Teaching sport education to Russian students: An ecological analysis

Given Russian students' general lack of group work and opportunities to develop student responsibility in their prior schooling experiences, the purpose of this study was to examine how a group of Russian high school students responds to novel demands of participation in a sport education season. Forty-two students from two ninth-grade physical education classes participated in basketball seasons lasting 18 lessons. The analysis of video records of lessons, interactive student journals, group and individual interviews demonstrated that these students were highly compliant with the explicit tasks in the managerial and instructional task systems, and became increasingly at ease with the tasks requiring less teacher direction. It was in the student social system that the most dramatic observations were noted. For some, the disruption in their social agenda led to different ways of fun. For others, the season design allowed for team affiliation and achieving goals previously unseen or unavailable during physical education.