Tan, Steven Kwang San

This chapter examines the changing socio-cultural and political salience of physical education since independence in Singapore’s schools. A brief history of physical education with developmental changes based on policy orientations across key educational milestones will be presented. Specifically, the chapter will describe significant impetus and policy synergies relevant to the direction and progress of physical education with emphasis on individual’s holistic development, drive towards thinking citizens and lifelong learners, strive for community partnership and collaboration, and enhancement of teachers’ transformative pedagogies.

This chapter focuses on video analysis as a tool to enhance physical education teachers’ pedagogical practices and experienced practitioners’ mentoring skills. It offers a description of how videos have been managed to help beginning physical education teachers (hereafter “beginning teachers”) reflect and improve on their pedagogical performance, and to develop instructional mentors’ (hereafter “mentors”) competence. Exemplary digital videos were created that represented the desired “best practice” teaching actions. Furthermore, digitally recorded beginning teachers’ lessons and mentors’ mentoring episodes facilitated video-aided analysis of beginning teachers’ teaching for self-reflection and subsequent conversations with their mentors. Three Primary and four Secondary beginning teachers and their mentors participated in a year-long professional development, where they learnt pedagogical knowledge and viewed the exemplary videos. Qualitative data of conversations and semi-structured interview transcripts were analysed using the constant comparison method to arrive at themes to describe the influence of video in transforming the professional learning of the beginning teachers and mentors.