In this article, a basketball teaching unit for secondary education is presented, along with its entire contextualization.
The objectives set in the basketball teaching unit are to understand individual technical actions and develop a respectful attitude and fair play.
Who this basketball teaching unit is aimed at
The basketball teaching unit is designed to be carried out with 13-14-year-old adolescents. Adolescents aged 13-14 experience a period marked by numerous physical and psychological changes.
According to Aliño-Santiago et. al (2006), during this stage of their lives, biological changes occur, such as those affecting the reproductive system, with the appearance of secondary sexual characteristics.
As a consequence of the transformations in the sexual organs, there is also a hormonal influence generating new needs, leading to a need for independence, impulsivity, emotional lability, mood swings, and the search for solidarity and understanding among adolescents.
Main psychosocial transformations in early adolescence (13-14 years)(1):
- Search for autonomy
- Gradual restructuring of family relationships
- Desire to assert sexual and social attractiveness
- Emerging sexual impulses
- Ability for self-care and mutual care
- Interest in new activities
It should be noted in this section that the existence of a student with special needs has been simulated. Everything related to the adaptations that must be made for this student will be addressed in the “Attention to diversity” section.
Teaching styles
Delgado Noguera (1991) defines the teaching style as:
The mode or form that didactic relationships take between the personal elements of the teaching-learning process at both the technical and communicative levels, as well as at the level of class group organization and their affective relationships based on the decisions made by the teacher.
Therefore, the teaching style is the way of doing, distinguishing different teaching styles.
In practice, these styles are combined in the same session, in the same teaching unit, etc., as will be seen later in the proposed basketball teaching unit, enriching it.
Teaching styles of the basketball teaching unit
In the proposed basketball teaching unit, the following 2 teaching styles are combined:
- Task assignment: in this teaching style, the teacher briefly explains a task, and the students repeat it freely at their own learning pace. It will be used in the basketball teaching unit to reduce the learning time of technical actions.
- Reciprocal teaching: this style is included by Viciana and Delgado (1999) among the styles that promote student participation, “consisting mainly of an organization in pairs, where one student provides feedback to their partner.”
If you want to know more about teaching styles, we recommend reading a complete article about them here.
Modified games
In the development of the basketball teaching unit, modified games have been taken into account.
José Devis (Devís and Peiro, 1997) defines the modified game as “a global game that captures the essence of one or an entire form of standard sports games, the simplified abstraction of the problematic and contextual nature of a sports game that exaggerates tactical principles and reduces the technical demands of major sports games” (2)
The characteristics of modified games are (2):
- They are between free play and fixed sports rules
- Although initial rules are established, they can be modified during the game
- They maintain the essence of each sport
- Technical demands are reduced, thus increasing the participation of all students
- Students can propose creating or changing some established rules
Specific competencies of the basketball teaching unit
At the end of the basketball teaching unit, the student will be able to:
- Understand and identify the individual technical actions of basketball as well as its main basic rules.
- Self-evaluate their own technical execution considering the technical model presented through the use of ICTs.
- Reflect and reject disrespectful attitudes among players, towards the referee, and from spectators, creating a fair play and respect decalogue in sports.
- Participate actively and make an effort in the games and exercises proposed by the teacher.
- Collaborate actively in group activities respecting the contributions of classmates.
Attention to diversity
As previously mentioned, in one of the groups there is a student with special educational needs (hereinafter SEN) due to having cerebral palsy.
The student in this group has paraplegic cerebral palsy, affecting the lower limbs, so she moves in a wheelchair.
Educational administrations must regulate appropriate measures for the attention of students with special needs, likewise, educational administrations must carry out (3):
- Curriculum adaptations
- Group splitting
- The offer of specific subjects
- Support in regular groups
- Personalized treatment programs
The adaptation criteria for the student with SEN to participate in physical education class normally will be as follows:
- Space: it will be delimited to reduce everyone’s mobility, irregular spaces will be avoided, using houses in tag games.
- Material: use of soft and adapted material.
- Rules: modify the rules in favor of the student with SEN, if I have to tag, go on one leg to go slower, when the student with SEN is the chaser, it is not necessary to touch, passing within 1 meter of someone would already be considered tagged, etc.
- Game: the use of the game instead of analytical exercises is the best way to adapt them effectively.
Information and communication technologies
What is digital competence? The educational curriculum of many countries defines this competence as the sum of skills to search, obtain, process, and communicate information and transform it into knowledge.
Therefore, why introduce information and communication technologies (hereinafter ICTs) in physical education? (4):
- They allow innovating the content and the way of teaching it
- ICTs facilitate the achievement of disciplinary objectives and contribute to developing other basic competencies.
- They allow quick and effective access to information, in a more attractive way.
- They allow the personalization and adaptation of content to students with special needs.
- They allow the “third pedagogical time”, that is, the learning time that occurs outside the spatial-temporal limits of the classroom.
Why use ICTs in physical education?:
- To develop in students the habit of collaborating and working in a team, as well as providing more “active” and creative experiences and learning.
- Create learning environments, awaken curiosity, the pleasure of learning, and to develop individual initiative and student autonomy.
- To attend to students with special educational needs.
- To connect and open the school to society and society to the school and to communicate, inform, and involve families in their children’s education.
- To promote the transversality of physical education.
Attention! Using digital resources should not make physical education sedentary.
Physical education is the most active subject of all, so we should not turn into virtual what can be done in a face-to-face, interactive, and experiential way (4).
