This dimension corroborates research evidence which suggests that teacher
perceptions of students’ ability, influences the ways in which they interact with the students
in PE (Martinek & Karper, 1986). For example Gary explained:
I mean you give the higher ability students a task and you can let them go off
and do it and they'll be quite fine. Where I could spend more time with low
ability students and just try and get their motivation up that way.
While this indicates that these teachers may be aware of the need for extra teaching
effort with low ability pupils, this extra effort may be partly undermined because some of the
strategies mentioned by the teachers have been shown to be maladaptive to students’
motivation. For instance, Rachel highlighted another way she changes her teaching
depending on the students:
If they're low ability, they're usually low ability because of the lack of interest.
The lack of interest will be because of a lack of motivation, not really wanting
to be there sometimes. The strategies do sometimes change to how you get