Reflective practice in primary physical education: developing context-specific tools and design considerations to support physical education teachers

Primary school physical education (PE) plays a pivotal role in fostering active lifestyles by promoting enjoyment of physical activity and supporting the development of skills, knowledge, and attitudes essential for lifelong engagement. However, delivering enjoyable PE lessons to all children remains complex, given the varying abilities, interests, and needs among children. One way to address these challenges is through reflective practice, wherein teachers critically evaluate their lessons, using feedback from their pupils, identifying areas for improvement, exploring alternative teaching strategies, testing them and reflecting on the outcomes. Despite its benefits, consistent and systematic reflection remains uncommon among primary school PE teachers.Technological tools are promising for supporting teachers in reflective practices. While applications like lesson recording software, feedback tools, and e-portfolios have gained traction in secondary and tertiary education, they often fail to meet the specific needs of primary school PE teachers and children. This paper addresses this gap by exploring design considerations for tools that support context-sensitive reflective practice of primary school PE teachers, aiming to improve teaching quality and better align lessons with children’s needs for PE enjoyment. A user-centered, iterative research-through-design approach was applied to develop a tangible feedback device for children and a digital mock-up reflection tool for teachers. We combined PE lesson observations, focus groups, reflective questionnaires, user-testing, and evaluation. Stakeholders, including primary school PE teachers, pre-service PE teachers, children and design researchers, collaboratively explored the challenges and practical needs surrounding feedback and reflective practices in primary school PE settings. Findings indicated a preference for a tangible, portable, battery-powered feedback device for children capable of offline operation to ensure usability during PE lessons. The device should facilitate easy and anonymous data collection, secure data storage and reliable data transfer. Iterative design cycles enhanced usability, resulting in an intuitive, robust and child-friendly device incorporating press buttons and smiley-face indicators as response labels. Feedback questions were adapted to children’s linguistic levels, ensuring alignment with teaching practices that foster children’s PE enjoyment. In parallel, teachers expressed a preference for a digital, web-based reflection platform to facilitate systematic reflection. A mock-up was developed in Figma, guiding teachers through structured reflection phases using prompts and templates. It supported accessible and time-efficient activities, including PE lesson evaluation, searching PE teaching resources, collaborating with peers via an online community platform, and creating action plans for future lessons. The reflection prototype was also integrated with the tangible feedback tool, facilitating seamless data transfer and enabling teachers to configure feedback. Visualizations of children feedback data were presented in an accessible format, and the tool allowed teachers to store, and archive resources such as recorded lessons, peer-assessments, self-assessments and articles, while ensuring efficient documentation, security, privacy, and easy navigation. The findings led to design consideration for primary school PE-specific feedback and reflection tools, highlighting their potential to improve children’s PE experiences and support teachers’ professional development. The study emphasizes the importance of understanding the PE context and collaborating with teachers and children when designing such tools.