Mary Kennedy’s (2016) offers a conceptualisation of teaching that is through the lens of persistent challenges. She highlights five of these challenges that all teachers face – portraying the curriculum to novice minds, enlisting student participation, exposing student thinking, containing student behaviour and addressing those four challenges whilst simultaneously accommodating our own personal needs as teachers. No one solution can address all of these challenges at once. Sometimes they are in conflict with each other and that each day and in each lesson a teacher must adapt to find an optimal response to the persistent challenges that faces them.
In PE, the enlisting student participation challenge can be framed by the idea of motivational climate. Motivational climate is the environmental factors which influence an individuals perception of competence in different ways and how they pursue goals. There are two main motivational climates that a PE teacher’s behaviour and task design can create. The first is a mastery focused climate which emphasises personal effort and improvement which can be considered from a student’s perspective as ‘success is making progress to my best version‘. The second is a performance focused climate which emphasises normative comparison and competition which can be considered from a student’s perspective as ‘success is being better than others‘.
A way that PE Teachers can create a more favourable mastery climate within their lessons, is by using the TARGET framework, which provides a set of six pedagogical structures:
- Task structure: designing a variety of activities and objectives adapted to students’ specific needs and level.
- Authority structure: creating opportunities for students to make decisions such as target setting, challenge level and equipment choice.
- Recognition structure: the distribution of positive feedback and rewards based on progress, effort and learning.
- Grouping structure: making student learning groups varied, mixed and heterogeneous. Providing clear roles for each member of the group.
- Evaluation structure: having criteria focused on the process and effort of the students and not exclusively on the end results.
- Time structure: appropriateness and relevance of the child’s own learning priorities and flexible pace to allow success and competence to occur.
| TARGET Structure | Mastery Motivational Climate | Performance Motivational Climate |
| Task | Self reference goals Differentiated tasks Multi-dimensional tasks | Comparative goals Undifferentiated tasks Uni-dimensional tasks |
| Authority | Pupils involved in decision making and given leadership roles | Teacher makes all decisions |
| Recognition (rewards, and relationships) | Individual recognition of improvement and effort | Public recognition of ability and performances |
| Grouping | Mixed ability and cooperative groups | Ability groups |
| Evaluation | Self-referenced and individual | Comparative and public |
| Time | Flexible time for task completion | Inflexible time for task completion |
What does this look like in practice? Morgan and Carpenter (2002) provide an example in athletics, which is an activity that often has a performance motivational climate rather than a mastery one. Over a period of 7 weeks pupils took part in running, jumping and throwing challenges. The TASKs were designed to provide choice from the actual event itself to other challenges, so in long the jump the pupils could choose from a range such as a standing long jump, three consecutive footed jumps for distance or the competition event. This meant they could work at their own level. AUTHORITY was shared and pupils involved in elements of decision making such as choosing the equipment they threw (hoops, quotes, cones), designing a points scoring system and choosing the pace and targets they ran for in longer distances. The teachers ensured that RECOGNITION was prioritised for effort, improvement and learning. Pupils were allowed to self assess themselves where they could then discuss this in private with their teacher while praise for effort was public. During the athletic unit of work GROUPING was in small mixed ability groups so they could work and support each other in pairs and take part in group reflection on improvement. This was to encourage cooperation and demphasise comparisons. EVALUATION was always based on personal improvement and mastery of the task through personal diaries where they could record their times, distances, improvement and perceived effort. Finally pupils were allowed TIME on each of the activities, with multiple attempt and limited waiting. They could also decide to go through the progression at their own pace, as well as having time to spend on areas of improvement they had chosen.
The evidence is sound and growing for TARGETs positive impact in PE. Braithwaite et al (2011) conducted a meta-analysis of 22 studies which used the TARGET framework and the general finding was that a mastery climate was associated with small to moderate affective, behavioural, and cognitive outcomes whilst a performance climate was associated with negative outcomes such as boredom and anxiety. More recently Dudley et al (2022) conducted a systematic literature review and meta-analysis of PE teaching approaches which have significant improvement in learning across the four learning domains. TARGET informed approaches were considered ‘Best Bets‘ for learning in both the psychomotor and affective domains – with deliberate use of the framework having a positive impact on enjoyment (Bortoli et al, 2015), intrinsic motivation (Cecchini et al, 2019), perceived competence (Almolda-Tomás et al, 2014; Barkoukis et al, 2008) attitude to physical activity and PE (Digelidis et al, 2001; Morgan and Carpenter, 2002, Abos et al, 2017) and self determined motivation (Jaakkola and Liukkonen, 2006).
A key discussion in the academic literature that is important for PE Teachers to consider is the interrelatedness of the TARGET pedagogical structures (Morgan, 2019). If they are additive then they are complementary and inadequacy in one principle can be compensated for in another. If however they are multiplicative then one principle well applied is unable to compensate for poor application of another. The current evidence suggests that they are additive with Morgan et al (2005) highlighting that the RECOGNITION structure is highly influential while more recently Weeldenburg et al (2022) study recommending the TASK structure as the key factor in influencing student motivation. Therefore whilst learning to use the TARGET pedagogical structures to influence motivational climate a teacher doesn’t need to focus on all of them at once. Rather put the emphasis on task and recognition structures and become competent at these before developing the application of others in their teaching.
A question that both novice and experienced teachers of PE ask is ‘How can I improve the motivation and engagement of my students in PE?’ This might be the wrong question as Ronkainen and Nesti (2019, p. 44) critically point out “Promoting motivation without addressing the underlying issue of meaning leaves us ill equipped to answer what we need this motivation for, and is, therefore, an ultimately groundless point for our efforts.” However rather than talking about motivation in purely abstract or theoretical terms, the TARGET framework of pedagogical structures provide an evidence based approach to inform teaching behaviours and task design in ways that can create a mastery motivational climate in PE, and therefore the substantial benefits that come from it. This means the PE teacher has a fundamental role, as they are one of the main agents that can modify class motivational climate, and ensure that it is an optimal one for all students to learn in.
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