Use of ICTs in the basketball teaching unit
The use of ICTs and the promotion of digital competence are very present in the basketball teaching unit presented.
Students will have to record themselves for 2 minutes in a 2×2 game, using a mobile phone or any other video capture device in session 7.
In the session following the recording, the introduction to the video analysis program Klipdraw will be conducted, with the aim of learning to use the program.
Subsequently, they can carry out a task in which they self-evaluate how they perform the basketball technical actions seen in class: movements, dribbling, types of passes, layups, and shooting.
Additionally, a website has been created where content for session nº3 on the fair play decalogue appears, as well as for session nº8, where the Klipdraw program will be used for the written task.
Here is the link to the web resource created for this purpose. In this basketball teaching unit, it could be said that there is an interdisciplinary work between the subjects of physical education and computer science.
Evaluation
Traditional evaluation instruments, those based on numerical grading, are impersonal grades, with little or no educational and formative intentionality.
Thus, the physical education teacher becomes a sports judge, whose functions are to measure, time, and tabulate results (5).
The evaluations of 21st-century physical education should be focused on developing a formative and shared evaluation. The purpose is not to grade the student, but to help the student improve and learn more.
The shared evaluation involves delegating the decision-making of the teacher’s evaluation to the student, either totally or partially, through self-evaluations, co-evaluations, and dialogued evaluations and grades (5).
Self-evaluation is a type of evaluation linked to autonomous learning and lifelong learning.
This is because it is an evaluation carried out by the student themselves, allowing them to check their own level of learning and, if necessary, redirect it (6).
Co-evaluation, however, is peer evaluation, in this case, the one carried out by one student to another student (7).
Evaluation instruments of the basketball teaching unit
In the proposed basketball teaching unit, the following evaluation and self-evaluation forms will be filled out:
- Initial evaluation (co-evaluation): in the first session of the basketball teaching unit, students will be evaluated by a classmate to check if they perform certain technical actions that will later be developed in the sessions of the basketball teaching unit.
- Self-evaluation form: students will fill out the form in session 6, self-evaluating in relation to the content seen in previous sessions and their attitude in them.
- Final task self-evaluation: once the technical actions carried out by themselves in the video have been analyzed, the student must fill out the self-evaluation form (same form as in the initial evaluation, opting for self-evaluation and not co-evaluation). They will analyze what they have improved by comparing the initial evaluation form and the final self-evaluation.
The task to be carried out consists of the following parts:
- Analysis of technical actions: the student will identify through the Klipdraw program the actions they perform themselves during a game conducted in session nº7.
- They will briefly describe the correct technique in the technical actions seen in class (movements, dribbling, passing, shooting, and layups).
- Fill out the final task self-evaluation form once the video has been analyzed and compare it with the initial evaluation.
- The task will be submitted to the teacher via a pen drive containing the analyzed video and the written task. Finally, in session nº3, the teacher will fill out an individual evaluation rubric on the quality of the content of the decalogue created by groups, participation, and its verbal presentation.
Grading criteria
Regarding grading criteria, the grading of the basketball teaching unit will be distributed as follows:
- Written task (50%)
⦁ Identify technical actions in the video (20%)
⦁ Describe the correct technique of the actions (10%)
⦁ Self-evaluation of technical actions (20%) - Decalogue of fair play, respect, and good practices in sports (20%).
- Attitude (30%): average of the items on attitude in the self-evaluation form.
Sessions of the basketball teaching unit
Below, the main part of the sessions of the basketball teaching unit:
Session 3 of this basketball teaching unit will be conducted in the computer lab.
Students will access the fair play decalogue tab on the website created by the teacher. The class dynamics and session objective will be explained.
Creation of groups of 4 people to create the fair play decalogue.
In session 7, we will repeat the same groups from exercise 1 of session 1.
A 4-minute game will be played, 2 against 2, which will be filmed by a student from outside. If there is time left, 5 against 5 games will be played on a real court.
Finally, session 8 of this basketball teaching unit will be conducted in the computer lab.
Students will access the website created by the teacher and enter the technical actions analysis tab.
The task will be explained, how to download the program, etc. The remaining class time is dedicated to individual work and resolving doubts.
Bibliographic references
- Krauskopf, D. (2011). Development in adolescence: psychosocial transformations and rights in a time of change. Psicologia. com, 15, 1-12.
- Devís Devís, J and Peiró Velrt, C. (1997) “New curricular perspectives in physical education: health and modified games” INDE. Barcelona.
- Ministry of Education, Culture and Sport. (2015). LOMCE step by step: Attention to diversity in compulsory secondary education and high school. Madrid.
- Barahona, J. D. (2012). The teaching of Physical Education implemented with ICT. Physical education and sport, 31(2), 1056-1056.
- Pastor, V. M. L., Aguado, R. M., García, J. G., Pastor, E. M. L., Pinela, J. F. M., Badiola, J. G., … & Martín, M. I. (2006). Evaluation in physical education. Review of traditional models and proposal of an alternative. Formative and shared evaluation. RETOS. New trends in physical education, sport and recreation, (10), 31-41.
- Delgado, A. M., and Oliver, R. (2009). Interaction between continuous evaluation and formative self-evaluation: Enhancing autonomous learning. University Teaching Journal, nº 4. Retrieved from http://www.um.es/ead/Red_U/
- Pastor, V. M. L., Pascual, M. G., & Martín, J. J. B. (2005). Student participation in evaluation: self-evaluation, co-evaluation, and shared evaluation. Rev. Tándem Didáctica Educ. Fís, 17, 21-37.
