This is the website of the AIESEP TGfU SIG. This ia a globally representative group of associations and individuals committed to the promotion and dissemination of scholarly inquiry around ways of knowing, learning and teaching through games centered approaches. The Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU) international task force started in 2002. In 2008 the task force evolved into the first Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Association Internationale des Ecoles Superieures d’Education Physique (AIESEP). The TGfU SIG and its alliance to AIESEP has sustain interest in inquiry into teaching/coaching games and has helped to ensure the maintenance of high level research into the teaching and learning of sport related games.

To become a Member of the TGfU SIG, click here and follow the directions on the form.

Teaching and coaching games for understanding

The purpose of the website is to facilitate the understanding necessary to promote coaches’ and teachers’ insights into how to plan and instruct meaningful and worthwhile games, maximising player learning and enjoyment. Since the early 1980’s an array of innovative approaches to teaching/coaching games have gained credibility in the scholarly literature. These approaches are unified around the premise that the best way to learn the game is to reduce the demands of the complex game or to exaggerate tactical elements of a game by using modified game forms. These game-based learning experiences are designed to elicit the players’ tactical awareness and skill development from situated learning experiences enabled by the teacher/coach (1) setting the environment, and (2) using appropriate pedagogical skills/tools such as prompts, feedback and/or questioning. Scholarly/professional papers and research studies have recognized the following approaches:

• Teaching Games for Understanding (TGfU)
• Play Practice
• Game Sense
• Invasion Game Competence Model
• Tactical Decision Learning Model
• Tactical Games Model
• Games Concept Approach
• Ballschule 

Each of the approaches list here links to an overview page in Google-docs that is continuously and collabortively developed by the members of the TGfU SIG. This is not a finite list.  We invite readers to (1) join the SIG and help develop these pages, or (2) submit to the TGfU SIG executive other approaches to teaching and coaching games they wish to be considered with the ones listed here. To edit you will need to be paid up member of the TGfU SIG and have access to a free google account.

 TGfU SIG Executive

                                                                                                Tim Hopper
Len Almond
Joy Butler
Stephen Harvey
Jamie Mandigo

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